A coat of many colors : immigration, globalism, and reform in the New York City garment industry / edited by Daniel Soyer.

Format:

• Book

Contributor:

• Soyer, Daniel.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Clothing trade--New York (State)--New York--History.
• Clothing workers--New York (State)--New York--History.
• Immigrants--New York (State)--New York--History.
• Immigrants.
• History.
• Clothing workers.
• Clothing trade.
• New York (State)--New York.

Physical Description:

xii, 284 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2005.

Summary:

• For more than a century and a half-from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth-the garment industry was the largest manufacturing sector in New York City. New York made more clothes than anywhere else, and for generations the garment industry employed more New Yorkers than any other. It has been central to the city's history, culture, and identity. Today, although no longer the big heart of industrial New York, the needle trades are still an important part of the city's economy-especially for the new waves of immigrants who cut, sew, and assemble clothing in shops around the five boroughs.
• In this valuable book, historians, sociologists, and economists explore the rise and fall of the garment industry and its impact on New York and its people-also as part of a larger global process of economic change.
• Essays in Part One trace the rise of the garment industry in New York, from the creation of a Manhattan garment district employing immigrant labor from tenements nearby, to the spread of Chinese-owned shops in cheaper, outlying neighborhoods. The tumultuous history of labor is the focus of Part Two, in chapters on contractors and labor militants and on the experiences of Italian, Chinese, Jewish, Dominican, and other ethnic workers. Finally, the book looks ahead to such global issues as fair labor, social responsibility, and the political economy of the offshore garment industry.
• As a comprehensive portrait of New York's signature industry, A Coat of Many Colors also offers valuable perspectives on the shifts that affect all cities and economies struggling with global transformations.

Contents:

• From downtown tenements to midtown lofts: the shifting geography of an urban industry / Nancy L. Green
• The globalization of New York's garment industry / Florence Palpacuer
• The geographical movement of Chinese garment shops: a late twentieth century tale of the New York garment industry / Xiaolan Bao
• Cockroach capitalists: Jewish contractors at the turn of the twentieth century / Daniel Soyer
• Tailors and troublemakers: Jewish militancy in the New York garment industry, 1889-1910 / Hadassa Kosak
• Culture of work: Italian immigrant women homeworkers in the New York City garment industry, 1890-1914 / Nancy C. Carnevale
• On Dominicans in New York City's garment industry / Ramona Hernández
• Expanding spheres: men and women in the late twentieth-century garment industry / Margaret M. Chin
• "Social responsibility on a global level": the National Consumers League, fair labor, and worker rights at century's end / Eileen Boris.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [235]-271) and index.

ISBN:

• 0823224864
• 0823224872

OCLC:

58451762