Where have all the jobs gone? When I was growing up in the 1930s one of my best friends' mothers worked for the ILGWU. Today, few if any know what that acronym stands for (International Ladies Garment Workers Union). She was one of thousands that made New York City the capital of clothes making throughout the United States. How things have changed.
While my wife was doing her best to end the recession in a Columbia department store, I wandered through rack after rack of scores of varieties of women's clothing. You could have taken a geography lesson on that one section of one floor. China, as you might guess, was far and away No. 1, albeit not as much as she has been in the past based on my own observations. India has barreled to the second place followed closely by Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Thailand and the Philippines. Also included were garments from Jordan, Taiwan, Peru and Guatemala.
The Unites States you ask? Well, I did find four different manufacturers (up from my last review several months ago). However, they represented only about 5 percent of the total. And I think I was overly generous in assigning that percentage. The ILGWU? I think they are still around, but their numbers are gigantically down from the post World War II years. I guess it's a sign of the times. A vast majority of the most well known names in the clothing industry order virtually all their garments from the countries noted above.
Multiply this fact by scores of other industries in the USA doing the same, and you can see why the jobless rate is so high.
Howard K. Ottenstein, Baltimore