What Men do in the Clothing Industries
Though many more women are employed in the garment trades than formerly, still the large body of workers are men. Men are employed for processes in which greater endurance or speed is required. In high-class dressmaking men work on dresses made of heavy materials, while women make those of lighter weight. Cloaks and suits are made by men, while waists, under muslins, and children’s clothes are made by women. An equal number of men and women are skirt operators, while in buttonhole making the number of men operators exceeds the number of women.
Strange as it may seem, men form the larger percentage of those who work on women’s clothes, and women make up a majority of those who work on men’s clothes. There is less routine in making women’s garments, and it has been suggested that this may account for the preference given such work by men.
It has been said that “mechanical power and division of labor have impersonalized industry,” and this is clearly true of the garment industries as regards their products, for except in the case of the custom tailors a worker can not think of any finished product as distinctly his. Any given garment is the joint product of many persons.
Formerly a whole garment was made by one man, who necessarily must be a skilled tailor. Now many persons may have a part in the making of a suit of clothes. This division of labor grew out of the need for different degrees of skill in the different processes. By specialization a large product may be produced by relatively unskilled labor.
The work may be divided into three general systems: Teamwork, in which the tailor, like the contractor, hires his workers and superintends the work; piece operating, in which all of one kind of work is done by one worker on the same garment; and section work, in which each operator does only that one process allotted to him.
In the cheap grade of women’s clothing this division of labor is very marked. One man works only on belts, another makes cuffs, another collars, and so on. In the better grade of clothes the garment after it has been cut is given to the tailor, who with his helper completes all the work and turns it over to the presser. In the expensive shops the tailor makes the entire garment, doing even his own cutting and pressing.
While no single operation can be said to be given over entirely to one sex, the cutting and pressing is done almost exclusively by men. Men who work in the garment trades may be generally divided into designers, sample makers, cutters, machine operators, hand sewers, pressers, and examiners. In the following paragraphs the brief descriptions given of these principal occupations have been summarized from Bulletin No. 183 of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and from the bureau’s publication “Descriptions of Occupations.”