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Part I
Race, Class, Gender, and Defining the Sweatshop and Modern Shop in Progressive America
Scholars, policymakers, unionists, and workers today describe the sweatshop as a garment workshop characterized by low wages and poor working conditions, the inevitable result of an economic "race to the bottom," unfettered competition fostered by an abundance of cheap labor. When the word "sweatshop" was first used at the turn of the twentieth century, it also described low wages and unclean workplaces. However, the factory inspectors who first coined the word and the Jewish immigrant workers who adopted it did not turn to an economic logic of competition alone to explain the rise of the sweatshop. Initially, at least, inspectors relied on scientific racism and workers used a more emotional and literary language of class to describe its origins. How could race and class simultaneously define the sweatshop and how did these languages help inspectors and workers articulate contrasting ideas about its dangers? How did workers and policymakers reconcile their different definitions of the sweatshop as they forged the first cross-class anti-sweatshop campaign?
Part I explores the language that workers, factory inspectors, policymakers, journalists, and social reformers used to make sense of and to address changes in the New York garment industry. In the 1880s, the garment industry in New York, one of the city's biggest and most visible manufacturing sectors, changed dramatically. As it grew rapidly with a shift from custom to ready-made production (the manufacture of presized garments), the garment industry became centered around small shops, not factories. These small shops were part of a new system of contracting and subcontracting in which numerous contractors, each hiring a few employees, stitched together pre-cut cloth for larger manufacturers and retailers. The rise of these small shops, often located in contractors' tenement apartments, can be explained by changes in fashion, the introduction of new, inexpensive technology, and, most important, the arrival of thousands of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, many of whom came with experience in garment manufacture. By the end of the 1880s, New York industry had become an outpost of a larger transnational garment industry with centers located also in Western Europe and with a workforce composed largely of Eastern European and, later, Southern European immigrants.
While recognizing the role of fashion, technology, and immigration, observers of the garment industry insisted that these factors alone could not account for the rise of the sweatshop. Instead, they argued that the racial characteristics of immigrants explained it. Jewish immigrants arrived in New York poor and the jobs they discovered in contractor shops did little to promote social mobility. But inspectors and journalists saw themselves as explorers visiting the Jewish immigrant neighborhood of the Lower East Side and they described the squalor they found as a reflection of Jewish racial traits, not the result of the low wages in and poor working conditions of the garment shops. Race, more than competition, explained economic changes. These inspectors saw the sweatshop as a reflection of Jewish racial inferiority and, potentially, as a cause of their racial degradation. For inspectors, the physical decrepitude of immigrants highlighted the threat of the sweatshop to civilization. The threat was manifest in germs that might be passed from filthy immigrants to female consumers. Immigrants, meanwhile, focused less on questions of race, biology, and public health, and more on issues of class. They described themselves as victims of the sweated system. Their victimhood was also concrete. They pointed to their enfeebled, potentially diseased bodies as evidence of their exploitation.
However, inspectors and immigrants did share concerns, in particular about women's labor, particularly in its relationship to occupational disease. Inspectors worried that women's labor alongside men created a promiscuous workplace. The children born from the immoral couplings of the sweatshop would inherit the moral and physical debasement of their parents. Gender, then, was key to immigrants' racial degradation. Immigrants, meanwhile, saw male breadwinning as a key to Americanization and as a marker of assimilation and civilization. Thus, they viewed married women's labor as a danger to immigrants' families and as the inevitable result of the sickness caused by sweated work. The wives of male immigrants would be forced to turn to paid garment labor if their husbands fell ill.
Increasingly, the labor of married women, especially married women's homework, was considered the worst kind of sweated labor by social reformers and male Jewish workers, the latter organized in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). In focusing on homework, immigrant unionists and reformers were able to construct a cross-class antisweatshop alliance that focused on specific sweatshop dangers. Questions of race and class moved to the background as immigrants and reformers stressed the gendered disorder created by sweated labor.
To trace the different and shifting languages used to define the sweatshop is to place the changes in the New York garment industry within the larger context of turn-of-the-twentieth-century anxieties about immigration, racial decline, and the public health effects of industrial labor. At the same time, it places anti-sweatshop campaigns in a larger context of burgeoning social reform, factory inspection, public health, and union movements. Explaining the shift in ideas about the threats posed by the sweatshop and the retreat of languages of class and race and the increasing importance of gender helps identify the cultural terms around which workers, inspectors, and policymakers built an enduring anti-sweatshop alliance.
One
Eastern European Jews and the Rise of a Transnational Garment Economy
Eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived in New York in great numbers starting around 1880. Especially in the early years of their migration, many found work in the city's changing garment industry. Paul Novick, a garment worker who later became the editor of the Communist Yiddish daily Freiheit, described the neighborhood where fellow Jewish immigrants concentrated as a neighborhood of workers. The immigrants of New York's Lower East Side, the crowded region in the southeast part of Manhattan, were "80 to 90 percent proletarian." He noted as well that many immigrants worked in the neighborhood's small garment workshops.1
Novick and his fellow immigrants represented a pool of unskilled and semiskilled cheap labor. Their desperate need for paid work, their backgrounds as garment workers in unmechanized shops in Europe, pushed them to the city's growing garment industry. They found work with growing numbers of Jewish employers, many of whom they were related to or had known in the old country. Their arrival dramatically altered the contours of the city's industry, integrating it into a transnational garment economy dependent on domestic consumers, but also on migrant workers and employers. This global garment economy stretched from Eastern Europe to the major industrial cities of Western Europe to urban immigrant neighborhoods in America. As Progressive reformers and immigrant workers mourned-albeit in different ways-this global garment economy was characterized by low wages and small workplaces.
In the years of heavy Eastern European Jewish migration to New York, wages declined as large garment manufactories gave way to a byzantine system of contracting and subcontracting. Retailers no longer produced garments but gave work out to contractors. These contractors, many of whom were also immigrant Jews, struggled to earn meager profits in the thousands of minuscule shops that concentrated among the tenement buildings of the Jewish immigrant neighborhood of the Lower East Side. These small contract shops looked very much like the shops where Jews worked in Eastern and Western Europe. The spread of the contracting system hurt immigrant workers the most because contractors and subcontractors took advantage of the glut of workers to cut labor costs. This had the effect of, first, moving the garment industry away from a factory system much cherished by politicians and social reformers and, second, forcing Eastern European Jewish immigrants into extreme poverty. The combined earnings of male workers and their wives might barely equal a subsistence wage.2
The arrival of Jews also dramatically altered the ethnic composition of the American garment workforce. While for much of the nineteenth century, the American garment industry was dominated by German and Irish immigrants and their descendants, by the turn of the century, the United States Industrial Commission reported that "the industry . . . is practically in the hands of the Russian Jews."3 Although other immigrant groups, especially Italians, soon came to find work in the garment industry, Jewish immigrants and their children dominated the industry as both workers and employers until the Great Depression. And, with the rise of garment unions in the twentieth century, they also composed a majority of union leaders and the rank and file.
As the Industrial Commission's report suggests, the arrival of Jews and the subsequent transformation of the garment industry did not go unnoticed by social reformers and policymakers. By the turn of the century, the Lower East Side and its crowded tenements, dank workshops, and impoverished immigrant residents had become the focus of numerous journalistic exposés, government hearings and inspections, and efforts at reform, education, and Americanization. As part of a general transformation in how immigration was analyzed by reformers and policymakers, these frequent visitors to the Lower East Side relied on conceptions of race to describe Jewish immigrants, their homes, and poverty.