One of my first jobs was working in a shoe factory in Worcester.
This was, of course, a kabillion years ago, when there were a lot of factory jobs to be had in Massachusetts. At some point or another, most of my friends spent a summer doing unskilled factory work. (Small plastic toys, sausages…)
Some of what was made here was clothing.
When I was a kid, our family took a tee-shirt buying jaunt each summer to Ware, Mass., where there was a mill that made unbranded (in my recall, mostly boldly striped) tee-shirts. Sometimes we went to Fall River, which also sold tee-shirts in factory stores.
I had a short-term Kelly Girl job at a factory in Boston that made Old Glory jeans. Around the corner, Forecaster of Boston made and sold raincoats (which you could buy off-price: I owned one).
These jobs, of course, went South (and after that East, far East), leaving us to build a higher-end, higher-skilled economy, with more highly educated, highly paid workers. Most of the folks who worked in the low-end factories found their way into lower-end services work. Overall, our economy and region were pretty much upgraded.
But I wonder what happened to all the folks who worked at H.H. Brown Shoe when it closed. (I believe that the building itself is now condos.)
The summer I worked there, most of those on my floor were women. Our work was the least skilled in the factory. We glued in the “heel pods”, cleaned glue off the leather, polished raw seams, put boots in boxes.,, Finishing work – low-skill, ill-paid (although some of the women were pretty fast and made a bit more than the pathetic hourly wage through their piecework). The women I worked with were French Canadian, Polish, Cuban. Immigrants or the daughters of.
I remember Marie, one of the older women on the floor, who on the day before payday would have no money in her pocketbook.
Men had most of the higher-skilled jobs. At the top of the pyramid were the cutters, who would take the cow-hides and cut out the pieces that would be made into boots and shoes. The trick was to get as many pairs out of a hide as possible, leaving minimum trimmings on the floor.
At the next skill layer were the stitchers.
And so it went, each floor in the factory taking another step towards turning raw material into finished good.
Maybe the jobs weren’t great, but they were jobs. Jobs making things.
There’s always some residual nostalgia for the days when we made things, material things, tangible things. Even though it makes more sense to make so many material and tangible things – tee-shirts included – somewhere else. (Especially if we’re willing to turn a blind eye to terrible working conditions, child labor, environmental depredation… Out of sight…)
So even though the clothing factory closing is in Pennsylvania, not Massachusetts, I was saddened to read that FesslerUSA has turned off its sewing machines after over 100 years.
FesslerUSA had survived war and depression, free trade and foreign imports, producing millions of knitted garments from its base in eastern Pennsylvania. Five years ago, third-generation owner Walter Meck and his family were feeling so good about the company’s prospects they doubled capacity, moving into a former pencil factory outside the small town of Orwigsburg.
They were still setting up shop in the new place when the Great Recession hit. (Source: AP on Boston.com)
And now Fessler’s run out its string. They’ve shut down production, laying off 130 garment workers who pretty much have nowhere to go. Where do you go after 30 years in the garment industry? Nursing home attendant? Housekeeper at Motel 6? Waitress at Denny’s?
I don’t imagine that there’s a lot out there in Orwigsburg, PA.
There were some interesting factoids in the article I saw.
One was that “19 billion pieces of apparel [were] sold in the United States last year.” That’s about 60 pieces of apparel per capita. I’m sure a lot of that was necessaries: undies, socks. But that’s still a lot o’ apparel. And don’t bother “looking for the union label”: 97% of it was made somewhere else, primarily Asia.
Surprisingly, although garment industry employment is way down – it accounted for 621,000 jobs in 1998, and has 151,800 today – I was surprised that there are still over 150K garment workers.
Fessler had survived this long:
…by pivoting from high-volume, mass-market apparel toward higher-end pieces made with more expensive fabrics, a segment of the market that foreign manufacturers were unable or unwilling to touch. Fessler thrived because it could produce quickly and in small quantities, and its fashionable tees appeared on the racks of such retailers as Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom.
Every once in a while you read about how the U.S. should retain some manufacturing capacity “just in case.”
So maybe we don’t need fashionable tees from Bloomingdale’s, but there is something comforting about the idea of self-reliance, however far-fetched and/or quaint it may be in such a globalized economy.
We do keep some manufacturing at home to some extent in the hard goods industries - all those Jeeps in Toledo – and in food production. For soft goods like apparel, let’s face it. Most of us could survive on what we already own for a good long time. All those walk in closets…
Maybe all the what gets manufactured where will all get solved when we use printers to manufacture everything we need, perfectly customized for us. Bespoke for the masses.
Until then, sad (but not surprising) to see another little factory fold.
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