A tailor's assistant - presses cloth
There were fully a dozen jobs just in the lowly Tailor's shop in the nineteenth century. Today's tailors exist mostly with one or two assistants and delivery people, or work for a large clothing store where there is enough volume.
So, one must be careful to compare apples to apples and tailors of old to persons sometimes split across multiple professions - who perform the same function today, whatever their titles. One thing that is clear is that we still need the products of those who labor to make clothing indeed, our closets bulge with a quantity of garments that most people in George's day would not own in a lifetime. Whether we need so many items is for discussion outside this paper, though George did warn us that human desire is basically insatiable.
Perhaps our labor has become so efficient that machines do all the drudgery for us?
Three decades ago, I tagged along with a group of fashion students on a tour of the Jantzen Sportswear Company in Portland, Oregon (as a young man, I was curious about everything). There were machines to do all kinds of things, from spinning the cloth in so many vibrant colors! to cutting the cloth so efficiently! to producing the final garments in seemingly unlimited quantities, cheaply and powerfully. This indeed seemed to be the future of modern clothes-making. Yet, we are told in the late 1990s that:[3]
Today, Jantzen is the leading brand of swimwear in over 100 countries, although a tough business climate forced the company to lay off workers, move some production operations to Latin America and the Caribbean, and discontinue its sportswear lines (emphasis added).
The business decisions of a particular manufacturer are beyond the scope of this paper, but anyone who is even slightly aware of what's been going on since George's time, will understand that manufacturing as a whole has moved to the lowest margin of production that is, to the place where it is cheapest to produce the goods that will satisfy human desire. So, it is not accurate to say today's American tailor is better off than yesterday's he simply has a different job description. But what about that jettisoned function making clothes? What was life really like for people who actually made clothes, in large amounts, in George's day? I'll use an example from the turn of the twentieth century, slightly after George's time, for reasons that will become clear later the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory took up the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building. Under the ownership of Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, the factory produced women's blouses (known at the time as "shirtwaists"). The factory normally employed about 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women, who normally worked nine hours a day on weekdays plus seven hours a day on Saturdays. [4]
Says Pauline Newman, who actually worked at the factory:[5]
In the first place, it was probably the largest shirtwaist factory in the city of New York.
My own wages when I got to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was a dollar and a half a week. And by the time I left during the shirtwaist workers strike in 1909 I had worked myself up to six dollars.
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