Plotting the survival of garment industry

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. - The two might seem as unlikely together as a hand-stitched double-breasted suit jacket with a pair of work pants: Anthony Sapienza, the son of a factory manager, and Warren Pepicelli, who grew up on the union side, pounding the pavement as a business agent in Boston, walking from one of the city's 60 women's garment factories to another.

But Sapienza, president of the Joseph Abboud suit factory, and Pepicelli, who runs its union, are working hand in glove. Union and management are collaborating to revamp timeworn garment-making methods in favor of manufacturing techniques pioneered at Toyota Motor Corp. Their goal: survival in the face of cheaper foreign competitors.

The U.S. garment-manufacturing industry has bled jobs for decades, as work moved first to cheaper labor in Mexico, then to Asia. As Chinese manufacturing becomes increasingly skilled and sophisticated, the few U.S. factories that remain are vulnerable, and their managers know it.

Sapienza and Pepicelli both have about 30 years in the business.

Sapienza spent his boyhood Saturdays sweeping cuttings in his family's menswear factory, then wrestling his brother in the pile of scraps. He remembers when there were 40,000 U.S. workers making men's clothing. Now there are 4,000, he said.

The days when Pepicelli could stand on a street corner in Boston and look up at row after row of women sewing in second-floor factories are just a memory. Every one of those factories is closed.

"An industry can go away; it can leave this country," said Pepicelli, international vice president of the union Unite Here. "It can become extinct."

That's what everyone at Abboud's sprawling skylit brick factory, built as a cotton mill around the time of the Civil War, is working to avoid. And if anyone forgets what's at stake, they need only drive down the street where the Cliftex menswear mill that used to employ more than 2,000 workers sits, its windows boarded.

Abboud has hired the best workers from its failed neighbors, managers there say. The city lost 67 percent of its manufacturing jobs during the 40 years ended in 2000, according to the Brookings Institute. For many of the factory's workers, "this is the one opportunity they have to continue to work," Sapienza said.

The push for change comes from Marty Staff, president and chief executive officer of JA Apparel Corp. Staff and private-equity company J.W. Childs bought the company in 2004; the brand's founder, Joseph Abboud, left in 2005.

Abboud says its sales are about $400 million a year. While the company is doing fine, management says the U.S. factory has to improve constantly to justify the higher salaries its workers make compared to foreign competitors. The average wage in the factory is $12 an hour, plus union benefits. That's three or four times what workers in Mexico make, Sapienza said.

But if the workers in New Bedford could make suits faster, the advantages would be even greater. Marty Staff asked Sapienza, his team and the union to embrace Toyota principles, including kaizen, a Japanese word meaning continuous improvement.

The union agreed. Pepicelli said: "It's an answer, but not a total answer."

The real problem, he said, "is an unlevel playing field; the competition from overseas makes it very difficult to be efficient and competitive."