History of the Garment Industry. New York first assumed its role as the center of the nation's garment industry by producing clothes for slaves working on Southern plantations. It was more efficient for their masters to buy clothes from producers in New York than to have the slaves spend time and labor making the clothing themselves. In addition to supplying clothing for slaves, tailors produced other ready-made garments for sailors and western prospectors during slack periods in their regular business. These kinds of goods were usually of a poor quality and often referred to as "slop work." Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, the majority of Americans either made their own clothing, which was loose fitting and required only basic skills and supplies, or if they were wealthy, purchased "tailor-made," customized clothing. By the 1820s, however, an increasing number of ready-made garments of a higher quality were being produced for a broader market.



The production of ready-made clothing, which continued to grow, completed its transformation to an "industrialized" profession with the invention of a practical and commercially viable sewing machine in 1850s. (Elias Howe patented the first sewing machine in 1844 although Isaac Merritt Singer, whose name is synonymous with the machine, added modifications and marketed the sewing machine for the first time to the mass public in the early 1850s. For more information, see also Sewing Machine.) The sewing machine, available to individuals for a relatively small amount of capital, allowed for a level of production hitherto unseen. Rather than forcing seamstresses and other contractors out of business as many reformers had warned, the sewing machine's advanced technology increased both employment and production.



The need for thousands of ready-made soldiers' uniforms during the Civil War helped the garment industry to expand further. Armies, both Union and Confederate, also instituted a standardized system of sizing for soldiers' clothing to make allotment easier; this system would continue on even after the War ended. By the end of the 1860s, Americans bought most of their clothing rather than making it themselves. Although ready-made clothing for women lagged behind that of men's due to more intricate tailoring demands, changes in style reversed the trend by the 1880s. With an ample supply of cheap labor and a well-established distribution network, New York was prepared to meet the demand. During the 1870s the value of garments produced in New York increased six-fold. By 1880 New York produced more garments than its four closest urban competitors combined, and in 1900 the value and output of the clothing trade was three times that of the city's second largest industry, sugar refining. New York's function as America's culture and fashion center also helped the garment industry by providing constantly changing styles and new demand; in 1910, 70% of the nation's women's clothing and 40% of the men's was produced in the City.

Composition of the Garment Industry. 
Even before the invention of the sewing machine, the ready-made garment industry relied on a system of "putting-out." As early as the 1820s, clothing manufacturers contracted work to female workers who would do the job for wages 25% to 50% less then that of male tailors. Rather than working in the clothing shop, the women seamstresses would complete their assigned sewing tasks in their homes. The ethnic composition of the seamstresses mirrored the general trend of immigration to New York City. Prior to 1850, most seamstresses were German immigrants or native born, poor Americans who had come to New York from rural areas, while from 1850 until the 1880s Irish immigrants dominated the industry.



In the 1880s the nature of the garment industry experienced another significant change. Immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe replaced seamstresses, who often worked alone or in very small groups, with contractors. Under the new arrangement, factories produced the fabric and the designs, which were then distributed to contractors on credit. The contractor was responsible that the fabric that he had acquired on credit be made into clothing, and then sold to stores and other retail outlets. He (it was almost always a "he") hired neighbors and other women in the area to do the job. The contractor paid by the piece, though he could refuse to pay for work he considered shoddy. As factory machinery became more sophisticated in the 1870s and 1880s, parts of a piece of clothing could be mass produced and women working at home did finishing work rather than making whole pieces of clothing from scratch. 



Female homework satisfied the desire of most husbands for their wives to remain at home and allowed the women to supervise their children. Working at home also eliminated commuting time and left more time for household chores. Women from different apartments would often work together in one of their kitchens or best rooms (the room fronting the street or rear yard and therefore receiving the most sunlight) to keep each other company. In warmer weather women often moved into the hallways or onto the roofs and fire escapes (when they existed). 

By the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century the putting-out system gave way, for the most part, to "sweat-shops." In this system, manufacturers provided the raw materials, designed the clothes, and marketed the final product, but the work of making the clothes was again handed over to contractors. The contractors would now secure a workspace, sewing machines, and ten to twenty workers, usually female immigrants. Each worker had a specific task to perform but was paid on the basis of how many garments the whole group was able to produce. By the turn of the century, most ready-to-wear clothing came from such shops.

