Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [885]
To another set of German Jews—merchants and manufacturers—the new immigrants seemed less a burden to uplift than a czar-sent opportunity. German Jews had come a long way from the secondhand shops of Baxter and Chatham Street: they now owned 80 percent of all retail and 90 percent of all wholesale clothing firms in the city. To these men, and the garment manufacturers who supplied their wares, the Eastern Europeans constituted a phenomenal supply of cheap labor. Some uptown philanthropies, like the United Hebrew Charities (UHC), stayed in close contact with leading manufacturers and actually funneled greenhorns into the garment business. The UHC gave quick and limited training to new arrivals, steered them to the shops, and on occasion deployed them to break strikes.
There was little need for coercion, however. Unskilled immigrants were well aware that the road to survival led literally to the garment district. Once past customs, most newcomers walked from the Battery up Broadway, turned right up Park Row at the General Post Office, and continued straight ahead along East Broadway, until they arrived at its conjuncture with Canal and Essex streets, a spot later known as Seward Square. Settling near there left them perfectly positioned to find work, for Canal Street was the center of the wholesale trade and Grand Street, two blocks north, was the axis of retailing.
In the 1880s New York’s textile trades were undergoing yet another transition, which the Eastern Europeans spurred. In the mid-nineteenth century, men’s clothing production had shifted from custom tailoring to ready-to-wear. In the 1880s it was women’s wear’s turn. The breakthrough came in cloakmaking; in the 1890s shirtwaist, skirt, and dress manufacturing followed suit. The number of women’s clothing establishments ballooned from 230 in 1880 to 3,429 twenty years later, while men’s shops continued their expansion, rising from 736 to 2,716 in the same period.
Production of both men’s and women’s clothing involved increasing mechanization and microdivision of labor. Before the Civil War, merchant-manufacturers had parceled out handcut fabric to skilled German and Irish craftsmen who, with the aid of their families, manually assembled the finished goods at home. Now German-Jewish manufacturers used the new rotary cutting machine (1874) to slice up materials in great quantities. Some finished up the garments in their own factories, employing young unmarried women (only 2 percent of Jewish wives worked outside their homes). But rents were high and the business seasonal, so ninety-seven out of a hundred cloak and suit houses turned cloth bundles over to German-Jewish or, increasingly, Russian-Jewish contractors, for transformation into ready-to-wear garments at a negotiated price.
A contractor then set up a workspace in a rented loft or his own tenement apartment. He rented or bought sewing machines—fifty to a hundred dollars would buy a few used Singers—or required employees to bring their own. Finally he supervised, and usually worked alongside, teams of eight to twenty semiskilled workers, ideally just off the boat. Labor in these “sweatshops” was broken down into thirty or more tasks, with machine work done by operators and needlework, basting, finishing, felling, and pressing reserved for the less skilled.
By 1895 there were roughly six thousand sweatshops in New York City and nine hundred in Brooklyn, employing perhaps eighty thousand workers. Given such fierce competition, few contractors did well. Each had to underbid the other, forcing all to operate so close to the margin that a slack season