Big changes on the factory floor
ChronicleHerald.ca, Canada
Management, union officials working together to find ways to ensure garment plant’s survival
By ELLEN SIMON The Associated Press
NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — The two might seem as unlikely together as a hand-stitched double-breasted suit jacket with a pair of work pants: Anthony Sapienza, the son of a factory manager, and Warren Pepicelli, who grew up on the union side, pounding the pavement as a business agent in Boston, walking from one of the city’s 60 women’s garment factories to another.
But Sapienza, president of the Joseph Abboud suit factory, and Pepicelli, who runs its union, are working hand in glove. Union and management are collaborating to revamp timeworn garment-making methods in favour of manufacturing techniques pioneered at Toyota Motor Corp. Their goal: Survival in the face of cheaper foreign competitors.
The U.S. garment manufacturing industry has bled jobs for decades, as work moved first to cheaper labour in Mexico, then to Asia. As Chinese manufacturing becomes increasingly skilled and sophisticated, the few U.S. factories that remain are vulnerable, and their managers know it.
Sapienza and Pepicelli both have about 30 years in the business. Sapienza, who spent his boyhood Saturdays sweeping cuttings in his family’s menswear factory, then wrestling his brother in the pile of scraps, remembers when there were 40,000 U.S. workers making men’s clothing. Now there are 4,000, he said.
For Pepicelli, the days when he could stand on a street corner in Boston and look up at row after row of women sewing in second-floor factories are just a memory. Every one of those factories is closed.
“An industry can go away, it can leave this country,” said Pepicelli, international vice president of the union UNITE HERE. “It can become extinct.”
That’s what everyone at Abboud’s sprawling skylit brick factory, built as a cotton mill around the time of the Civil War, is working to avoid. And if anyone forgets what’s at stake, they need only drive down the street, where the Cliftex menswear mill that used to employ more than 2,000 workers sits, its windows boarded.
Abboud has hired the best workers from its failed neighbors, managers there say. The city lost 67 per cent of its manufacturing jobs during the 40 years ending in 2000, according to the Brookings Institute. For many of the factory’s workers, Sapienza said, “This is the one opportunity they have to continue to work.”
The garmentos
The push for change comes from Marty Staff, president and chief executive officer of JA Apparel Corp. Staff and private equity company J.W. Childs bought the company in 2004; the brand’s founder, Joseph Abboud, left in 2005.
Staff, a burly man with curly blond hair and Bono glasses who switches between two PDAs as he speaks, has worked in the garment business for more than three decades, including long stretches at Bloomingdale’s Inc., Polo Ralph Lauren Corp. and Calvin Klein, Inc.
He’s a storied garmento; one of the stories is that he once said, “In my next life, I’d like to come back as me.”
He loves having the factory. “The factory is really the heart of our company,” he said.
“If you said, ’Let’s create a half-million-square-foot facility in the U.S. and hire 600 skilled workers to make high-quality garments,’ you could never do it,” said Staff. “It would be like building the Holland Tunnel.”
Keeping Abboud’s suit manufacturing in the United States has advantages, such as reduced shipping time, he said. He also believes overseas workers can’t beat the quality and price of the suits Abboud produces in New Bedford, which sell in Nordstrom Inc. and Bloomingdale’s for US$700 to US$1,000.
Abboud says its sales are about US$400 million a year. While the company is doing fine, management says the U.S. factory has to improve constantly to justify the higher salaries its workers make compared to foreign competitors. The average wage in the factory is US$12 an hour, plus union benefits. That’s three or four times what workers in Mexico make, Sapienza said.
But if the workers in New Bedford could make suits faster, the advantages would be even greater. Then the company could restock a successful style at stores in season — it could get fresh winter suits to shoppers in late January, for instance, if a store had run out of a size or a colour. It could introduce the “fast fashions” that stores like H&M and Zara sell — edgier styles that arrive every month, then are swiftly replaced.
Finally, the company could make made-to-measure suits more quickly. The suits currently take 10 working days to manufacture; the goal is to make them in three.
To speed production and cement the factory’s edge over foreign workers, Staff, who spent about two years as acting CEO of Penthouse Brand Management, read up on Toyota, poring over the book The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production. He asked Sapienza, his team and the union to embrace Toyota principles, including “kaizen,” a Japanese word meaning continuous improvement.
The union agreed. Pepicelli said, “It’s an answer, but not a total answer.”
The real problem, he said, “is an unlevel playing field; the competition from overseas makes it very difficult to be efficient and competitive.”
The company is asking workers at the factory — half of whom speak only Portuguese or Spanish and many of whom never finished high school — to abandon the piecework method of making suits, in which every worker does only one task, and move to team-based work.
It’s also asking workers to speak up at kaizen meetings, voicing their opinions on how they can do their jobs better. It’s a big change at the factory, whose previous owners were strictly hierarchical.
“I can remember people coming to me and asking for permission to speak,” said Sapienza.
The change to teams
So far, there are only three teams, each with eight to 10 workers, at the 600-person factory. The company hopes to move one-third of its jacket production to teams by August and all trouser production to teams by September. That switch would be enough to keep up with seasonal reorders and custom suits, Sapienza said.
For now, most of the factory’s work is still done on the piecework system, which hasn’t changed since the 19th century. A worker will take a tied-up bundle of, say, 20 sleeves, untie them and perform the same single task on each sleeve, such as pressing the seam. Once she has completed her work on all the sleeves, she will re-bundle them, load them in a cart and roll them to the next worker, who will unbundle the sleeves, complete her one task on each sleeve, re-bundle them and roll them along.
Individuals are paid by the number of pieces they complete, with a guarantee they’ll make minimum wage, plus 25 cents an hour. “Make more, get paid more,” Sapienza said. Most do; hence the average wage of $12 an hour.
Piecework slows production. During the four weeks it takes to make a standard suit, only about 250 minutes of labour is put into the suit. Much of the rest of the time, its components are tied in bundles, sitting on a cart, waiting for the next worker to untie them and work on them.
In the factory’s new teams, it takes 12 days to make a suit. Team members are trained to be proficient at more than one task and are asked to do their jobs standing up, if possible, to add more speed. Workers sit close together and the carts that roll bundles of pieces from one worker to the next are gone. Once a worker finishes a piece, it moves to the next worker.
The average wage on the teams is still $12 an hour, plus benefits, and there are shared bonuses if the team beats its quota, or makes its quota faster. Individuals with additional skills, or those who have trained to do more than one job, are paid a higher wage. The hourly goals are laid out on a chart near the team. A green dot by an hour means the team has hit its goals, a red dot means it’s missed.
The oldest of the Abboud factory’s teams has a sign on its bulletin board summarizing team members’ reasons for changing. No. 1: “Could lose jobs to competition if we don’t make this change.”
Sapienza, a tall, courtly man in an elegant suit, is hopeful.
“It’s one thing to do it in 2014,” he said. “Are we going to be able to do it in 2014? In 2012?. . . In the final analysis, if Toyota can make a car in 13 hours, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to make a suit in a much reduced period of time.”
