Textile Sector Quotes

About 1.2 million jobs—more than three-quarters of domestic employment in the textile sector—vanished between 1990 and 2012.

The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point. As already noted, from the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable at the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership. The National Industrial Recovery Act raised wage rates in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs. While this Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was upheld by the High Court and became the major force establishing a national minimum wage. As already noted, the inflation of the 1940s largely nullified the effect of the Fair Labor Standards Act, until it was amended in 1950 to raise minimum wages to a level that would have some actual effect on current wages. By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males. Even though 1949—the year before a series of minimum wage escalations began—was a recession year, black teenage male unemployment that year was lower than it was to be at any time during the later boom years of the 1960s. The wide gap between the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers dates from the escalation of the minimum wage and the spread of its coverage in the 1950s. The usual explanations of high unemployment among black teenagers—inexperience, less education, lack of skills, racism—cannot explain their rising unemployment, since all these things were worse during the earlier period when black teenage unemployment was much lower. Taking the more normal year of 1948 as a basis for comparison, black male teenage unemployment then was less than half of what it would be at any time during the decade of the 1960s and less than one-third of what it would be in the 1970s. Unemployment among 16 and 17-year-old black males was no higher than among white males of the same age in 1948. It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers. In the early twenty-first century, the unemployment rate for black teenagers exceeded 30 percent. After the American economy turned down in the wake of the housing and financial crises, unemployment among black teenagers reached 40 percent.

As with Japanese keiretsu, the member firms in a Korean chaebol own shares in each other and tend to collaborate with each other on what is often a nonprice basis. The Korean chaebol differs from the Japanese prewar zaibatsu or postwar keiretsu, however, in a number of significant ways. First and perhaps most important, Korean network organizations were not centered around a private bank or other financial institution in the way the Japanese keiretsu are.8 This is because Korean commercial banks were all state owned until their privatization in the early 1970s, while Korean industrial firms were prohibited by law from acquiring more than an eight percent equity stake in any bank. The large Japanese city banks that were at the core of the postwar keiretsu worked closely with the Finance Ministry, of course, through the process of overloaning (i.e., providing subsidized credit), but the Korean chaebol were controlled by the government in a much more direct way through the latter’s ownership of the banking system. Thus, the networks that emerged more or less spontaneously in Japan were created much more deliberately as the result of government policy in Korea. A second difference is that the Korean chaebol resemble the Japanese intermarket keiretsu more than the vertical ones (see p. 197). That is, each of the large chaebol groups has holdings in very different sectors, from heavy manufacturing and electronics to textiles, insurance, and retail. As Korean manufacturers grew and branched out into related businesses, they started to pull suppliers and subcontractors into their networks. But these relationships resembled simple vertical integration more than the relational contracting that links Japanese suppliers with assemblers. The elaborate multitiered supplier networks of a Japanese parent firm like Toyota do not have ready counterparts in Korea.9

English exports, led by cotton textiles, doubled between 1780 and 1800. It was the growth in this sector that pulled ahead the whole economy. The combination of technological and organizational innovation provides the model for economic progress that transformed the economies of the world that became rich.

Godhra presented a cheap, good-value operation from Pakistan’s point of view. Gujarat was fertile ground for unrest. Its Muslims had grown increasingly disenchanted during the 1980s as the textile sector in the state, where many were employed, shrank from sixty-four to only twelve operating mills.52 The industrial contraction threw large numbers of shift workers into desperate unemployment. The economic depredation among the state’s Muslims had hardly improved over the subsequent decade and there was a reservoir of resentment and fear among the Muslims of Godhra that could readily be tapped. Next was the timing of the operation. It has been pointed out that trainloads of kar sevaks had been commuting to and from Ayodhya for over a month by late February 2002. Many more excursions were planned. But why choose this particular train? Indeed, this was one of the arguments that had been raised against a conspiracy (and in favour of an accident because of a cooking fire on board) before overwhelming physical evidence disproved it.

