Looks like there are others who have already researched for me! Here are some of the points made in Over-Dressed the Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline.
Further destroying my idea of buying clothes made in the USA Cline points out that most of L.A.'s garment workers get paid per piece. Your are suppose to make minimum wage (probably the same law as waiters in restaurants) but they don't always.
There seems to be many factors as to why the textile/clothing industry left the U.S. . NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was passed which caused the garment industry to flee to Mexico causes the loss of tens of thousands of L.A. jobs. (NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994.) Additionally, the lifting of MFA (Multi Fibre Arrangement) in 2005 removed limits on the amount developing countries could export to developed countries.
The U.S. did at one time have a strong textile/clothing industry. Prior to 1990 The International Ladies Garment Workers Union was active. Clothing made by union members had the ILGWU Union label affixed. (According to Wikipedia this union lost too many members and was absorbed into the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, called UNITE.)
It used to be the higher the cost the higher the quality but that is not the case anymore. In 1994 Consumer Reports found a rayon chenille sweater being sold at Barneys was of no better quality than one at Kmart. It seems the price is based on the status of the brand these days but they are probably all being made at the same factories as the cheap clothes. Consumers only pay more for these items because they perceive them as having a higher status. It's an economic term Veblen Goods. So, basically when I'm buying that Coach purse or any other high status item it just might not be of any better quality than a cheap purse I might pick up at Target.
Years ago clothes were expensive and you only had a limited amount of them. You could also hire a local dressmaker and get them to alter or even re-create older clothes into a fashionable style. But today H&H & Forever 21 get daily shipments of new styles. "Topshop, which has a U.S. location in Manhattan, introduces an astonishing four hundred new styles a week on its Website."
I remember a couple of years ago walking through the clothing aisles at Target and thinking that everything they had for sale were exact copies of clothes we wore in the 1980s. In the past fashions came back but changed enough that you couldn't actually wear the clothes in the back of your closet for three decades. After reading this book I realize I wasn't imagining things. Those were the same designs. Cline cites a vintage clothing dealer who once sold an old Calvin Klein sweater and was told that they were shipping it to an factory in China to be replicated.
If you are donating clothes you might be surprised what happens to them. Only 20% of donated clothes sells in thrift stores. What the stores don't sell they sent clothing overseas in bales. This then puts a damper on these foreign countries in their garment industry. When our second hand stuff is so readily available and cheap they don't need to make their own clothes.
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