Refashioning the Rag Trade

By Michael Webber And Sally Weller, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001, 377 pages, paperback, $55.00. Reviewed by Amanda McLeod in the June 2004 issue.

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Firstly, I have to declare my personal attachment to the 'rag trade'. As a teenager I had dreams of becoming a fashion designer and influencing international fashion trends. I left high school in 1988 to begin a two-year TAFE course in clothing manufacture. The completion of my course, the book reminded me, coincided with the year of the highest retrenchment in the TCF industry. I managed, however, to find work as a sewing machinist, not in the fashion industry, but in a soft-furnishing factory in Richmond in Melbourne's inner east making blinds and curtains. I lasted three months. Low wages, long hours, physically demanding, unchallenging work, not to mention the pressure from management to work harder, faster and more productively made me quickly realise that the reality of factory work did not match my expectations. The factory was small and family-owned, which Refashioning the Rag Trade tells me was typical of Australian manufacturing. Most of the factory's workers were recently arrived migrants. One of the machinists who sat next to me was a doctor and another a lawyer, whose qualifications had not been recognised in Australia; lack of English language skills prevented them from retraining. Most had families and children to support and no other employment options. These were the people who interested Michael Webber and Sally Weller.

In essence this book is the story of the failure of neo-classical economic theory to protect the interests of TCF workers. At its heart are the women and men who worked in the TCF industries who ultimately lost out to the rationalisation and restructuring of Australian manufacturing that has occurred since the 1970s.

Refashioning the Rag Trade begins with a history of the state of production in Australia from Federation. Webber and Weller deftly argue that the development of Australian manufacturing was built on the joint elements of labour exploitation, low wages and border protection (tariffs). The 'rag trade', they explain, was never an industry characterised by equality and fairness. The TCF drew its workforce from an easily exploitable minority predominantly made up of women from non-English speaking backgrounds who had little opportunity to demand better conditions or to go elsewhere. Webber and Weller show that the industry relied on labour exploitation rather than efficiency and technical change (p 58). As tariff protection was reduced, the necessity to compete with countries that could provide even cheaper labour meant that Australia workers were even more at risk of exploitation.

The overall argument presented here is not a surprising one; as the industry was being restructured, inequality was being refashioned. Yet the data collected by Webber and Weller paints a frightening picture. The text is complemented by statistical data gained from interviews with workers who were directly affected by industry restructuring. While the amount of data presented is overwhelming and the analysis of economic theory is at times dense, this book is far from a collection of cold statistics. Webber and Weller succeed in showing the reverberations of industry restructuring on people -- real people with families, commitments, interests, and rights.

While it might be tempting to slip into a glib diatribe against neo-liberalism, Refashioning the Rag Trade is refreshingly even handed. Webber and Weller outline the (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts made by reformers to retrain retrenched workers. It was not the intention of neo-liberal reformers to ignore the interests of workers. The greatest failure of government economic policy was the failure to predict the changes that occurred within Australia and the shifts in commodity chains which shifted some of the stages of production offshore (p 68). Interestingly, the changes occurred largely because Australian firms 'successfully' restructured themselves, and not because of their domination by multi-national firms.

Refashioning the Rag Trade also tells a story of Australian immigration. A shift in local production from factory-based work to outwork coincided with a change in the source of labour. While factory work was predominantly performed by Southern European immigrants in capital cities and workers in rural Australia, outwork is primarily performed by migrants from Southeast Asia. Thus, the shift in production left retrenched factory workers without the necessary networks, or the appropriate geographical location, to obtain home-based outwork. Chillingly, Webber and Weller tell us that more than a third of the sample was never employed again after retrenchment. The competitive necessity to cut-costs made domestic outwork attractive to manufacturers. Almost all of the clothing produced in Australia is now produced using home-based outworkers. Outwork presents its own set of unique inequalities and workers are often at greater risk of exploitation.

Refashioning the Rag Trade made me grateful that I had to retrain only after a two-year course and a three-month stint in the TCF industry, rather than as a retrenched fifty-year-old Italian migrant woman with limited English-skills who had worked all her working life as a machinist sewing buttons on high quality business shirts.

Refashioning the Rag Trade is a powerful book that succeeds in exposing the 'process by which inequality is being recreated in Australia' (p 350). It raises important questions about the cost of production not only in terms of the goods that are produced but also about the welfare of those who produce them.

Citation

• Amanda McLeod. 'Review: Refashioning the Rag Trade by Michael Webber and Sally Weller' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 18 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Since the early 1980s successive Australian governments have adhered to a national industry strategy of 'international competitiveness'. This has meant the removal of tariffs, quotas and other protection. This title looks at how these changes have affected Australia's textiles industry.

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