CAF o Talgo son líderes en material rodante ferroviario (…) alrededor del 15% de los componentes de los AirBus proviene de manos españolas y 3 de cada 5 vuelos están controlados por sistemas de navegación españoles (…) Indra ganó a Siemens el control de su espacio aéreo. ¿Sabían que el 50% de los inodoros de todo el mundo son de la catalana Roca? ¿O que los chinos prefieren los pavimentos cerámicos de la firma de Vila-Real Porcelanosa? (…) El grupo navarro Viscofan es el primero en el mercado de envolturas artificiales para productos cárnicos (…) nuestros productos estrella son el vino (segundo productor mundial) y el aceite (primer exportador del mundo) (…) En las cenas de Acción de Gracias americanas se cuelan los capones segovianos de Cascajares. Hasta Obama se hace traer el foie de Extremadura (…) la española Puleva inventó la primera leche enriquecida con calcio del mercado. Marcas internacionales como Zara o Mango son referentes mundiales de nuestro sector textil (…) una de cada cuatro novias en todo el mundo elige un traje diseñado en España por marcas como Pronovias. De la tecnología valenciana de Jeanology salió el láser para desteñir vaqueros que utilizan la mayoría de marcas (…) un pequeño taller de 14 metros cuadrados de los años ochenta en Andújar es hoy una planta de 1300 metros que fabrica el 50% de los estores que vende IKEA por todo el mundo (…) Una antena de comunicaciones colocada en el Curiosity fue fabricada en España. Y qué decir del acento español de grandes compañías como Telefónica, Repsol o Santander consolidadas internacionalmente.

In 1991, 56.2% of all clothes purchased in the United States were American-made. By 2012, it was down to 2.5%. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 1990 and 2012, the U.S. textile and garment industry lost 1.2 million jobs. That was more than 3/4s the sectors labor force, said it to Latin America and Asia. Once-vibrant industrial centers down the Eastern Seaboard and across the South faded into ghost towns, as factories sat empty and those who were laid off went on unemployment. In the United Kingdom in the 1980s, one million worked in the UK textile industry; now, only 100,000 do. The same went down across most of Western Europe. All of heroin textile jobs globally nearly doubled, from 34.2 million to 57.8 million.

Las poblaciones del antiguo San Miguel52, el sur de Santiago, nacieron como poblaciones obreras. Las historias de las familias recuerdan el tiempo en que trabajaban en las industrias textiles –Sumar, Yarur, Hirmas– o eran obreros del cuero y el calzado. Nunca se sabe si es el recuerdo de tiempos mejores o era una realidad. Pero todos se acuerdan de haber perdido esa relación industrial cuando se produjo el golpe y la política de des-industrialización de los años setenta y ochenta, la que es recordada dramáticamente. En la población San Gregorio hemos realizado numerosas entrevistas e historias de vida. Todos coinciden en esta terrible cronología. La señora Leontina recuerda que entonces salieron a la calle; a cuidar autos en el cine El Golf. De allí a las actividades semi prohibidas, un paso. La familia obrera se destruyó.53 Hay una memoria de un tiempo de enorme dignidad. Se recuerda a don Jorge Alessandri junto al presidente Eisenhower de los Estados Unidos, inaugurando la población, el trabajo en las industrias, un pasado de bienestar. Una enorme nostalgia de la sociedad industrial existe hasta el día de hoy en estos sectores de la ciudad. Lo que cantan Los Prisioneros es una realidad sentida ampliamente: “Les dijeron que no vuelvan más”. Y ahí comenzó una degradación de todas las formas de la vida cotidiana. Se deterioró la calidad del trabajo, quizá no necesariamente el ingreso. Se perdió la seguridad del trabajo industrial, la solidaridad de los sindicatos, el sentido de la acción colectiva. Se dañó profundamente la vida cotidiana. Las poblaciones, como la San Gregorio y tantas otras, se fueron llenando de violencia, de tráfico ilícito, de marginalidad. Nadie ha sacado las consecuencias del costo moral que significó en Chile la política de shock, del cierre de las industrias. A fines de los ochenta había quien creía que aún se podría volver al régimen industrial anterior. No fue así. Y eso se reflejará en la cultura y en

Aren’t fears of disappearing jobs something that people claim periodically, like with both the agricultural and industrial revolution, and it’s always wrong?” It’s true that agriculture went from 40 percent of the workforce in 1900 to 2 percent in 2017 and we nonetheless managed to both grow more food and create many wondrous new jobs during that time. It’s also true that service-sector jobs multiplied in many unforeseen ways and absorbed most of the workforce after the Industrial Revolution. People sounded the alarm of automation destroying jobs in the 19th century—the Luddites destroying textile mills in England being the most famous—as well as in the 1920s and the 1960s, and they’ve always been wildly off the mark. Betting against new jobs has been completely ill-founded at every point in the past. So why is this time different? Essentially, the technology in question is more diverse and being implemented more broadly over a larger number of economic sectors at a faster pace than during any previous time. The advent of big farms, tractors, factories, assembly lines, and personal computers, while each a very big deal for the labor market, were orders of magnitude less revolutionary than advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving vehicles, advanced robotics, smartphones, drones, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of things, genomics, digital currencies, and nanotechnology. These changes affect a multitude of industries that each employ millions of people. The speed, breadth, impact, and nature of the changes are considerably more dramatic than anything that has come before.