Why Made in USA? Tradition of Social Progress

Sorry for the break from the blog. I am bummed that I dropped the ball so soon after starting this blog, but I’m back now. I’ll try to be more diligent from here on out, but I got distracted with a great trip to Alabama to visit my family.

I’ve been planning this post for a little while, and I wanted to seriously consider it before I jump onto the Internet and throw around my thoughts. The answer to the question of why I view “Made in USA” as so important has many parts. The first  part of my focus is tradition. I’m unabashedly nostalgic. I realize that the present is arguably the best manifestation of the state of the world that we’ve seen. That’s an incredibly broad generalization, I realize, and that’s not to say that the world is a cuddly sunny place. But I’d definitely argue that incredible progress (not complete solutions by any means) has been made in some key areas: civil rights (again, not to say that these issues have been solved or no longer exist, just that general and significant progress has been made), women’s rights (ditto from my last parenthetical), and internationalism (another ditto).

With that said and my admission of nostalgia, I don’t pretend to think that when children were threading knitting machines in dusty locked sweatshops in New York City in the beginning of the last century, things were all hunky-dory and people were better-off. Obviously, as a thinking and feeling human, I don’t think that part of the tradition should be lauded. But those and similar common situations involving child labor and mistreatment of workers spurred activism that made considerable progress in the area of worker’s, children’s, and women’s rights. That is the type of American tradition we should celebrate.

As a statistical illustration, I nabbed these numbers from the documentary, Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags:

In 1965, 95% of the clothing Americans wore was made in this country.
In 1975, it went down to 80%.
It was just 70%, in 1985,
50% in 1995,
and currently only 5% of our clothing is manufactured in this country.

This film was released in 2009, and from my experience in the fashion industry, I know that the statistics have gotten even lower than 5% with a number of factories in Midtown Manhattan closing at the end of 2010.

Essentially, local production of fabrics (both knitted and woven) and the assembly of garments in the United States has a long tradition in almost all states in the Union, and it’s a shame to see these industrialized years of technical and social progress go to waste in order to save a few dollars on manufacturing.

And the sad truth (but certainly happy truth for Chinese workers and human rights activists) for manufacturers (just to clarify, I’m going ahead and identifying these folks as the dollar-chasing at all costs bad guys in this scenario) at the moment is that the cost of labor in mainland China is going up as the workers are getting more organized and specialized, thus making similar progress to the United States at the beginning of the 20^th century. So the long-distance shipping and importation costs aren’t necessarily off-set any longer by the extremely cheap labor. Unfortunately, there seem to be an endless number of third-world countries that can provide easily-exploitable impoverished people to manufacture sweatpants for Wal-Mart. So once China gets too organized and expensive, manufacturers will simply move to countries with sketchier regulations.

So, in summary, I am really proud of the progress America has made while becoming an Industrialized Nation. Workers now have unions and federal statutes that uphold their rights. I fully admit that the system of labor in the US is far from perfect, but it’s come a long way, and I hate for all of that progress to be pushed aside in order to simply exploit a less fortunate population.