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Reviewed by: A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization and Reform in New York's Garment Industry Steven J. Gold (bio) A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization and Reform in New York's Garment Industry. Edited by Daniel Soyer. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. vii + 285 pp. Underneath the glitzy exterior of New York's garment industry exists a volatile and ruthless world where enterprises large and small rely on [End Page 392] recent immigrant workers, most of them women, toiling under harsh conditions to create both clothing and livelihoods. In so doing, it reveals a Dickensian world of unrestrained capitalism. The industry is a century and a half old, and its system of production has undergone myriad changes in the articles it produces, the technology it uses, the location of its customers and competitors, the regulatory environment within which it operates, and the ethnicity of its workers and owners. Nevertheless, its current form reveals a surprising degree of continuity with its earliest patterns. These include a disaggregated organizational structure, small sweatshops closely linked to ethnic communities, labor abuses, and efforts to improve workers' lives though unionization, policy making, and the actions of middle-class reformers. A Coat of Many Colors does an outstanding job of bringing to light these patterns of continuity and transformation. It begins with a preface by Ruth J. Abram, the president of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Because Abram has regular contact with persons outside the academic realm, she emphasizes the book's message for a general rather than specialized audience, noting that the text offers not just a catalog of arcane and dusty facts, but instead provides the reader with the ability to "draw connections between historical and contemporary issues" (ix). Following the preface, the book's editor, Daniel Soyer, identifies major themes and issues that have been associated with the New York garment industry for the past 150 years. The chapters that follow are organized into three parts. Part I concerns the geography of New York's clothing trades. Chapter One, by Nancy L. Green, traces the location of garment production in the New York area, from its origins in Lower East Side tenement buildings to its occupation of larger premises in midtown and the outer boroughs. Chapter Two, by Florence Palpacuer, concerns the globalization of the garment industry via the perspective of a value chain model. This perspective "shows that globalization involves a transnational reorganization of apparel activities, in which American firms play diverse roles" (46). Price competition, especially from the Far East, threatens the viability of the New York industry and, in the author's mind, can be best dealt with via a global regulatory architecture. Chapter Three, by Xiaolan Bao, concentrates on the migration of Chinese garment manufacturing (runaway shops) from Manhattan's Chinatown to Brooklyn's Sunset Park, a move made, at least in part, to escape the consequences of a successful unionization campaign in 1982 by Chinatown workers. Part II deals with relations between workers and owners of garment operations, many of whom are from the same ethnic or national origins. Chapter Four, by Daniel Soyer, explores the achievement of upward mobility by Jewish contractors thorough the employment of co-ethnic workers. Chapter Five, by Hadassa Kosak, concerns Jewish militancy in [End Page 393] the first decade of the twentieth century. Kosak finds that involvement in garment unions helped to forge the political outlook of the larger Jewish population, and made the International Ladies Garment Workers Union more radical and idealistic than was the case among mainstream American unions of the same era. Chapter Six, by Nancy Carnevale, revisits the experience of Italian women home workers between 1890 and 1914. Due to a cultural imperative to fulfill family duties while simultaneously earning a living, these women were more heavily involved in home-based manufacturing than non-Italian women of the same period. The last two chapters of Part II deal with contemporary migrants. Ramona Hernandez focuses on Dominicans, who are New York's largest and poorest immigrant group. Their limited education and social marginality results in their concentration in the poorly paid and shrinking garment industry and leaves them with few opportunities to move beyond...
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