Since the mid-1800s garment work in New York City has been associated withimmigration. Immigrants, from Eastern Europeans to today’s Asians,have alwaysbeen in the industry. In the mid-1990s, while doing fieldwork in the Chinesegarment shops, I discovered, to my surprise, that the Chinese were not the onlyones left in this industry. Korean immigrants operated a sector almost as large.Although the Chinese hired unionized, immigrant coethnic women, the Kore-ans did not—they hired mostly undocumented Mexican and Ecuadorian menand women.The two sectors are structured very differently,not only in terms ofwho is working but in terms of pay and even in terms of how the work floor isorganized. However, these two sectors coexist in the very competitive NewYork City environment. How can both sectors be viable?

In this book I examine the role that garment work has played in these con-temporary immigrants’ lives. In particular, I consider the relationships betweenthe owners and workers and ask when ethnic relationships are helpful andwhen they are not and how immigration status and gender condition workers’lives. By examining the processes that Mexican, Ecuadorian, and Chinese im-migrants use to get jobs, I explore the tensions between coethnic obligationand economic necessity and try to understand how they result in coethnic ex-ploitation or cooperation.Gender and immigration are important factors in thework opportunities that the Chinese employers and workers have. In turn, theiropportunities are very different from those available to Korean employers andtheir Mexican and Ecuadorian workers.

For most immigrants work is central to survival in the United States; thusfew would envision emigrating unless they were aware of work opportunities.Work is not just a means to earn money to survive: it plays a large role in the so-

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cietal status of Chinese, Koreans, Mexicans, and Ecuadorians. Many intermedi-ary factors determine how and where immigrants get jobs. Immigration statusand the long-term goals of the individuals (to become U.S. citizens or to returnto their home country) affect the kinds of jobs that they strive for and are will-ing to take.Wages, work hours, and benefits are important considerations if anindividual has family and children in the United States. Given a choice, immi-grants favor jobs that complement their household roles as parents, providers, orsupporters of relatives overseas. Only in this context should we examine howethnicity and coethnic ties matter.These bonds can be used to advance workprospects—that is, to gain access to jobs and higher wages.They can be positivewhen members reap benefits from ethnic ties.The ties can also be constrainingwhen they are used to limit access to jobs or other economic opportunities.

The differences between the sectors suggest that the employment marketdoes not operate solely on the basis of free market assumptions—that is, thatimmigrants will work wherever they can get the highest wages.These immi-grants mostly end up in the narrowest settings, which suggests that a numberof forces are channeling these immigrants into the garment industry.Are theseforces connected to ethnicity and ethnic bonds? How important are structuralfactors, including route of emigration, neighborhoods, or the way the industryis organized? And to what degree does gender role dictate where an immi-grant works? What I found was that immigration status, ethnicity, and genderare intertwined and cannot be totally disaggregated. Examining immigrationstatus and gender provides insight into the specific mechanisms and conditionsthat alternately turn ethnic ties into resources or barriers in the pursuit ofemployment.

Why Garment Workers?

Garment workers and garment work have always intrigued me. I often won-dered why the clothing manufacturing process has remained the same for morethan one hundred years. I am the daughter of a former garment worker, and thefactories that I remember visiting as a young child looked very similar to theones I visited for this study.While I was doing my research, most of my auntswere still working in factories in Chinatown.They all worked for the Chinese,and the majority of their own coworkers were also Chinese. Chinatownseemed to be filled with coethnic enterprises that brought money and jobs intothe community. Garment work was only one of these enterprises.Although noone would dispute the benefits of the jobs and money that the garment indus-try provides for the community, many workers wished that their employers

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were white and not coethnic Chinese. Some felt that they were being ex-ploited.Others thought that conditions might be better uptown in the factoriesowned by the older Jewish and Italian employers. I wondered why such a sharpgendered division of labor exists among the Chinese, with the majority of thewomen working in the garment industry and most of the men working inrestaurants. I realized that the majority of studies were written with data col-lected only from the employers and that Chinese workers might have some-thing very different to say.

While doing fieldwork with the Chinese, I discovered that Korean im-migrants also worked in the garment sewing shops, not as workers but asemployers. They hired undocumented Ecuadorians and Mexicans, both menand women. I initially thought that these two ethnic groups—Chinese andHispanics1—working in the garment industry were more similar, in general,than different, and it turned out that my data supports this conclusion. Coeth-nicity may have little to do with how work is organized; in fact, how people gethired, trained, and paid may be a result of the route of emigration taken by theworker, the role that the worker plays in the family, the neighborhood wherethe factories are located, and the structural conditions in the industry.

For example, I found that some aspects of the Chinese sector, like lowwages, could be overlooked and dismissed as industry standards, while an infor-mal training program could be overidealized into a version of coethnic har-mony and benefit.How do we know this if we do not compare this to the non-coethnic sector? This study is not meant to discount the advantages that accruefrom coethnic relationships, but potential disadvantages should also be ana-lyzed. Thus I needed to examine exactly when these coethnic resources areused and why, how they differ from resources in noncoethnic relationships,what kind of benefits can be derived from them, how those benefits differamong the minority groups, and how they lead to different outcomes amongthe different minority groups.

