Book Review

Michael Webber & Sally Weller, Refashioning the Rag Trade: Internationalising Australia's Textiles, Clothing and Footwear Industries, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2001. pp. x + 377. $55 paper.

The textile, clothing and footwear sector has long been cast a site of intense and gendered exploitation and immense difficulties for organised labour—from the 'sweated industries' of the nineteenth century to the clothing outwork of our own times. Across very different times and spaces, these two books reveal much about the nature of work, unionism and the role of the state in these industries. Of perhaps greatest interest is the difference in the conceptual frames and methods deployed in constructing their arguments.	1
In Refashioning the Rag Trade, Mike Webber and Sally Weller's immediate aim is to explore the trajectory and outcomes of the 20-year restructuring of the Australian textile, clothing and footwear (TCF) sector. They show that this restructuring is one in which 'stories of failure predominate', contributing to 'the process by which inequality is being recreated in Australia' (p. 323). Their book also has a broader aim: to reassess critically the assumptions, suppositions and truisms that shape the way in which the history and geography of economic policy in this country are understood (p. 1). In my view, they succeed quite brilliantly.	2
As others have done before them, Webber and Weller demonstrate that the TCF sector stands as the dark reality to the dream of industry development so central to Federation's 'national settlement'. Behind the tariff wall, drawing on cheap but skilled female labour in both factory and home, capital enjoyed rates of profit far above the average for manufacturing. A clearer case of gendered exploitation, protected for the most part by the state, is hard to imagine. When, in the 1970s, the state set out on the path that would lead to cutting trade protection and the restructures of the 1980s, the TCF sector was bound to be one of the targets for 'reform'. Such a group of industries found few defenders beyond those engaged in it.	3
The book builds upon the scholarship of many disciplines, from history to geography and beyond. The depth and breadth of sources is deeply impressive, if occasionally overwhelming. Refashioning the Rag Trade traces the industry's history in terms of labour process, labour markets, union strategy, firm structure and public policy. It undertakes a detailed study, across several chapters, of the fate of hundreds of retrenched TCF workers. What is most compelling about this book—and which any review can only sketch—is not merely the detailed description of these developments but the sophisticated analysis of them. The authors show how the proponents of change, from both left and right, used frameworks built upon seriously, indeed tragically, flawed assumptions. It is upon this issue that I will concentrate.	4
Webber and Weller show how it was that the 'economic liberalism' of policy-makers and the 'international interventionism' of some on the left joined forces to construct strategies that sought to reduce protection, re-gear the industry for quality products and export markets and make both the workforce and the workplace itself more 'flexible'. This account takes issue with practically all of the assumptions of the economic-modellers and policy-makers who set out to remake Australian industry in those years. They demolish the claims, based in 'post-Fordism', that flexible, small-batch production was readily possible and desirable for sectors like TCF. This account shows that the claims of these 'left-optimists' as well as those of the hard heads at the Industry Commission were illogical, ahistorical and overstated.	5
Apart from the criticisms of post-Fordism, the argument offers new ways of seeing the TCF and policy change more broadly. Where many other accounts of TCF have focussed on the idea of creating local connections in an upskilled TCF sector, Webber and Weller point instead to the importance of the global scale, especially of new global commodity chains. Yet, as supply structures were being internationalised, governments persisted with the fiction of discrete national industries. They also show that industry policy is at least as much about power as it is about economics. By ignoring this, policy-makers and many critics missed the significance of growing retail power over suppliers. TCF manufacturers were not free agents in charge of their own destiny. The transfer of electronic data (from retailers to makers) enhanced buyer power a more significant development than (limited) technological change in the workplace itself upon which so many laid so much hope. The book also invites rethinking the state and globalisation. Webber and Weller's critique speaks (as does so much of the book) to issues beyond TCF. They argue that: changes in policy are less a retreat of the state in the face of global pressure and more the creation of conditions under which global forms of TCF corporations can develop and prosper. The whole point about globalising the TCF sector is that business and state activities operate across national borders, taking advantage of differences created by the existence of borders (pp. 347-8). The claim that policy-makers ignored the importance of space is no less important than the critique of post-Fordism. Policy relied upon anachronistic notions of the nation state and national firms. Nothing could make clearer that 'theory matters', in making and understanding the social world. Because, in part, of conceptual flaws, real people lost real jobs, real people lost hope and localities were sundered.	6
