Enrique Diaz-Alvarez wrote:
> This is utter bullshit. I buy my US-made jeans for under $15 at Kmart.
> . . . By contrast, the horrendously overpriced garbage at Gap and like
> stores is all made in the Third World. I am not an expert, but it
> seems to me that manufacturing labor cost must be a fairly tiny part
> of the price of a $60 pair of Gap jeans.
I think this might be a misleading comparison. I'm pretty sure K-Mart pants are mainly machine made, which is where you'd expect the advanced countries to have an advantage. But Gap and Old Navy pants visibly involve a lot more labor. You can certainly argue that it's useless labor from a utilitarian point of view, and that we as a people have been maddened by advertising, but it's clear that people will pay much more for those marks of distinction that take so much more labor (i.e., pockets on your ankle and zippers to nowhere). And while I think you're certainly right that labor is a minority of the cost of a pair of Old Navy jeans, I think that's in large part because the labor employed in making them is so cheap -- that the labor cost wouldn't be such a small part of the price of such high-labor pants if they were made here.
I thought it was universally accepted that the textile industry was the classic example of a "sunset" industry, where labor counted for a lot, and that would therefore all but vanish from advanced industrial nations under conditions of utterly free trade. Are you're saying this is not true? Or are you simply saying it wouldn't be true if we could convince people to dress like you and Ralph Nader?
Also, I don't know about the Gap, but at Old Navy, which also seems to source everything in the Third World, jeans start at $22 rather than $60. FWIW.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com