History of Sweatshops. In 1888, New York state factory inspectors provided the following description of sweat-shops: "In New York city, in the tenement house districts where clothing is manufactured, there exists a system of labor which is nearly akin to slavery as it is possible to get. The work is done under the eyes of task-masters, who rent a small room or two in the rear part of an upper floor of a high building, put in a few sewing machines, a stove suitable for heating irons, and then hire a number of men and women to work for them." Explicit in the inspectors' definition of a sweatshop is the exploitation of garment workers by contractors, who forced their workers to labor for long hours only to be paid insufficient wages. In addition to physically sweating as a result of their toil, workers were also "sweated" in the same manner an animal would be milked or bled.

By the 1880s, for the most part, seamstresses no longer negotiated work on an individual basis but were subsumed into a system of contracting. Contractors received components of garments that they in turn assembled according to designs. These finished products were returned to the manufacturers and marketed under the company's label. As a result, manufacturers distanced themselves from the hiring and equipping of a labor force, which became the responsibility of the contractor. Manufacturers paid a set price for each finished garment they received from the contractor, which was considerably lower then they would then charge retail. Consequently, contractors, in order to make any profit, forced longer hours and lower wages on their workers.

Contractors, more often than not, exploited fellow immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe by using social networks and common dialects to hire their labor force. In many instances, a sweatshop would be staffed by workers who all came to America from the same hometown in Europe. The exploitation of the contractor, in his own mind, was justified by the fact that he himself felt exploited by the manufacturers. Furthermore, many new immigrants were willing to take any job offered to them at all, particularly during the economic hardships of the 1890s (See Depression of 1893). The line that contractors straddled between being helpful employers and ruthless exploiter to their fellow countrymen was indeed thin, and varied from shop to shop.

Because the equipment necessary for making garments was not cumbersome, most contractors based their sweatshops out of the tenement apartments in which they lived with their family. Within the Lower East Side, there was no pattern as to where one would find a garment sweatshop. Research shows that in one year shops were in existence in tenements along Delancey, Sheriff, Division, Hester, Essex, Ridge, Cherry, Ludlow, Monroe, Mulberry, Mott, Baxter, Pitt, Rivington, Suffolk, Norfolk, Canal, Henry, Cannon, Stanton, East Houston, Attorney, Allen, Eldridge, Bayard, Chrystie, Orchard (No. 180, in addition to 97), Willett, Jefferson, Columbia, Clinton and Madison streets. The shop was run as a family affair. The wife of the contractor would help out by cooking meals (for which the workers had to pay) and attending to other tasks. Everything in the shop served both a domestic and business purpose. Stoves used to heat irons were also used to cook meals. The average sweatshop employed anywhere from four to 30 employees.

In 1904, the opening of the New York City subway system and other transportation networks allowed the garment industry to move uptown, and to consolidate workers in more factories. Although sweatshops in tenements remained, factories, such as the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

The Evolution of a Garment -- How the Sweatshop System Worked Although certain retailers employed "inside" shops, which eliminated contractors and paid sewing machine operators and other workers at a piece-rate to work directly for them, most retailers relied on the system of using "outside" shops organized by contractors.

Typically, a designer, either independent or working for a retailer, would design a garment based on the latest fashions (particularly within the women's clothing industry). Cotton, harvested by underpaid sharecroppers (usually freed African-American slaves and poor Southern whites, who lived in a type of veritable slavery where wages and rent were always manipulated to keep them in debt) was shipped to the giant textile mills of New England and the mid-Atlantic. Textile workers, often poor, underpaid immigrants working their own long hours, converted the fiber into fabric.

Retailers purchased the fabric from the mills, and redistributed the material to a cutting contractor, who would be paid a piece-rate to cut the material into the garment design. Upon receiving the cut designs, the retailer would re-contract the material, this time to a sewing contractor (i.e. Harris Levine). Often the system of contracting was highly diversified with each sweatshop performing a specialized task. A single clothing firm might employ as many as 75 different contractors to work on their clothing line.

Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Tenement Encyclopedia, Chapter Six: Garment Industry” at http://www.tenement.org/Encyclopedia/garment.htm