Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Labels provide current events lesson

By Carl Heintze

Lately I've taken up a new hobby: reading the labels in my clothes. You know, those little labels sewn into the collar or a sleeve somewhere. Oh, I know idle hands (and minds) are the devil's workshop. I ought to be doing something more worthwhile with my time; I have too much time on my hands, and so forth.

But bear with me. I have a purpose in mind and a moral to relate. Because it's my contention that you can learn a lot about the current state of the world by looking at the labels in your clothes.

Check one sometime. The front side is washing instructions. Sometimes it's in English and Spanish, sometimes it's in English and French. I'm not sure why this is so, but I assume it's where the maker expected to market the garment--the United States and Canada for the French-English version, or maybe the Northeastern U.S. The English-Spanish label is pretty obvious: California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Usually, the washing side of the label is pretty much the same: Gentle cycle, no bleach, tumble dry, although once in a while it says dry clean.

That part's not what interests me, though. It's the flip side, the part that tells where the garment was made.

It used to be the label said "Made in Korea," or maybe Japan. Then, as conditions improved in Japan and Korea and wages there rose, there came the period of Chinese labeling. Everything seemed to be made in China.

I once bought an Australian bush hat--in Australia--only to find it, too, was made in China.

Even the Australians seem not to have been in the garment business, though you'd think they might manufacture bush hats. As with us, though, Australian clothing manufacture has gone overseas.

Lately, labels have begun to appear from places beyond China. I've got a sweatshirt that was manufactured in Bangladesh, a shirt or two from Malaysia, one from India and a pair of pants "assembled in Mexico."

I'm not sure what that means, but I think it's intended to tell you the pieces were cut somewhere in the United States, sewn together south of the border and then shipped back here. It's cheaper to do it that way than to carry out the whole process in the United States.

The one that really baffled me, though, was a pair of pants from Qatar. I'd barely heard of Qatar. I knew it was somewhere in the Middle East, but where?

I got so intrigued I looked it up in an atlas. Qatar is a tiny place on the Persian Gulf across from Iran, one of the Arab Emirates. It's home to not more than 50,000 people, about half of whom are native Qatarians. The average per capita income is supposed to be $17,500, which would seem to me to be a modest sum for a country on the Persian Gulf.

I thought every state there was filled with wealthy sheiks and princes. But apparently some residents of Qatar have to sew for a living.

So not everyone in Qatar is oil-rich, or rich, period. Some, in fact, seem to be poor enough to be employed as pants makers. But who?

There is one clue in the atlas entry. Qatar has been home to a lot of refugees from Palestine. Maybe they're the ones who sew pants. Because sewing clothing is not a job to which many aspire.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, sewing clothing in the United States gave rise to so-called sweatshops, where immigrant women, many of them Jews from Eastern Europe, worked long hours hunched over sewing machines. They were awful places to work, a fact highlighted by a terrible fire in which a lot of them were burned to death.

Partly because of this and partly because of the rise of labor unions, sweatshops brought about the formation of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

That ended the sweatshops, but it also increased the wages of seamstresses. That led clothing manufacturers to move, first to the southern United States (remember Norma Rae) and finally overseas.

It's a sad fact that much of the clothing we wear with strange labels like Bangladesh and Qatar is sewn in new sweatshops. It's cheaper to send material abroad, have it cut and sewn there and then return it home for sale than it is to make it in the United States.

Nobody here wants to be a seamstress anymore. Who can blame them? Sitting in front a sewing machine staring at a needle all day is no fun.

I'm not sure if this means we ought to feel guilty when we put on our jeans in the morning or not. It does seem to indicate we ought to be appreciative of those out-of-sight, out-of-mind women (and sometimes children) who are making the clothes we wear.

So I urge you to check the labels in your clothes before you put them on, or maybe even before you buy them. It should give you a sense of how small the world is becoming and how dependent we are upon one another for life. And of that nameless poor person somewhere out there in Qatar or Bangladesh who helps you put on your pants every morning.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.