Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - US Chinese Factories losing business to China

Cynthetiq · 05-27-2005, 10:43 AM

Quote:

Lifting of quotas comes as death blow to Chinatown
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Michael Powell
May 24, 2005

The sounds on the fifth-story factory floor in New York's Chinatown are nearly timeless: the whirr-whirr of sewing machines, feet tap-tapping on pedals, and the juicy vowels of 50 or so women chatting in Fujianese and Cantonese as they work fabric into vast piles of pants and shirts.

So how is business?

Factory owner Peter Wong, 44, smiles wanly and runs his hand over close-cropped black hair. ``Off by half in the past six months,'' he says. ``We can't compete with China. The future for my business is very, very dim.''

The lifting of world quotas on mainland textiles has sent a flood of cotton trousers, cotton knit shirts and underwear into the United States and western Europe. It has fallen like a death blow on one of Manhattan's last great immigrant neighborhoods - Chinatown. Thousands have lost their jobs or had their hours pared back in recent months, and dozens of factories have closed.

It is another economic insult for a neighborhood hit hard by September 11, 2001, and a superheated property market. In the past few years, developers have converted several towering turn-of-the-last-century factory buildings into multimillion-dollar loft buildings. The number of garment factories in Chinatown has fallen from 400 in 2000 to about 150, with rumors of new closings each week. At least 30 percent of the factory owners now operate without leases.

``It's been a battle with gentrification and cheap Chinese textiles - the factory owners cannot plan even a few months out,'' said Garment Industry Development's Kevin Chu. ``It's scary - these garment factories are the backbone of Chinatown economy. Without them, the neighborhood perimeter is shrinking every day.''

Unite Here, the historically powerful garment workers' union, has closed its Chinatown office. Its membership has fallen by about half to 5,000.

The Bush administration imposed quotas this month to limit growth of mainland imports to 7.5 percent a year. In response, Beijing announced Friday it would voluntarily slap its own tariffs on 74 categories of textiles.

Such steps might buy Chinatown's factories a few months' grace. But few owners see a long-term remedy. ``In a strange way, our problem is the people of China,'' said Wong, born in Hong Kong and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. ``They can make it cheaper. Their factories don't demand payment until the textiles are delivered - we can't compete with this.''

The importance of garment factories and restaurants to the traditional economy of Manhattan's Chinatown - the largest such enclave in the nation - cannot be overstated. For more than half a century, women trudged up creaking wooden stairs to factory floors. Their wages are modest, but they receive union health benefits.

``The closing of the factories knocks out one leg of the traditional economy of Chinatown,'' said Peter Kwong, urban planning professor at Hunter College.

``The outcome of Chinatown's present decline,'' he said, ``is that many immigrants are finding better ways to survive now that they aren't stuck in a repressive and controlling social and political culture.''

As for the garment factory owners? Some try to find their way by catering to young designers from New York's design schools. But Wong says this offers small volume and a fair amount of headaches. A number of his fellow owners have sold their factories and begun working as American representatives for Chinese factories.

He might go the same way.

``I give myself three years.'' He shrugs. ``It's hard to fight history.'' THE WASHINGTON POST

The global economy is a tough thing to compete against. If our kids today aren't being taught how to compete and to learn from losing, how will they compete against other labor pools in other countries?