 "The limitation of 'Make in America'")
MAKING IT IN AMERICA: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (and How It Got That Way)
Author: Rachel Slade
Publisher: Pantheon
Pages: 352
Price: $28
Is it possible to buy American in an age of offshoring? And is that the right goal — for workers, consumers or the planet? The journalist Rachel Slade explores these questions in Making It in America, which takes as a case study one small clothing manufacturer in Maine.
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Slade follows Ben and Whitney Waxman, who in 2015 founded American Roots with the goal of not only manufacturing in the US, but also operating with an entirely domestic supply chain.
The company specialises in custom work wear: T-shirts, sweatshirts and a signature hoodie that sounds simply spectacular. (It has a six-panelled hood for superior fit and a zipper pull so chunky it can be fastened without removing your welding gloves.) Whitney, who studied anthropology, manages the factory while Ben, a former organiser, handles sales.
Slade argues that free trade policy is responsible for the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector. Five million American manufacturing jobs disappeared between 1994 and 2013, and garment manufacturing was one of the first industries to move offshore. Subsequent job growth has been concentrated in industries like retail and hospitality; these jobs are lower-paying and mostly not unionised. This drop in pay has been slightly offset, but not made up for, by the lower prices that are free trade’s most tangible benefit.
Free trade, Slade contends, has caused a massive upward transfer of wealth, and rendered the United States unable to make what we need.
The Waxmans are determined to run a unionised factory and pay a living wage. They hire stitchers from Maine’s growing community of refugees. American Roots employees get health coverage and three weeks of paid vacation, and Slade reports that the average salary at the company rose to $47,000 in 2022.
Her book benefits from extraordinary access, providing an up-close look at the challenges of manufacturing. The Waxmans’ lack of experience leads to errors — at one point, they are ripped off by a fabric supplier. They also over-hire, and have to lay off some of their workers. But hoodie by hoodie, the Waxmans bootstrap what appears to be a solid small business, closing $3.5 million in sales in 2022.
Slade makes digressions, delving into organising, immigration, textile manufacturing. There’s a chapter about the history of the hoodie — a perfect garment, a mature technology of American vernacular fashion gone worldwide. But always she returns to her thesis: “Whenever we buy stuff made abroad, we leave a lot of questions unanswered,” she writes.
Was someone exploited to make that thing? Did they earn a living wage? Did they have the freedom to leave the factory when they needed to? Did they have access to protections in the factory, like masks or helmets? Did they have a safe place to report sexual harassment? Did they get regular breaks? Were they expected to work reasonable hours? What happened when they got sick or their children fell ill? Was the factory building even safe?
But these are questions that should be asked of US factories, too. Throughout Making It in America, Slade applies a US-centric analysis to free trade, considering it in terms of its impacts on America’s labour market. She also seems to assume that buying American equates to buying ethically. But if the garment industry were to return to the US at scale, it would probably more closely resemble the industry we currently have than the Waxmans’ business.
Most US garment workers are paid not per hour but per sewing operation — a system known as piece-rate. Factories pay three cents for sewing in a “Made in USA” label, four for attaching a sleeve. There are about 45,000 workers employed in the industry’s centre, Los Angeles, and illegal pay and wage theft are rampant. A 2016 study found that the average LA garment worker is paid less than half of minimum wage; 60-to-70-hour weeks are standard.
One of the manufacturers that Slade mentions glowingly — an LA-based zipper manufacturer — is later revealed to not offer health insurance to its workers. There is an unexamined tension here between Slade’s open advocacy for the return of manufacturing jobs and the fact that these jobs often offer shockingly poor conditions and pay. Absent broader changes, a return to US manufacturing alone won’t improve wages and conditions for American workers.
Arguably, if that were the goal, our best chance would be organising a few Starbucks and Amazon warehouses, as well as passing universal single-payer health care and student loan reform. And perhaps, rather than relying on “Made in USA” as a heuristic for ethical manufacturing, we should devise a system of trade that ensures labour and environmental standards apply wherever goods are made.
Slade’s key insight, and possibly the strongest argument for reviving domestic manufacturing, is that it is how we innovate. It’s by confronting the limitations of the materials and the current processes that you put yourself in a position to come up with the breakthroughs that will define the future. It’s perhaps the best reason we have for making things.
The reviewer writes about culture
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