“On the Auction Block: The Garment Industry and the Deindustrialization of New York City”

This article explores the roots of deindustrialization in one of New York City’s most important industries, the manufacture of clothing. Capital flight, in the form of “runaway shops,” began as early as the teens, when the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILG) established itself through a series of key battles. The handmaiden to runaway shops was the reemergence of contracting, whereby the assembly of garments was disaggregated in terms of time, space, and legal identity. I trace efforts to combat these dynamics through their culmination in what I call the “New Deal settlement,” a stabilization of the industry across what contemporary analysts called the “New York Production Area.” This settlement, I argue, was at once geographical, political, cultural, and economic. As soon as the New Deal settlement emerged, manufacturers began working to collapse it, dispersing garment work to places like northeastern Pennsylvania, where manufacturers enlisted the wives and daughters of unemployed anthracite miners to sew their garments. Factory owners, sometimes linked to organized crime, sought to establish a new regulating capital rooted in relationships of domination, protected by authoritarian local governments. This account offers an alternative emphasis to that of Robert Fitch, whose influential account emphasized “a conscious policy” to deindustrialize the city, overseen by the real estate industry. Instead, I show how deindustrialization was rooted in significant ways in the dynamics of competition themselves, shaped at each stage by particular social relationships, state policy, and world politics.