Clete Daniel's Culture of Misfortune also has broad intentions. It seeks not only to explain what was perhaps 'industrial unionism's ... greatest disappointment'—the failure to organise textile workers in the USA—but also to situate this failure as 'a daunting forecast of what lay ahead for all American workers' (p. 12).	7
In trying to make sense of the unhappy, Daniel begins with an overview of the years before the 1930s, including what seems to me a rather dismissive account of the more militant tendencies in American labour, the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World and the communists. His central concern, understandably enough, is to get to the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) and the resurgence it led in the late 1930s. Thereafter, most of the book is occupied with a detailed, almost forensic, account of the organisational politics and manoeuvres surrounding the failure of the union in the southern States after World War II. Union divisions and astonishing personal bitterness and duplicity undermined any hope of success, at great cost to all textile workers and the union itself. This is truly a tragic tale.	8
There is much here that is, by inference at least, deeply instructive for understanding union decline and renewal today. Daniel's account of the early organising drives is impressive. Many aspects of the story would make union officials and activists today marvel. For example, when the CIO's Textile Workers Organizing Committee (set up to emulate the successful Steel Workers Organizing Committee) was in full cry after 1937, it had nearly 600 organising staff at its disposal. It would have about US$2 million in funding.	9
The chapter examining the initial CIO-led drive, tellingly entitled 'Trusting in the strength of others', is a fascinating story of how peak unions organise themselves and others, of inter- and intra-union tensions as well as solidarities. One of the most striking aspects of this account is the importance of what the state did—and did not do. Initial success was built upon the Roosevelt administration's recovery legislation while later success depended upon the Wagner Act and, most importantly, state-enforced recognition of collective bargaining in the war years. The state, though, was far from all-powerful because, time and again, southern employers in particular simply defied it when it suited them to do so.	10
There is much to admire here, not least in the depth of research and the evident feel the author has for both the industry and the union. Many readers will have no problem at all with the book. I must admit, however, to a real concern with this style of union history. There is certainly much that can be drawn from this account—but the reader is left with a lot of work to do. This is what might be called an introverted history. The personalities of leadership along with the perfidy of employers become the keys to understanding. There is very little about the wider frame of political economy that shaped American unionism in the cold war years. There is almost no explicit reference to the literature examining other attempts to organise in the southern States. There are other gaps which, it seems to me, union histories should no longer neglect: there is no clear exposition to open or close the book about the nature and implications of the argument; no reference to the work of the many industrial relations scholars and geographers who have tried to explain the patterns of union development which this book describes. This purely empirical approach means that the book cannot achieve its stated aim of showing how this story is the precursor of more recent union decline. The book has no way to shift from the particular (in one industry) to the general (across industries, time and space).	11
Apart from some overlap in industry focus, what makes the juxtaposition of these two books compelling is the comparison of methods. At first sight, the history of a union's organising campaigns in a massive industry in the world's greatest capitalist power might seem of more interest to readers of this journal than would an account of public policy-making in one industrial sector. Not so: the breadth of the explanatory framework in Refashioning the Rag Trade is compelling and instructive. The context that it provides for understanding and rethinking recent labour history and current labour movement problems and strategies is vital. Read one book for as good a narrative as empiricist labour history can provide. Read the other for why theories matter and for how and why we can all benefit from multi-disciplinary approaches to our studies.	12
The University of Sydney BRADON ELLEM

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