On June 12, 2013, Tiffany Hsu writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Patriotism isn’t easy. Just ask L.A.’s garment makers.
Three years after combining their names to create Venley, a company that produces T-shirts and other basics in a downtown Los Angeles factory, onetime fraternity brothers Nick Ventura and Kevin Gressley find manufacturing clothes in the U.S. to be an expensive and frustrating undertaking.
Like many other apparel executives in the U.S., the pair pay more than the minimum wage, Ventura said. Sometimes, the same amount of money Venley shells out for locally made fabric gets Wal-Mart Stores Inc. an entire outfit sewed abroad.
“Companies are driven by what consumers buy, and nobody’s buying U.S.A. even though consumers preach about it all day,” Ventura said.
It’s a far cry from the post-World War II era, when the Southern California garment industry emerged. With immigrant seamstresses from Mexico, Europe and Asia offering a steady source of labor and hippie culture and grunge wear driving the popularity of California casual, the West Coast fashion empire steadily expanded.
Then the North American Free Trade Agreement blasted open trade barriers in the 1990s. Cheaper clothing imports flooded across borders, conditioning companies to search for even more affordable manufacturing in Asia once China emerged on the world stage.
Garment workers in the U.S. can command as much as $14 an hour, according to the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights. Even after recent minimum wage increases overseas, their counterparts earn the equivalent of only 21 cents an hour in Bangladesh and $2.45 in Guangzhou, a hub of apparel manufacturing in southern China, government figures show.
The number of workers making apparel in Los Angeles County slumped to 45,500 last year, down 40 percent from a decade earlier, according to the California Employment Development Department. Nationally, more than 600 textile mills have closed since 1997.
In some industries, more American companies are considering a return to U.S. production, partly as a reaction to rising wages abroad as well as swelling costs to ship goods. On the home front, technological advances, especially in the auto and machinery sectors, have helped offset the high cost of U.S. labor.
But in the fashion world, tight margins and the need for human hands to drape and sew continue to make foreign factories appealing.
And working with a local contractor doesn’t guarantee humane employment practices. In December, federal regulators said they uncovered endemic “sweatshop-like” conditions in the downtown Los Angeles fashion district, including underpaid wages and lax or fake record-keeping.
When deciding where to manufacture, costs aren’t the only consideration.
Some companies can’t find enough trained workers in the U.S.
Thousands of Southland garment workers have been fired because they lack proper citizenship papers, Metchek said. Many of the young people who would take their place don’t have access to industrial training opportunities.
Loans for expensive apparel manufacturing equipment are hard to get, she said. Tax credits are difficult to understand and qualify for.
It’s now common for classic U.S. brands such as California-cool label Stussy, workwear maker Carhartt and outdoor name Woolrich to manufacture large chunks of their products abroad.
“Woolrich strives to keep as much manufacturing here as possible, but companies today have little choice but to compete in a global economy,” the company says on its website.
Some efforts are being made to turn the tide. Wal-Mart pledged to buy $50 billion in U.S.-made products over the next decade. A few companies have launched special “Made in U.S.A.” collections in an attempt to reclaim their roots.
“Retailers prefer to stay here, as long as they can get a product at the right price,” said Bill Dombrowski, chief executive of the California Retailers Assn.
This situation encompasses the realization that the troubling economic and social trends (global capitalism, free-trade doctrine, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs) is caused by continued concentrated ownership of productive capital.
To reinvigorate “Make It In America” and “Made In America,” is the government should create financial incentives and tax provisions to reward American companies that bring manufacturing back to the United States from abroad, promote manufacturing investment, and incentivize more investment by foreign companies, all with the condition that the employees will share in the ownership benefits generated by the new capital formation projects. The result will be more broadened employee ownership and in-sourcing of jobs created by the new capital formation projects, and make America self-reliant.
The government should impose robust import levies and tariffs (tax) on particular classes of imports that are determined to be manufactured outside the United States and exported back to the United States that do not qualify as “Fair Trade” and unfairly undercut an American-make equivalent. At present, American business corporations are increasingly abandoning the United States and its communities to invest in productive capital formation outside the United States, particularly in China, Mexico, India, and other parts of Asia. As a result, America is experiencing the deindustrialization of America. This has forced policy makers to adopt a redistributive socialist solution rather than a democratic capitalist one whereby democratic economic growth of the earning power of the citizens would flourish simultaneously with new, broadly-owned productive capital formation investments in the United States. Such overseas operations have the advantage of “sweat-shop” slave labor rates relative to American standards, low or no taxation, supportive infrastructure provisions, currency manipulation, and few if any environmental regulations––which translate to lower-cost production. Thus, producing the same product or service in the United States would be far more expensive. For most people, economic globalization means a growing gap between rich and poor, technological alienation of the labor worker from the means of production, and the phenomenon of global corporations and strategic alliances forcing labor workers in high-cost wage markets, such as the United States, to compete with labor-saving capital tools and lower-paid foreign workers. Unemployment is high and there is an accelerating displacement of labor workers by technology and cheaper foreign labor, resulting in greater economic uncertainty and unstable retirement incomes for the average American citizen––causing the average citizen to become increasingly dependent on government wealth redistribution programs.
We need a policy change, which assures truly “Fair Trade” and that exponentially reduces the exodus of our manufacturing prowess and invigorates America’s entrepreneurial exceptionalism and competitive spirit to create products and services in the spirit of “the best that they can be.” We need policies that will de-incentivize American multinational corporations and others from undercutting “American Made,” while simultaneously competitively lowering the cost of production through expanded capital worker ownership. At present, the various incentives in place do not broaden capital ownership but instead further concentrate ownership.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-la-manufacturing-bangladesh-20130612,0,1109637.story
In my consideration, apparel manufacturing cost will much high than China, Bangladesh & other countries for USA brand.