Sewing Women, by Margaret M. Chin (introduction)

introduction

Since the mid-1800s garment work in New York City has been associated with immigration. Immigrants, from Eastern Europeans to today’s Asians, have always been in the industry. In the mid-1990s, while doing fieldwork in the Chinese garment shops, I discovered, to my surprise, that the Chinese were not the only ones left in this industry. Korean immigrants operated a sector almost as large.

Although the Chinese hired unionized, immigrant coethnic women, the Koreans did not—they hired mostly undocumented Mexican and Ecuadorian men and women.The two sectors are structured very differently, not only in terms of who is working but in terms of pay and even in terms of how the work floor is organized. However, these two sectors coexist in the very competitive New York City environment. How can both sectors be viable?

In this book I examine the role that garment work has played in these contemporary immigrants’ lives. In particular, I consider the relationships between the owners and workers and ask when ethnic relationships are helpful and when they are not and how immigration status and gender condition workers’ lives. By examining the processes that Mexican, Ecuadorian, and Chinese immigrants use to get jobs, I explore the tensions between coethnic obligation and economic necessity and try to understand how they result in coethnic exploitation or cooperation. Gender and immigration are important factors in the work opportunities that the Chinese employers and workers have. In turn, their opportunities are very different from those available to Korean employers and their Mexican and Ecuadorian workers.

For most immigrants work is central to survival in the United States; thus few would envision emigrating unless they were aware of work opportunities.

Work is not just a means to earn money to survive: it plays a large role in the so-

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cietal status of Chinese, Koreans, Mexicans, and Ecuadorians. Many intermediary factors determine how and where immigrants get jobs. Immigration status and the long-term goals of the individuals (to become U.S. citizens or to return to their home country) affect the kinds of jobs that they strive for and are willing to take.Wages, work hours, and benefits are important considerations if an individual has family and children in the United States. Given a choice, immigrants favor jobs that complement their household roles as parents, providers, or supporters of relatives overseas. Only in this context should we examine how ethnicity and coethnic ties matter. These bonds can be used to advance work prospects—that is, to gain access to jobs and higher wages.They can be positive when members reap benefits from ethnic ties.The ties can also be constraining when they are used to limit access to jobs or other economic opportunities.

The differences between the sectors suggest that the employment market does not operate solely on the basis of free market assumptions—that is, that immigrants will work wherever they can get the highest wages. These immigrants mostly end up in the narrowest settings, which suggests that a number of forces are channeling these immigrants into the garment industry. Are these forces connected to ethnicity and ethnic bonds? How important are structural factors, including route of emigration, neighborhoods, or the way the industry is organized? And to what degree does gender role dictate where an immigrant works? What I found was that immigration status, ethnicity, and gender are intertwined and cannot be totally disaggregated. Examining immigration status and gender provides insight into the specific mechanisms and conditions that alternately turn ethnic ties into resources or barriers in the pursuit of employment.

Why Garment Workers?

Garment workers and garment work have always intrigued me. I often wondered why the clothing manufacturing process has remained the same for more than one hundred years. I am the daughter of a former garment worker, and the factories that I remember visiting as a young child looked very similar to the ones I visited for this study.While I was doing my research, most of my aunts were still working in factories in Chinatown.They all worked for the Chinese, and the majority of their own coworkers were also Chinese. Chinatown seemed to be filled with coethnic enterprises that brought money and jobs into the community. Garment work was only one of these enterprises.Although no one would dispute the benefits of the jobs and money that the garment industry provides for the community, many workers wished that their employers

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were white and not coethnic Chinese. Some felt that they were being exploited. Others thought that conditions might be better uptown in the factories owned by the older Jewish and Italian employers. I wondered why such a sharp gendered division of labor exists among the Chinese, with the majority of the women working in the garment industry and most of the men working in restaurants. I realized that the majority of studies were written with data collected only from the employers and that Chinese workers might have something very different to say.

