Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)

by Rachel Slade

Historically, the United Steelworkers owed a lot to the needleworkers. While Andrew Carnegie was hiring the notorious Pinkerton private detective and security company to crush steelworkers’ attempts to organize, a group of young men and women, many of them immigrants from Eastern Europe, were establishing one of America’s first unions, the ILGWU. Before they unionized, America’s needleworkers spent long hours in packed, poorly ventilated spaces (tuberculosis was a constant scourge) and sometimes had to pay for their own machines, thread, and needles. If they missed a shift due to illness or a sick child, they could lose their job or, at the very least, their week’s pay. Adding insult to injury, they were often cheated—bosses would skim their pay for tiny infractions. Sometimes at the end of the week, bosses would refuse to pay stitchers altogether, claiming poor workmanship or failure to meet impossible quotas set by the company.