Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [529]
Crucial to this rapid expansion was a reorganization of the trade into three distinct but interdependent levels: a small elite of wholesale firms at the top, a large corps of subcontractors who supervised final production in the middle, and, at the bottom, an army of outworkers. Wholesale firms like P. L. Rogers, D. and J. Devlin, and Lewis and Hanford (the nation’s biggest) brought cloth straight from the mills to their own in-house tailors, who cut it to the desired pattern. These “cutters,” aristocrats of the trade, were among the city’s best-paid workers. The constituent parts of garments were then turned over to outworkers, men and women who worked in their own homes or shops sewing the pieces together into a final product. As one cutter could keep many outworkers busy, the ratio of employees was wildly skewed toward the latter. In 1854 Hanford’s had seventy-five insiders and four thousand outsiders; Brooks Brothers (the former custom tailors turned wholesalers) had seventy-eight inside, fifteen hundred outside.
In time, as the volume of business grew, more and more wholesalers subcontracted their finishing work to smaller manufacturers. Many were immigrant artisans who had made the transition from wage-worker to proprietor. It didn’t require much capital. A tailor might get a contract from a wholesaler or a larger shop, do his own cutting at home, and parcel out the sewing to outworkers, thus passing on the costs of space, light, fuel, and even needles and thread. Competition among subcontractors was fierce—vicious—and success depended on holding the wages of outworkers to an absolute minimum. (“If they were compelled to pay living wages for their work,” Horace Greeley observed, “they must stop it altogether.”) Even then, profit margins were slim, and the whole enterprise could easily collapse, tumbling a boss back down into the ranks of his workers.
Everything, in the end, came down to the workers, tens of thousands of them—male tailors and their families as well as unmarried seamstresses. Many of the men had fled Europe aiming to reestablish themselves as traditional artisans, only to discover that too many had come too late for that to be possible. Apprenticeship disappeared. Wages plummeted. The best and luckiest became contractors or cutters; most found themselves irredeemably proletarianized. By the 1850s piece rates in New York were so low that journeyman tailors couldn’t earn enough to stay alive unless they had families and became, in effect, foremen of their own family shops. They negotiated with employers, did the heaviest or most skilled work, and supervised the labor of their wives and children. Working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, they and their families together might take in ten dollars a week (compared to the twenty dollars an inside male cutter could earn).
Life was even more precarious for single women working as seamstresses, dressmakers, milliners, shirtmakers and collarmakers, embroiderers, tasselmakers, and artificial-flower makers. A woman’s wages reflected the assumption that she didn’t need to support herself but was merely supplementing the income of her husband. Single women and widows, frequently with children to support, made between fifty cents and two dollars