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On the Auction Block: The Garment Industry and the Deindustrialization of New York City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2022

Andy Battle Open the ORCID record for Andy Battle [Opens in a new window]
Andy Battle*
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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, United States
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Corresponding author: Andy Battle, email: andrew.battle@gmail.com
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Abstract

Several important studies of New York City's fiscal crisis of the 1970s identify the city's deindustrialization as a key component. The flight of manufacturers from New York fostered a racialized unemployment crisis while eroding the city's tax base, undermining its ability to meet increasing demands for social services, creating incentives for policymakers to focus on real estate development as the motor of the city's political economy, and weakening the institutions, especially labor unions, that had served as bulwarks of the city's unique (by American standards) brand of municipal social democracy.

This article explores the roots of deindustrialization in one of New York City's most important industries, the manufacture of clothing. Capital flight, in the form of “runaway shops,” began as early as the teens, when the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILG) established itself through a series of key battles. The handmaiden to runaway shops was the reemergence of contracting, whereby the assembly of garments was disaggregated in terms of time, space, and legal identity.

The twin forces of contracting and runaways threatened the existence of the ILG by draining garment work out of its New York City stronghold. I trace efforts to combat it through their culmination in what I call the “New Deal settlement,” a stabilization of the industry across what contemporary analysts called the “New York Production Area.” This settlement, I argue, was at once geographical, political, cultural, and economic. Its goal was to limit competition and establish a new equilibrium in the garment industry, one that could permit manufacturers acceptable profits without resort to the sweatshop. I borrow the notion of a “regulating capital” from the economist Anwar Shaikh to describe these attempts to engineer a reproducible cost structure.

As soon as the New Deal settlement emerged, manufacturers began working to collapse it. I trace the dispersion of garment work to places like northeastern Pennsylvania, where manufacturers enlisted the wives and daughters of unemployed anthracite miners to sew their garments. Factory owners, sometimes linked to organized crime, sought to establish a new regulating capital rooted in relationships of domination, protected by authoritarian local governments. When imported garments arrived in the 1950s, a new regulating capital rooted in a worldwide sweatshop economy forced manufacturers to leave Pennsylvania for the US South, the Caribbean, and beyond. In an attempt to link political economy with social history, I stress that the currency of regulating capitals, particularly in labor-intensive industries, is political domination.

Throughout, I illustrate these processes with reference to Judy Bond, the blousemaker whose departure for the US South prompted a widely publicized but unsuccessful national boycott led by the ILG. In terms of the historiography of New York City's deindustrialization, this account offers an alternative emphasis to that of Robert Fitch, whose influential account emphasized “a conscious policy” to deindustrialize the city, overseen by the real estate industry. Instead, I show how deindustrialization was rooted in significant ways in the dynamics of competition themselves, shaped at each stage by particular social relationships, state policy, and world politics.

Type
Article
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 103: Precarious Labor, Capitalist Transformation, and the State , Spring 2023 , pp. 179 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2022

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Joshua B. Freeman, Kim Phillips-Fein, the two anonymous reviewers for International Labor and Working-Class History, and Steven Calco and Melissa Holland of the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation for their gracious support for this research.

References

Notes

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3. Jacob Rothenberg to Blouse and Waistmakers Union Local 25, et al., December 11, 1961, Box 12, Folder 13; E. T. Kehrer to Louis Stulberg, January 8, 1962, Box 12, Folder 12; both in ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation, Catherwood Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

4. “Hearing,” February 4, 1962, Box 12, Folder 12, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

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44. “Re: Federal Trade Commission vs. Local 25, et al.”

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54. Wolensky et al., Fighting for the Union Label, 51–75; Witwer and Rios, Murder in the Garment District, 81–104.

55. “Statement by B. H. Lerner, Executive Director, before the Senate Finance Committee,” March 17, 1955, Box 2, Folder 12, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

56. By industry convention, cheaper garments were sold in units of one dozen.

57. “Case of the Dollar Blouse,” U.S. News & World Report, September 14, 1956.

58. Jack Rothenberg to David Dubinsky, April 1, 1955, Box 4, Folder 8, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

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69. Crone, 35 Northeast, 97.

70. Joseph de Christofer to David Dubinsky, September 2, 1955, Box 4, Folder 2, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

71. “Report of the General Executive Board to the 31st Convention,” May 23, 1962, Box 2, Folder 4, ILGWU Convention Publications, Collection 5780/193 PUBS, Kheel Center, 23.

