It’s Sink or Swim for Jobs inApparel
Vincent Rojas, president of Maxine of Hollywood, a swimwear manufacturer in Vernon, was present at the creation of the California fashion industry. Sadly, it looks like he’s going to be there for the next phase of its deterioration as well.
It was shortly after World War II when Rojas’ father, a garment designer, came West from New York. “It was a different lifestyle,” the 58-year-old Rojas recalls, “and with it came the California clothing -- the colors, the fabrics. Everyone was into casual clothing. It changed the world.”
Closer to home, it changed the industrial landscape. Sewing shops sprang up around Los Angeles, and garment manufacturing became a huge engine of the economy, alongside aerospace and motion-picture production.
Rojas, a graduate of Los Angeles’ Woodbury College, got into the business as a management trainee with Catalina Swimwear, which had been a pioneer in the business, along with Cole of California, Caltex and Rose Marie Reid. He left Catalina in 1977 to found his own swimwear company. And today, having acquired other firms such as Manhattan Beachwear, Rojas has built a thriving $50-million-a-year enterprise.
Much of the rest of the local industry hasn’t held up so well, of course. “Some 50,000 sewing machines have left this area in the last three years,” says Ilse Metchek, head of the California Fashion Assn., a trade group. Apparel employment in Southern California has declined to 98,000, down from more than 130,000 in the mid-1990s, as production has shifted to Mexico and Asia.
But compared with much of the industry, the swimsuit segment has progressed, well, swimmingly. Among the reasons: a kink in the global supply chain.
Lycra -- the DuPont Co. stretch fabric that makes most women’s swimsuits form-fitting and form-enhancing -- was not reliably available in Asia for many years. Though the synthetic fabric was introduced in 1974, DuPont didn’t license knitting mills in Asia to produce it until the early 1990s.
Even then, the company suffered “label piracy,” with Asian factories turning out inferior stretch material and labeling it Lycra. That angered retailers who were paying 10% extra for a Lycra garment -- and often getting stuck with a counterfeit.
The upshot: Lycra production has remained centered largely in mills in the Carolinas. And they, in turn, have supplied the swimsuit manufacturers of Southern California, who employ the skilled sewers needed to make high-quality finished goods. Indeed, Los Angeles and Orange counties long have had an abundance of workers capable of producing form-fitting beachwear with great consistency.
Today, Maxine of Hollywood employs more than 600 workers at its Vernon factory and at another plant in Commerce. (It also has a facility in Guadalajara.) It supplies Liz Claiborne Inc. and Hobie as well as private label swimsuits for Target Corp., J.C. Penney Co., Sears, Roebuck & Co., Federated Department Stores Inc. and May Department Stores Co.
“Swimsuit manufacturing is a complex activity,” Rojas says, standing in the middle of a vast floor of sewing machine assembly lines where women workers swiftly put together flowered fabric with lining and elastic.
In fact, unlike shirt material, the stretch fabric of swimsuits “can move an inch or two under the needle,” requiring superior dexterity and control, explains Willa Yarbrough, a Maxine of Hollywood supervisor who has worked in the business for nearly 40 years. She grabs a swatch of lining and stretches it back and forth in her fingers. “I train these skilled sewers,” she adds, “and we have to do new styles every season,” meaning that her employees must be quick studies.
That is why sewers of bathing suits command higher pay than most apparel workers. With a minimum wage guarantee, they typically earn about $100 a day, or $25,000 a year. That’s not a fortune, to be sure, but it is a decent wage -- especially for an immigrant from Mexico or Central America who has recently arrived in Los Angeles and is trying to get started.
Which makes it all the more poignant that many of those jobs are going to go away. Says Rojas: “In five to seven years we’ll be manufacturing in Asia.”
Why the change?
For starters, DuPont has discovered a way to make Lycra production in Asia reliable -- with an unlikely assist from new homeland-security regulations. Now imported fabrics must be inspected by U.S. Customs agents, who also demand full records of every participant in the manufacturing process. “Verification is possible now,” says a DuPont spokeswoman.
Meanwhile, Rojas and other local manufacturers find themselves in a squeeze: Expenses are rising and yet retailers are clamoring for a break. The cost of workers’ compensation insurance has tripled in the last three years, Rojas says, from $148,000 annually to $500,000 in his case. Health insurance costs are going up every year too. “But retailers won’t allow us a price increase,” he says. “They want lower prices.”
Plus, there is another factor: The supply of skilled workers in Southern California is dwindling.
“Look around you,” Rojas says with a wave at the factory floor, “the women are middle-aged. Their daughters are not coming into the factory.”
Yarbrough agrees. “The young women, they don’t want sewing jobs. In my day, you were glad to get training, but not the young people today.”
It is a business problem, but also a social problem -- one that the government needs to step into and help solve.
“The government doesn’t care that these jobs are going away,” complains Metchek, who works with the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. to attract industry and employment to the region. “They regard them as ‘sweatshop’ jobs and give no incentives.”
Yet “these are the best kind of entry-level jobs because they give real training in manufacturing.”
The apparel sector will remain a significant force in Southern California, even as more sewing machines slip away to places where it’s cheaper to use them. For one thing, much of the high-end design work -- often using sophisticated computer programs -- will continue to be done here.
Maxine of Hollywood, for its part, is in on this game. “We’ll do the designs and the fashion,” says Rojas, “because we know the California style and what the American consumer wants.”
But that kind of work employs relatively few people and demands that they be relatively well educated. “It’s a shrinking business,” says Rojas resignedly -- one, in other words, that doesn’t offer the brightest future for a local economy where so many immigrants are seeking a foothold.
*
James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan @latimes.com.
