3.
In the United States under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the minimum wage is $1.60 per hour. The average in the textile and apparel industry is slightly over $2.30 per hour. With the difference between the average textile and apparel hourly wage in the United States and those paid in the supplying far eastern countries, American labor unions are extremely concerned about import competition. The level of that import competition is a severe depressant on the unions' activities to improve the workers standards in the United States.
When we look at the kinds of workers that are employed in the textile and apparel industries, we find some of the reasons why those industries are important in dealing with the problems of poverty in our economy.
A very high proportion of the employees fall into categories we call semi- skilled. In manufacturing generally, in the United States, about 44% of the workers are classified semi-skilled. In textiles 67% are semi-skilled and in apparel 78% are semi-skilled.
Workers in both these industries tend to be older than the average and have less education than the average in all-manufacturing. It is for these reasons, and because training requirements to become a worker in these industries are relatively low, that textiles and apparel provide an entrance into industry for newcomers to the labor force. These industries, therefore, have become of major importance as a source of employment for our minority groups.
In the textile mill industry, for example:
Negro employment in 1962 was
in 1968
4.8% of the total 9.5% ·
In the apparel industry:
Negro employment in 1962 was
in 1968
9.3% of the total 12.7%
These data are not as up-to-date as we would like them to be, however, from available indications, the trend of ¡legro employment is continuing upward.
These figures can be surdemented by data on the employment of the Puerto Rican minority group workers in the New York and Philadelphia urban centers. A survey of a half dozen large apparel producing firms in those areas indicated that the percentage of legro and Puerto Rican production workers range from 25 to 65 percent of the total number of production workers in those firms. It further indicated that up to 90 percent of the Negroes and Puerto Ricans in those firms were hired during the past five years.
There is another factor that should be considered. As the textile industry in the South hires more and more Negroes, this has an effect on slowing down the flow to the urban centers and ghettoes in the northern cities. The effect of this in turn is to ease, somewhat, the social and economic pressures on our urban centers.