After watching Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, which premiered Sunday on HBO and will be repeated today at 10 a.m. and 9:30 p.m., you won't soon be buying a $10 frock from H&M. Or maybe you will, but you'll feel terrible about it.
And you probably should. For those of us who haven't been keeping track of the ailing garment industry, the most startling information revealed in this hour-plus documentary is that in the past 40 years, the percentage of American clothing made in America has plummeted from 95 to 5. Five percent! How did this happen?
That is exactly what director and executive producer Marc Levin and producer Daphne Pinkerson are champing at the bit to tell you. But not before building a convincing case that the garment industry was the progenitor of both the American labor movement and the middle class. Not to mention that it was once the economic, and almost literal, heart of New York.
Through terrific footage and illuminating interviews with members of every level of the industry, many of them now unemployed, Levin takes us through a cultural history of the past century through the prism of schmatta, the Yiddish term for rags. Originally based on immigrant labor living in the tenements on the Lower East Side and working in the sweatshops within an eight-block radius on Manhattan's West Side, clothing manufacturing was transformed by the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911.
The deaths of hundreds of young women who literally had been locked into what became an inferno proved to be a catalyst for the garment-workers union.
Soon, people who had been slaving for pennies were receiving a living wage and health benefits. Banks and low-cost housing became available and, within a generation, the sons and daughters of cutters and spreaders were going to college and entering the middle class.
Although it gets off to a slow and overly earnest start, Schmatta picks up speed and by the end leaves a viewer outraged and bewildered. The problem is carefully explained, but the solution is only hinted at. Yes, we can look for the union label, but if it is found in just 5 percent of clothing, what are we supposed to wear?
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