Guilds, unions, and garment factories: notes on Chinese in the apparel industry.(Industry overview)

This volume of Chinese America: History & Perspectives includes several essays on Chinese labor guilds, labor unions, and the apparel industry. The following write-up is intended to provide relevant background information to better help the reader understand how each essay is related to a particular stage in history and how they are interrelated. This write-up is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of the complex issues surrounding the apparel industry

CHINESE IN THE APPAREL INDUSTRY

The identity of the first Chinese in California to have sewed apparel for the market is now lost in the historic past, but the shortage of females, who would have normally been hired as workers in the sewing trades in California, created a need that was filled by willing Chinese male "seamstresses," a phenomenon that distinguished the industry in the San Francisco region from the industry in the rest of the United States. Thus, by the late 1860s the Chinese impact on the industry was already noticeable so that Rev. A. S. Loomis noted that "Pantaloons, vests, shirts, drawers, and overalls are made extensively by Chinamen," and the 1870 Census counted 110 Chinese in the sewing trades. (1) As Chinese continued to enter the industry, the San Francisco Morning Call ran an article reporting the following on May 27, 1873:

 
   Next, if not superior in importance to the Chinese cigar factories, 
   are the Chinese clothing factories of which there are altogether 
   28, including 3 shirt factories.... These factories employ 
   from 50 to 100 men each and their employees number in the 
   aggregate about 2000. 

By 1876, Chinese workers had become a considerable percentage of workers in the sewing trades in California, as shown in Table 1. (2)

However, these figures did not include the many Chinese working by the piece outside the factories. Rev. Otis Gibson estimated during the same period that 1,230 Chinese were "sewing on machines" and 168 were "working on clothing for Chinese." (3)

Four years later the 1880 manuscript population census counted the following numbers in the apparel industry shown in Table 2.