While doing fieldwork with the Chinese, I discovered that Korean immigrants also worked in the garment sewing shops, not as workers but as employers. They hired undocumented Ecuadorians and Mexicans, both men and women. I initially thought that these two ethnic groups—Chinese and Hispanics1—working in the garment industry were more similar, in general, than different, and it turned out that my data supports this conclusion. Coethnicity may have little to do with how work is organized; in fact, how people get hired, trained, and paid may be a result of the route of emigration taken by the worker, the role that the worker plays in the family, the neighborhood where the factories are located, and the structural conditions in the industry.

For example, I found that some aspects of the Chinese sector, like low wages, could be overlooked and dismissed as industry standards, while an informal training program could be overidealized into a version of coethnic harmony and benefit. How do we know this if we do not compare this to the noncoethnic sector? This study is not meant to discount the advantages that accrue from coethnic relationships, but potential disadvantages should also be analyzed. Thus I needed to examine exactly when these coethnic resources are used and why, how they differ from resources in noncoethnic relationships, what kind of benefits can be derived from them, how those benefits differ among the minority groups, and how they lead to different outcomes among the different minority groups.

Immig ration Status, Gender, and Ethnicity Immigrants often face barriers to full inclusion in the economic activities of the host society.They often lack access to network ties that are necessary to succeed

1. In this book I use the terms Hispanic and Latino interchangeably, following the guidelines issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), dated October 30, 1997, which was applied to the 2000 U.S. Census.

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in certain kinds of activities. Licensing requirements often prevent immigrants from entering professional or internal labor markets. Moreover, immigrants’ skills may not be the skills that employers in the host society seek.The immigrant work sector may exhibit many features of the larger economy. But an immigrant’s family may not resemble the families of citizens. Immigrant families may include both documented and undocumented residents in the United States, as well as relatives still in the home country. Legal circumstances often constrain their relationships and their ability to assist each other. I also examine worker-employer relationships, the workers’ relationships with work organizations, and how ethnicity relates to these two factors.

I also examine gender differences, the supply of workers, training, and the organization of the shop floor. The process of immigration and resettlement funnels immigrants into different jobs, which sometimes redefine gender roles.

Immigration status affects the workers’ lives and the degree of family support that they need or acquire here in New York City. In particular, many emigrants must decide whether to bring their children or leave them in their home country. These factors affect men and women differently, including how they organize their work lives.

Hispanic men and women with few family responsibilities here in New York City have more freedom from their usual gender roles, if those roles involve being a caretaker or a homemaker. Because they often are here illegally, they leave their children in their home country.The absence of dependents allows them to pursue jobs that they might not take otherwise. Men and women can both take on the role of economic breadwinner and take whatever jobs are available in the garment industry. In this particular case, illegal immigration places Hispanic men and women in roles that are less gendered than usual in their society (at least temporarily), until they have to care for children here in New York City. Hispanic men find employment in the Korean sector of the garment as easily as Hispanic women do. Chinese men and women tend to emigrate with their children and bring with them their traditional gender roles. The Chinese sector of the garment industry is dominated by women.

Work, which includes hiring, training, pay schedules, and the organization of day-to-day production, is organized to give the owners control over their workers.This includes control of the workers’ use of their own social contacts.

Chinese employers encourage workers to recruit others, especially friends and kin. Employers treat their workers paternalistically. Korean employers tend to eschew nepotism among their employees. The different patterns of coethnic social relations in each sector offer both advantages or disadvantages to the workers.

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By comparing these two immigrant populations in the garment industry, I hope to highlight how immigrants can or cannot influence the work situations into which they are channeled. But focusing on how social networks lead to employment downplays the cultural explanations of why immigrant women enter the garment industry. I hope to illuminate how historic, economic, and social contexts influence women to take jobs in the garment industry.

The Study I chose to do a comparative study in order to get a closer look at how immigration status, ethnicity, and gender are interrelated. I used ethnographic fieldwork, consisting of observations and interviews, to explore two sectors of the New York City garment industry—Korean factory owners whose workforce is dominated by Mexican and Ecuadorians, and Chinese factory owners, who hire Chinese almost exclusively. I draw data from almost three years of fieldwork, in 1994 to 1996 and 1999 to 2000.

