Chapter 1: What motivated the speaker to seek ethically made t-shirts?
The idea started out, I have a four-year-old and a one-year-old, but when I had my first baby, I remember she would just be like laying on my chest or in my arms or on my lap. And, you know, I used to buy like really kind of crappy fast fashion clothes. Like I just like grew up shopping at like the $5 store, which I loved. And I remember being like, oh, I really want to buy anything.
at least like good t-shirts so that her little face and her little mouth that she sleeps on me is like on something that I can feel good about her like laying on. So then I set out for like a year and a half to try to find a t-shirt that I could feel good about. A t-shirt that looks good, that feels good, that is good for the environment. And then ideally the last layer was like
Good labor practices.
Sarah Gonzalez usually covers economics. I mean, I don't cover fashion. She's a reporter and host of the NPR podcast Planet Money.
We're an economics podcast and we're like fun and narrative.
So Sarah found herself in a pickle that a lot of us might relate to, which is this eternal question. How do we buy clothing ethically? Is that even possible?
I mean, it's so hard to be a good shopper, you know, and then you have like children and they grow out of things and so you have to buy them more things. I'm like a bad consumer. Like, where should I buy this T-shirt that I can feel good about? And then I did it. an interview with a remarkable woman. Her name is Aisha Baron-Blatt. She's the CEO of this group called Remake.
Their whole thing is like, we want to like remake the fashion industry. I was asking her, like, you tell me, like, where do you shop? Like, you've dedicated your life to this. So like, what do you do?
You know, there are certain companies that I like very much, but for the most part, for the last decade, I'd say I've bought very little. Like you come see my closet and there's, you know, six classic pieces. I do a little rental, a little vintage. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
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Chapter 2: How does the speaker's experience relate to the challenges of ethical shopping?
But I had no idea what the garment industry in the United States actually looks like.
I remember being like, where are the garment factories? Like, where do you like? I've never seen one. I've never been like, oh, look, they're making clothes there. Like ever. I used to live in New York City. I never like stumbled upon these things in any real way. And most of them are like tiny, tiny operations.
Like 76% of our garment factories in the US have less than 10 workers because they're like so hidden. You can't even, you don't even know where they are. Like I went to some garment factories and I would show up and I would be like, this is like a house on a street with all the other houses. But technically it's a garment factory, but it just, you couldn't tell.
In New York, it's like some unit on top of a restaurant and They're so small that they're not... It's not like we make clothes here, you know? So they exist, but they're kind of like hidden. They're really, really difficult to find online. Like really... They're quite hidden.
But Sarah Gonzalez has pulled back the curtain on the U.S. garment industry for an episode of Planet Money that I think is one of the best pieces of fashion journalism I have ever heard. I couldn't not share it with you.
I started working on it, setting out to like find a T-shirt I can feel good about. And then all of a sudden, like the conversation was made in the USA, made in the USA. And then I was like, wait, I don't know if this is the future we actually want.
After the break.
Maria doesn't speak any English. Not a word, she says. But she does know some. Like sizes. She knows sizes. She knows label. Ticket, all words related to her job. Manager. Okay, the boss, you just call him mister. The boss is a girl, it's a missus.
Missus over here, missus over there, she says.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Aisha Baron-Blatt provide about the fashion industry?
She's originally from Puebla, Mexico. Puebla, camotera. Sweet potato city, she says. nodding her head and making a little fist to herself when she says it. Maria is only 73 years old, but she has the presence of both a much older, comforting grandma and somehow also like this easily delighted kid. She has those little grandma sandals on and a little white flower tucked behind her ear.
Whenever Maria sees a flower, she picks it up, puts it in her hair.
We've been doing this since you were a little girl.
It makes her happy. A little flower in her hair. Maria has been in the U.S. almost 30 years, and she has done the exact same job the entire time. She's a trimmer at a garment factory in Los Angeles. Half of what is left of the garment manufacturing industry in the U.S. is in Los Angeles. And when I ask Maria what a trimmer does in a U.S. garment factory, Maria reaches for my shirt.
She tucks her hand under the bottom of my shirt, at the hem, the back of her warm fingers, on my bare stomach, the way only a grandma can do. That was so cute. She taps all the places on my top where a piece of thread would be left behind when a hem or a seam or a stitch ends. The side of my stomach, at the side seam. My shoulder, where a sleeve was sewn on.
The back of my neck, where the tag was sewn on. And when she's tapping me like this, it feels like something my grandma's sister would do, actually. Like this blessing. And right now, when you touched me like this, it was like... And when I tell Maria, she looks at me like, I understand. Maria's job is to cut off all the leftover thread. That's what a trimmer does, all day, crouched over.
Just snip, snip, snip, snip, snipping loose threads. And as we're talking, Maria notices a little spot at the hem of my shirt where a tiny piece of thread was left over. Uh-huh. Like half a centimeter. Uh-huh. And she goes, I guess the trimmer working on this was in a rush. But then again, they're all in a rush. The shirt I'm wearing this day with Maria, made in Vietnam.
My pants, made in Bangladesh. My bra, made in China. But the clothes that Maria works on are made in the US, in Los Angeles, California. And a lot of people love the idea of making things like clothes in America. One of the Trump administration's goals is to bring manufacturing in general back to the U.S.
But what people might picture when they think of a made in America future might be different from the made in America we have now. When you start out as a garment worker, you often start out as a trimmer, like Maria. Then you might get trained on a sewing machine. But Maria never moved on to a machine. She likes being a trimmer. But really, she just likes having a job.
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Chapter 4: What is the reality of garment factories in the U.S.?