Immigration Status, Gender, and Ethnicity

Immigrants often face barriers to full inclusion in the economic activities of thehost society.They often lack access to network ties that are necessary to succeed

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1. In this book I use the terms Hispanic and Latino interchangeably, following the guidelines issued bythe Office of Management and Budget (OMB), dated October 30, 1997, which was applied to the2000 U.S. Census.

in certain kinds of activities. Licensing requirements often prevent immigrantsfrom entering professional or internal labor markets. Moreover, immigrants’skills may not be the skills that employers in the host society seek.The immi-grant work sector may exhibit many features of the larger economy. But an im-migrant’s family may not resemble the families of citizens. Immigrant familiesmay include both documented and undocumented residents in the UnitedStates, as well as relatives still in the home country. Legal circumstances oftenconstrain their relationships and their ability to assist each other. I also examineworker-employer relationships, the workers’ relationships with work organiza-tions, and how ethnicity relates to these two factors.

I also examine gender differences, the supply of workers, training, and theorganization of the shop floor. The process of immigration and resettlementfunnels immigrants into different jobs, which sometimes redefine gender roles.Immigration status affects the workers’ lives and the degree of family supportthat they need or acquire here in New York City. In particular, many emigrantsmust decide whether to bring their children or leave them in their home coun-try. These factors affect men and women differently, including how they orga-nize their work lives.

Hispanic men and women with few family responsibilities here in NewYork City have more freedom from their usual gender roles, if those roles in-volve being a caretaker or a homemaker. Because they often are here illegally,they leave their children in their home country.The absence of dependents al-lows them to pursue jobs that they might not take otherwise. Men andwomen can both take on the role of economic breadwinner and take what-ever jobs are available in the garment industry. In this particular case, illegalimmigration places Hispanic men and women in roles that are less genderedthan usual in their society (at least temporarily), until they have to care forchildren here in New York City. Hispanic men find employment in the Ko-rean sector of the garment as easily as Hispanic women do. Chinese men andwomen tend to emigrate with their children and bring with them their tradi-tional gender roles.The Chinese sector of the garment industry is dominatedby women.

Work, which includes hiring, training, pay schedules, and the organizationof day-to-day production, is organized to give the owners control over theirworkers.This includes control of the workers’ use of their own social contacts.Chinese employers encourage workers to recruit others, especially friends andkin. Employers treat their workers paternalistically. Korean employers tend toeschew nepotism among their employees. The different patterns of coethnicsocial relations in each sector offer both advantages or disadvantages to theworkers.

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By comparing these two immigrant populations in the garment industry, Ihope to highlight how immigrants can or cannot influence the work situationsinto which they are channeled. But focusing on how social networks lead toemployment downplays the cultural explanations of why immigrant womenenter the garment industry. I hope to illuminate how historic, economic, andsocial contexts influence women to take jobs in the garment industry.

The Study

I chose to do a comparative study in order to get a closer look at how immi-gration status, ethnicity, and gender are interrelated. I used ethnographic field-work, consisting of observations and interviews, to explore two sectors of theNew York City garment industry—Korean factory owners whose workforce isdominated by Mexican and Ecuadorians, and Chinese factory owners, whohire Chinese almost exclusively. I draw data from almost three years of field-work, in 1994 to 1996 and 1999 to 2000.

My fieldwork included observing four garment shops, two owned by Chi-nese and two owned by Koreans. I used these observations to get a sense of thedaily lives of the workers and owners.The Chinese shops were unionized andlocated in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown; the Korean-owned shops were notunionized and were located in the West 30s and 40s in midtown Manhattan. Iinterviewed fifteen Chinese and fifteen Korean owners about their perspectiveson hiring, work, and ethnicity. I found these thirty owners in a variety of ways,including seeking referrals from the shops where I observed and from the Chi-nese and Korean business associations.

I interviewed 112 workers—57 Chinese (2 men and 55 women), and 55Hispanics (19 men and 36 women) of whom 27 were Mexican and 24 wereEcuadorian. The rest were women from Central America or the DominicanRepublic. I found most of the workers in union-sponsored English-as-a-Second-Language classes, at the Garment Workers’ Justice Center or at the Gar-ment Industry Development Corporation.The latter, established in 1984, is aconsortium of labor, business, and government groups that offer an array of ser-vices to maintain the competitiveness of local apparel manufacturers and con-tractors and to increase workers’ skills (Bowles 2000).

In addition to learning about the workers and owners, I tried to understandthe background and history of the garment industry. I interviewed union offi-cials, the leaders of the Chinese and Korean contractor associations, officialsfrom the New York State Department of Labor’s Apparel Industry Task Force,and former garment workers.

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Organization of the Book

In the first chapter I review the history of the New York City garment industry.In chapter 2, I review the literature on ethnic businesses in the United States. Idiscuss emigration and immigration strategies used by the Chinese,Korean, andHispanic immigrants in chapter 3, where I also introduce how gender and chil-dren affect emigration and immigrant work roles. Chapter 4 is about the peo-ple in the garment industry. In chapter 5, I discuss how the employers choosetheir workers. In chapter 6, I discuss the assets and liabilities associated with eth-nic resources, in terms of getting a job and getting paid, and I analyze the orga-nization of the workforce in relation to how workers are hired in chapter 7. Inchapter 8, I discuss the significance of immigrant status, gender, and ethnic re-sources in relation to work. And in the epilogue I briefly discuss the status ofthe garment industry in 2004.2

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2. “Sewing Woman” is also the name of an interesting documentary made by Arthur Dong in1982. It is based on oral histories of his mother who was an immigrant garment worker in SanFrancisco.