The economic and social consequences of international trade agreements have become a major area of inquiry in development studies in recent years. As evidenced by the energetic protests surrounding the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 1999 and the controversy about China’s admission to the WTO, such agreements have also become a focus of political conflict in both the developed and developing countries. At issue are questions of job gains and job losses in different regions, prices paid by consumers, acceptable standards for wages and working conditions in transnational manufacturing industries, and the quality of the...

The apparel industry is one of the oldest and largest export industries in the world, with global trade and production networks that connect firms and workers in countries at all levels of economic development. This chapter examines the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as one of the most recent and significant developments to affect patterns of international trade and production in the apparel and textile industries. Trade policies are changing the institutional environment in which firms in this industry operate, and companies are responding to these changes with new strategies designed to increase their profitability and...

This chapter analyses how the structure of the New York garment industry has evolved under the impact of globalization. The focus is the industry’s main industrial segment, the highly fashion-oriented women’s wear industry, and the subcontracting networks through which production is organized in this segment. Globalization is here associated with two major trends: (1) the development of international subcontracting networks that link garment firms in New York City to foreign producers located in a variety of countries; and (2) the entry of Asian and Hispanic immigrants, which has contributed to a significant diversification of the social and ethnic composition of...

Since the 1950s the Southern California apparel industry has defined a look that has evolved into a lexicon of cutting-edge contemporary casual wear, primarily for women and girls. This includes a strong emerging niche of active wear: men’s and women’s fashions geared to a variety of outdoor and indoor activities from snowboarding to skateboarding. Los Angeles County is the largest apparel production center in the United States. Its garment-manufacturing base has continued to grow, in terms of both employment and company startups, while most other U.S. garment production centers have experienced steady, pronounced declines. The distinctive demands of the industry—...

Starting in the late 1970s, investigative journalists noticed what they understood as the reemergence of extreme exploitation of laborers in the domestic United States apparel industry (e.g., Buck 1979). Academic studies of the issue began to appear in the early 1980s (Ross and Trachte 1983). But two challenges confront the idea that sweatshops are reemerging. One challenge contends that, like the poor, whom “always ye have with you” (John 12:8), sweatshops were always with us, never really going away (Proper 1997a; Alman 1997; Ross 1997). At the other extreme, one of the most knowledgeable of all sociologists studying the apparel...

Global and flexible production have had a devastating impact on U.S. garment workers and on the once-powerful U.S. garment industry unions. The apparel industry has lost thousands of jobs since its peak in 1973, and every month brings reports of new job losses. Wages have stagnated or fallen, and sweatshops have returned to U.S. cities. For a time, especially from the New Deal through the 1960s, as a product of government oversight and strong unions, sweatshops more or less disappeared from U.S. garment production. But now they have returned, as workers slave long hours for piece rate (i.e., payment by...

In this chapter I describe the restructuring and job loss in the garment industry of El Paso, Texas, that has accompanied trade liberalization between the United States and Mexico since the late 1980s. As a small city whose “Old West” economy has traditionally revolved around the “four C’s—copper, cattle, cotton, and climate” (Mangan 1980, 115), El Paso may seem an unlikely subject for the study of trade regulations and the globalization of the apparel industry. In 1993, on the eve of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, El Paso’s civilian labor force numbered 278,500, of whom...

This chapter describes the organization of garment production in the border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad (Cd.) Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. As is widely acknowledged, El Paso has occupied a unique position in the U.S. garment industry due to, among other things, the dominance of jeans production in the city’s apparel sector (McIntyre 1955; van Dooren and van der Waerden 1997; Chapter 7 in this book). The specialization in standardized garments has, since the mid-1990s, created great difficulties for the “Jeans Capital of the World” because of the vulnerability of these types of products to international price competition. However,...

Since the mid-1980s, Mexico’s economy has developed in a context that is substantially different from its former import-substitution industrialization model.¹ The opening of the economy to international competition has modified the modes of conduct of both the government and private firms, as well as their mutual relations. This change has been important not only for Mexico but also for its nearest and most important neighbor, the United States, which upon the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) formalized its status as Mexico’s most important trade partner.

Mexico’s unilateral trade opening preceding NAFTA produced macroeconomic imbalances and social...

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has dramatically increased the export dynamism of the Mexican apparel industry. The sheer increase in the country’s clothing exports to the United States, from $1.6 billion in 1994 to almost $6.5 billion in 1998, is impressive evidence of this claim. NAFTA has also promoted the consolidation of apparel export-production centers. This chapter concentrates on one of these production centers, the Torreón region, which has been called the new blue jeans capital of the world.

Torreón is a dynamic industrial cluster of five hundred thousand people located in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila,...

The garment industry is being hailed as the outstanding success of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), at least from the Mexican point of view. Garment exports to the United States have expanded from less than $500 million in 1991 to $7.4 billion in 2001. Moreover, since 1994, when the agreement actually went into effect, that rate has continued to increase as more and more producers move facilities from other parts of North America and the Caribbean Basin to Mexico. But NAFTA is the culmination of the process of opening the Mexican economy to trade, a process that began...

Knitwear producers in small towns in Mexico have recently begun exporting to the United States as well as to Latin American markets. The most significant challenge they face is the complexity of dealing with foreign clients and not a lack of overall competitiveness, as has been suggested on the basis of research carried out in the 1980s (Wilson 1993, 79). In recent years it has become clear that large Mexican manufacturers have significant export potential, but so far success in the export market has eluded small companies (El financiero1996). Furthermore, the large exporting companies appear to have few linkages...

Since the beginning of its opening to international trade in 1986, the Mexican economy has undergone a series of transformations. Some of these arose as a consequence of the continuation of the financial crisis that erupted in 1982. Others were the result of Mexico’s new relationship to the world economy in general and with the United States and Canada in particular. Mexico’s reinsertion into the world economy called into question the patterns of production, distribution, and service provision that prevailed during its import-substitution period. For this reason many entrepreneurs, some with experience in the international market and others who were...

In a world of over two hundred countries, it can be argued that only about 10 or 15 percent of them—basically the members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—can be considered to have “made it” in terms of growth and development. They have done so in the sense that they have enjoyed a sustained economic growth over many decades, if not centuries, that has allowed them to reach a significant level of per capita income; the level may be set at U.S.$20,000 a year (Mortimore 1997). Figure 14.1 captures this notion in terms of the...

Global and regional changes brought on by the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and more recently the United States–Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA) have had mixed repercussions for the export-oriented industries located overwhelmingly in the export-processing zones (EPZs) of the Caribbean and Central America. This chapter focuses on the Dominican Republic, since that country not only has the largest number of EPZs in the region but also is considered a success in terms of the number of plants drawn to its zones and the number of jobs generated therein (particularly in the garment...

The various contributions to this book have documented how NAFTA-inspired firm strategies are changing the geography of apparel production in North America. The authors show in myriad ways how companies at different positions along the apparel commodity chain are responding to the new institutional and regulatory environment that NAFTA creates. By making it easier for U.S. companies to take advantage of Mexico as a nearby low-cost site for export-oriented apparel production, NAFTA is deepening the regional division of labor within North America, and this process has consequences for firms and workers in each of the signatory countries. In the introduction...