You do not get the clothes dirty. And many workers who get paid by the piece will do this. Their whole families will work on the clothes together. Now, sometimes when Maria gets a bundle of really time-consuming garments, she will ask for more pay. Again, she doesn't speak English, but she makes gestures to the boss, she says, and gets by just fine.
She'll be like, mister, come, come, look, look how much trimming this garment needs. He'll be like, okay, you want an extra cent? No, two cents, she'll say. And she's gotten it. But that would get her like an extra $10 for the day. Now, piece rate pay varies depending on what you're doing.
The trimming is considered the finishing touches before a garment gets ironed and sent out to a store or brand. The person on the iron in L.A. might get 50 cents per garment. It's more dangerous. The person who sewed on the sleeves, did the bottom hem, maybe 12 cents.
Well, actually, that's better. When I started an industry over 30 years ago, we laughed and called it a penny a pocket because that's what they were paid for every pocket they would put on.
In the U.S.?
In the U.S.
Lynn Bureti is the head of the Department of Design and Merchandising at Oklahoma State University. But back in the 90s, Lynn actually also helped figure out what garment workers working for U.S. brands would be paid. Like, she'd watch them on the assembly line, sewing on a pocket, sewing on a seam.
Say you've got an 18 inch seam that you have to make. They pick up the two pieces, put it together, put it through the machine, cut the thread at the end and lay it down. 18 inch seam takes X amount of seconds to make. I would keep track. of that cycle and write down the cycle, watching their movements, et cetera.
So you're standing there with a stopwatch, like, okay, she did that in 30 seconds.
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Chapter 5: How does piece rate pay impact garment workers?
This is as good as it gets? Well, in terms of people actually being paid.
Yeah. Basically, as good as it gets in terms of pay. Now, some countries like Canada, Japan, Belgium actually do pay garment workers more than the U.S. does. But generally, in countries that make most of our clothes, workers would make way, way less than $3.90 total to make a bra like this. Oh, pennies.
It could be 50 cents in other countries.
So why don't they do it somewhere else? Is it because they want to be a brand that says we use American labor? That's worth money. Absolutely. Do you think that your average consumer of this product thinks, oh, wait, that's what American labor is? It's like someone getting paid 18 cents to 30 cents to work on this?
No, absolutely not. I think we have the image of a well-run factory that's air-conditioned, where people get nice breaks and go home to their families at night. And it's just not. I've seen worse factories in America than I have seen overseas.
Most of the garment factories left in the U.S., over 76% of them, are small operations with fewer than 10 workers. You'd walk by some of these and never even know there was a garment factory there. In New York City, a factory could be on top of a restaurant in Little Italy. In Los Angeles, it could be on a residential street, looking like any other single-story house on the block.
There aren't that many factories or that many domestic garment workers. In 1990 there were like 900,000 apparel manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Today there are 82,000. The U.S. lost most of its garment industry in the 90s when brands and retailers started sourcing more and more products overseas and paying other countries to make more and more clothes. And when that happened, the U.S.
kind of stopped investing in the factories that were left, stopped innovating. So walking into some of these factories today can feel like going back in time.
It's tiny, subcontracted, overcrowded factories with these juky machines.
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Chapter 6: What are the working conditions like for garment workers in the U.S.?
makes a decent amount of that. And here's another big reason. Basically, all of the clothes for the US military have to, by law, under the very amendment, be made in the US. The fabric, the fiber, top to bottom, made in the USA. Because the US military doesn't ever want to have to rely on a particular country in case we ever, like, go to war with that country or something.
This is the part of the garment industry that the US government does prop up. And there's a perception, right, that made in America must mean better labor conditions maybe, better pay, good for the environment even. Why do you think that, Sarah? That's not true. That's absolutely not true.
Aisha's nonprofit does these reports where they basically grade brands on labor issues like pay and worker well-being and environmental issues like the raw materials brands use and where their clothes get discarded.
There's this perception that somehow if I'm paying more, or if it's a luxury item, then the workers are paid better. And, you know, time and time again, you know, there have been scandals with sweatshops in Italy, and there have been high-end brands, luxury brands. There's math out there, something like 20 cents for a $20 t-shirt, but the same holds true for a $120 t-shirt.
a $20 t-shirt, a $120 t-shirt, the workers likely got 20 cents to work on it either way. Aisha says you generally cannot buy your way into better wages for workers. There has been an effort in California where Maria and half of all U.S. garment workers are to raise the pay. But the thing about making clothes is it has historically gone somewhere else where you can pay workers less.
That's after the break. So we know that Maria gets paid by the piece. But here's how they add it up. Every day when Maria walks into work, she gets bundles of clothes that need trimming sorted by size. And Maria keeps track of the cut, the style, and the number of pieces in a notebook, and then figures out her total pay at the end of the week.
And the mister or missus will do the same accounting on their end. And sometimes their math might be five, six dollars short, and Maria will be like, no, no, no, check your math again. If you do your math right, you'll see that it's true. Maria does feel like she has to fight for every dollar she gets.
Working a regular, average day where the garments she's working on is not so easy and not so hard, Maria might do like 500 pieces at 15 cents a piece. So $75 a day. ¿Y te pagan en cash? Sí, claro, en cash. Working full time, she could make $375 a week, $1,500 a month. If Maria was making the minimum wage in California, though, she'd make $2,640 a month.
When you convert piece rate pay to hourly wages, it can add up to much less than the minimum wage. According to a Department of Labor survey of garment workers in Southern California, some workers made as little as $1.58 an hour. And in California, the way that Maria is getting paid by the piece is actually not legal. It's wage theft. And Maria knows it.
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