Garments, textiles vital to region in 20th century
Scranton Times-Tribune
BY DAVID FALCHEK STAFF WRITER
Raised in Luzerne County, Kenneth Wolensky saw the tail end of the anthracite region’s experience of the coal mines, garment industry and unionization.
The historian with the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission explored region’s garment industry more deeply in the 2002 book “Fighting for the Union Label: The Women’s Garment Industry and the ILGWU in Pennsylvania†which he wrote with his brother Robert and niece Nicole Wolensky
BusinessWeekly spoke with Mr. Wolensky recently about the garment and textile industry’s dominance, decline and survival in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Q: How important was the garment/textile industry to the region in the 20th century?
A: It was absolutely vital. The coal industry peaked in 1917, and was in a tailspin since then. Tens of thousands of coal miners were unemployed or underemployed. So garment and textile companies moved into the region from places like the New York City garment district. As coal declined, the garment industry became more important than even coal. It allowed people to support their families, mostly because wives and daughters and sometimes men, worked there.
Q: How did this region become a garment industry center?
A: The majority of factories migrated from the garment districts to the region because of the absence of organized labor, lower wages, reasonable proximity to New York City, and large number of people desperate for work.
Every small town had at least one garment factory In the anthracite region as a whole, there were several hundred. From 1930 through the 1950s, the area became the key garment producing area in the United States. At its peak employment in the 1960s, 27,700 people worked in the garment and textile industry. Look at Pittston alone. In the 1940s and 50s, Pittston had more than 60 garment factories. Today, there is not one.
Q: Do you see parallels between the industry’s movement to the Far East in recent years, and the movement from New York and New Jersey to Northeastern Pennsylvania generations ago?
A: Absolutely. The migration is not only similar, it is identical: low wages, no unions, and large numbers of desperate people. That’s the formula and the impetus for the industry to come to Northeastern Pennsylvania, then to move to the American South in the 1960s and 70s, then to Guatemala, Honduras, Vietnam, the Far East, and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 90s. Many of these places have no employee protections, no unemployment compensation, few, if any labor laws.
Q: What were conditions like in Northeastern Pennsylvania garment factories?
A: Working conditions were not very good. Elizabeth Lynett, a daughter of the publisher of the Scranton Times, went undercover in the 1930s as a woman seeking employment and worked in several factories. The result was series of editorials exposing the conditions – long hours, employers who didn’t pay overtime, people expected to work on Saturdays and Sundays, girls under the age of 16 working. She named names.
The Scranton Chamber of Commerce didn’t want these practices known and they were very upset at the newspaper and the Lynett family. The state was doing its own investigation in the 30s, but the Lynett pieces, very much in the muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair, spread awareness and hastened unionization, which helped improve conditions.
Q: The former Klots Throwing, Alperin Inc., and Sauquoit Silk continue successfully today as Gentex, Alperin and Noble Biomaterials. To what do you attribute these pockets of survival?
A: They found an area of the market they could provide products to. The other companies, let’s say, made women’s dresses on a large scale for JC Penney and Sears. Production of large quantities of a common product is easily exportable — so those dresses are made in Vietnam now. Alperin found a niche catering to the U.S. Postal Service; the Vietnam company can’t.
Q: How long will the remnants of the textile industry remain?
A: Generally, the garment and textile industry is an overseas industry that will always chase the least expensive labor. Garment employment in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area has gone from a peak of 27,600 in the 1968s, to 1,300 in 1999.
You have niche products like helmets, body armor, that will hold out longer. Those that hold on will likely remain very small. The clothing you and I buy — shirts, suits, ties — the vast majority will continue to come from overseas.
Contact the writer: dfalchek@timesshamrock.com