My fieldwork included observing four garment shops, two owned by Chinese and two owned by Koreans. I used these observations to get a sense of the daily lives of the workers and owners.The Chinese shops were unionized and located in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown; the Korean-owned shops were not unionized and were located in the West 30s and 40s in midtown Manhattan. I interviewed fifteen Chinese and fifteen Korean owners about their perspectives on hiring, work, and ethnicity. I found these thirty owners in a variety of ways, including seeking referrals from the shops where I observed and from the Chinese and Korean business associations.

I interviewed 112 workers—57 Chinese (2 men and 55 women), and 55 Hispanics (19 men and 36 women) of whom 27 were Mexican and 24 were Ecuadorian. The rest were women from Central America or the Dominican Republic. I found most of the workers in union-sponsored English-as-aSecond-Language classes, at the Garment Workers’ Justice Center or at the Garment Industry Development Corporation. The latter, established in 1984, is a consortium of labor, business, and government groups that offer an array of services to maintain the competitiveness of local apparel manufacturers and contractors and to increase workers’ skills (Bowles 2000).

In addition to learning about the workers and owners, I tried to understand the background and history of the garment industry. I interviewed union officials, the leaders of the Chinese and Korean contractor associations, officials from the New York State Department of Labor’s Apparel Industry Task Force, and former garment workers.

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Organization of the Book In the first chapter I review the history of the New York City garment industry.

In chapter 2, I review the literature on ethnic businesses in the United States. I discuss emigration and immigration strategies used by the Chinese, Korean, and Hispanic immigrants in chapter 3, where I also introduce how gender and children affect emigration and immigrant work roles. Chapter 4 is about the people in the garment industry. In chapter 5, I discuss how the employers choose their workers. In chapter 6, I discuss the assets and liabilities associated with ethnic resources, in terms of getting a job and getting paid, and I analyze the organization of the workforce in relation to how workers are hired in chapter 7. In chapter 8, I discuss the significance of immigrant status, gender, and ethnic resources in relation to work. And in the epilogue I briefly discuss the status of the garment industry in 2004.2

2. “Sewing Woman� is also the name of an interesting documentary made by Arthur Dong in 1982. It is based on oral histories of his mother who was an immigrant garment worker in San Francisco.

Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival research, and her own memories of growing up as the child of a New York City garment worker, Margaret M. Chin builds an intimate history of one of the city’s longest-running and most fraught industries. She lays bare the personal and professional realities of the Asian and Latina women at the heart of the garment industry’s modern revival, and she contrasts the conditions and hiring practices of Korean- and Chinese-owned factories, revealing how ethnic ties both improve and hinder advancement opportunities for immigrants. Chin concludes with a discussion of the effects of new anxieties about immigration in the wake of 9/11 and a growing awareness of the industry’s more exploitive practices.

“A sophisticated analysis of the inner workings of the needle trade.”

— M I N Z H O U , Nanyang Technical College, Singapore, and coauthor of The Asian American Achievement Paradox “A terrific read for anyone interested in immigration, the sociology of work, and the intersection between family life and the organization of the shop floor.”

— K A T H E R I N E N E W M A N , coauthor of The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America “[Chin’s] masterful threading of oral interviews into the analysis brings the history to life.”

— A N N I E P O L L A N D , senior vice president of programs and education, Lower East Side Tenement Museum “An imaginative and compelling portrait.”— H - N E T “Ethnographic sociology at its richest and best.”

— H E R B E R T J . G A N S , Columbia University “Chin’s strong writing allows her reader to see and feel the garment worker’s exhausting struggles on a daily basis.”— A L T A R M A G A Z I N E

M A R G A R E T M . C H I N is associate professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Cover design: Chang Jae Lee ISBN: 978-0-231-13309-8

Cover image: New York skyline © Royalty-Free/Corbis; Colorful spools © Jacqui Hurst/Corbis.

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