Note from SweatFree Communities: Joe Raico, mentioned in this review and seen in the photo at the Bloomberg link below, attended SFC´s 2006 international conference in New York City. He joined former Bangladeshi garment worker Kalpona Akter on a visit to the memorial for Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workers in Manhattan´s Lower East Side.
New York’s Garment District is being buried in a cheap Chinese suit.
“Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags,” a documentary airing tonight on HBO at 9 p.m. New York time, traces the rise and fall of an industry that was once New York City’s biggest employer. Most of those jobs have now gone overseas, many of them to China.
Today, the schmatta (Yiddish for “rag”) trade is very ragged indeed.
The 90-minute film is fairly lively, considering it’s basically a long obit for the industry, whose fate is told in this statistic: In 1965, 95 percent of American clothing was made in the U.S. Now, only 5 percent is made here...
