Slade makes digressions, delving into organizing, immigration, textile manufacturing. There’s a chapter about the history of the hoodie — a perfect garment, a mature technology of American vernacular fashion gone worldwide. And there’s the “Fabric King of 38th Street,” an old-school garmento who sits in a duct-taped office chair dispensing wisdom about the superiority of natural fibers.
But always she returns to her thesis: “Whenever we buy stuff made abroad, we leave a lot of questions unanswered,” she writes.
Was someone exploited to make that thing? Did they earn a living wage? Did they have the freedom to leave the factory when they needed to? Did they have access to protections in the factory, like masks or helmets? Did they have a safe place to report sexual harassment? Did they get regular breaks? Were they expected to work reasonable hours? What happened when they got sick or their children fell ill? Was the factory building even safe?
But these are questions that should be asked of U.S. factories, too. Throughout “Making It in America,” Slade applies a U.S.-centric analysis to free trade, considering it in terms of its impacts on America’s labor market. She also seems to assume that buying American equates to buying ethically. But if the garment industry were to return to the United States at scale, it would probably more closely resemble the industry we currently have than the Waxmans’ business.
Most U.S. garment workers are paid not per hour but per sewing operation — a system known as piece-rate. Factories pay 3 cents for sewing in a “Made in USA” label, 4 for attaching a sleeve. There are about 45,000 workers employed in the industry’s center, Los Angeles, and illegal pay and wage theft are rampant. A 2016 study found that the average L.A. garment worker is paid less than half of minimum wage; 60-to-70-hour weeks are standard.
One of the manufacturers that Slade mentions glowingly — an L.A.-based zipper manufacturer — is later revealed to not offer health insurance to its workers. There is an unexamined tension here between Slade’s open advocacy for the return of manufacturing jobs and the fact that these jobs often offer shockingly poor conditions and pay. Absent broader changes, a return to U.S. manufacturing alone won’t improve wages and conditions for American workers.
Arguably, if that were the goal, our best chance would be organizing a few Starbucks and Amazon warehouses, as well as passing universal single-payer health care and student loan reform. And perhaps, rather than relying on “Made in USA” as a heuristic for ethical manufacturing, we should devise a system of trade that ensures labor and environmental standards apply wherever goods are made.
Slade’s key insight, and possibly the strongest argument for reviving domestic manufacturing, is that it is how we innovate. “You need to know what works to imagine what is possible,” she writes. It’s by confronting the limitations of the materials and the current processes that you put yourself in a position to come up with the breakthroughs that will define the future. It’s perhaps the best reason we have for making things.
MAKING IT IN AMERICA: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (and How It Got That Way) | By Rachel Slade | Pantheon | 352 pp. | $28