72. “Call for National Vigilance: Let Not Your Sacrifices Be in Vain!” n.d., Box 4, Folder 5, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

73. “Report of Proceedings, Twenty-Ninth Convention, International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union,” May 1956, Box 2, Folder 1, ILGWU Convention Publications, Collection 5780/193 PUBS, Kheel Center.

74. “Minutes of the General Membership Meeting of Local 23-25, ILGWU,” June 16, 1965, Box 3, Folder 10, ILGWU Local 23-25 Records, Collection 5780/059, Kheel Center.

75. “Brewton Fashions Inc.” Box 41, Folder 2, ILGWU Southeast Region Records, Collection 5780/058, Kheel Center.

76. Jacob Brodsky to E. Kramer, December 4, 1961, Box 12, Folder 12, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

77. Elias Lieberman to Charles Kreindler, December 27, 1961, Box 12, Folder 12, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center. Judy Bond's loss amounted to nearly $4 million in 2020 dollars.

78. “Judy Bond Gets 2 Alabama Plants,” Women's Wear Daily, December 28, 1961.

79. Joseph Tuvim to David Dubinsky, January 25, 1962, Box 12, Folder 12, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

80. Scribner, Robert Leslie, “A Short History of Brewton, Alabama,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1949): 7–131Google Scholar; James E. Fickle, “Forest Products Industry in Alabama,” in Encyclopedia of Alabama, http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-3021.

81. “Brewton Manufacturing Inc,” January 12, 1962, Box 22, Folder 49, ACTWU's Research Department Company Records, 1937–1995, Collection 5619/012, Kheel Center; “City Industrial Outlook Bright,” Brewton Standard, January 18, 1962.

82. “Stock Sale Underway,” Brewton Standard, March 22, 1962; “$30,000 Stock is Sold,” Brewton Standard, April 12, 1962.

83. David Dubinsky to Allan Harris, April 30, 1962, Box 12, Folder 17, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

84. “Industrial Board Is Formed for Financing Judy Bond Plant Building Expansion,” Brewton Standard, May 12, 1962; John Mohr, “Wallace and Cater Acts,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-3747.

85. E. H. Kehrer to David Dubinsky, August 6, 1962, Box 12, Folder 18, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

86. “New Bonifay Plant to Hold Opening June 21,” Holmes County Advertiser, May 27, 1965. For “Dixie socialism,” see A. H. Raskin, “Union Builds a Plant in ‘Civil War’ on Jobs,” New York Times, June 27, 1954.

87. Josephine Clark to Martin Morand, December 20, 1965, Box 41, Folder 1, ILGWU Southeast Region Records, Collection 5780/058, Kheel Center.

88. Millard Rothenberg to David Dubinsky, March 6, 1962; Millard Rothenberg to David Dubinsky, March 5, 1962, both in Box 357, Folder 1b, ILGWU David Dubinsky President's Records, 1932–1966, Collection 5780/002, Kheel Center.

89. Handwritten notes, n.d., Box 12, Folder 12, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

90. “Judy Bond: Contract Analysis,” in Box 12, Folder 17, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

91. Martin Morand to David Dubinsky, April 1, 1965, Box 13, Folder 10, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

92. “We Take It For Granted,” Brewton Standard, May 31, 1962.

93. Nick Bonanno, handwritten notes, July 8, 1962; Edwin Sharp to “Al,” February 16, 1962, both in Box 41, Folder 5, ILGWU Southeast Region Records, Collection 5780/058, Kheel Center.

94. Statement of Dorothy Dewberry, Box 13, Folder 4, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

95. Statement of Grace Kast, June 7, 1966, Box 12, Folder 21, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

96. “Brief of Petitioner Brewton Fashions, Inc.,” Box 41, Folder 1, ILGWU Southeast Region Records, Collection 5780/058, Kheel Center.

97. Alice York to Max Zimny, April 9, 1965, Box 13, Folder 3, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

98. To All Employees,” October 18, 1966, Box 12, Folder 21, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

99. “To All Employees,” February 19, 1965, Box 13, Folder 3, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

100. “Let's look at the ILGWU's record in the Blouse Industry,” February 26, 1965, Box 13, Folder 3, ILGWU Legal Department Records, Collection 5780/081, Kheel Center.

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