ABSTRACT
The garment industry has always attracted immigrants. It offers jobs to a range of immigrants: those confined at home, those with minimal job opportunities, those capable of mobilizing their co-ethnics, those with sewing skills as well as those with none, those with starting capital and those with none. However, immigrants attracted to this industry share characteristics or often belong to communities already connected with it. The literature treats the garment industry as a sector that requires a flexible, cheap, and nonunionized work force in order to survive. It stresses immigrants and women as the most vulnerable work force. It underscores the exploitative organization of production. A number of studies have investigated workers at the bottom of the scale and also women home workers (Shah, 1975; Hoel, 1982; Labelle, 1987; Saifullah-Khan, 1979; Allen, 1981, 1989; Coyle, 1982). Phizacklea’s and my own work have shown that gender and ethnicity, combined with racism, increase the vulnerability of the female work force. Women are naturally paid less and allocated certain jobs because their role as workers is rarely considered paramount (Morokvasic, 1988, 1987b; Morokvasic et al., 1986). Studies of the garment industry in France generally characterize immigrants as illegal labor (Delacourt, 1980; Vincent, 1981; Conseil Economique et Social, 1982; Krieger-Mytelka, 1987) and 76marginal (Montagne’-Villette, 1987; Dubois, 1987). Rare in France is an analysis of the relationship between formal and informal structures that incorporate illegal labor. The few available studies show that illegal immigrant workers tend to be employed by available co-ethnics or other immigrants (Morokvasic, 1987b), who constitute an important link to manufacturers in the subcontracting chain (Green, 1984, 1986). Some literature does, indeed, focus on immigrants as potential entrepreneurs, and the garment industry provides many opportunities for self-employment. The ethnic business literature has focused on upward mobility of immigrants by access to self-employment, thus, extending current analysis that has focused only on immigrants as workers. It is argued that previous experience of wage employment with a co-ethnic owner enhances the probability of self-employment in the same sector. This approach provides a useful framework, though it does not focus directly on garment industry. Examples include Light’s now classic Ethnic Enterprise in America (1972), Bonacich’s middleman minority theory (1973), Bonacich and Modell (1980), Light and Bonacich (1988), and other works in that field in the United States and Europe (Waldinger et al., 1990). Waldinger (1986) contrasted various explanations for ethnic entrepreneurship, and suggested a theoretical framework based on interaction of opportunity and migrants’ characteristics (see also Morokvasic et al., 1990; and Morokvasic, 1987a). Among the most important characteristics of immigrants in this business are skills -- imported or learned on the spot, future-orientation related to the circumstances of immigration (target workers vs. settlers), and the capacity to mobilize ethnic networks and resources. A common obstacle is limited access to the general labor market (Min, 1987). On the other hand, maximum opportunities for self-employment exist in those sectors that have low entry barriers and in which the departure of previous entrepreneurs creates vacancies (Waldinger, 1989). The garment industry is a classic example.
