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1 The nature of the clothing and textiles industries: structure, context and processes
Tony Hines
This chapter is structured to give the reader insights to the nature and structure of the clothing and textile industries. Nature and structure will be considered, first, in historical context, to provide patterns of development through time from a UK. perspective; second, the UK sectors are considered in their contemporary context nationally and, finally, in an international context - from a European perspective and then in a global context. Global supply chains serve as a lens through which to view the interconnectedness of firms and national economies. Finally, future industry challenges and opportunities are considered in a national and international context.
The nature of the clothing and textiles industries
It is perhaps apposite to consider the nature of the clothing and textiles industries by demonstrating their interconnectedness and the similarities and differences that occur between them. Viewing a supply chain from its origin through to final consumption is a useful framework for this discussion. Figure 1.1 illustrates the main stages linking the chain. Primary producers are located either in agriculture for natural fibres (e.g. wool and cotton) or in the chemical industry for man-made fibres (e.g. nylon and acrylics). Essentially, outputs of these two primary producing sectors (agriculture and chemicals) form the basis of inputs to the textile industry. It is at this stage of the journey that conversions begin with natural or chemical-based products entering the textile supply chain to become textile-manufactured outputs (e.g. fabrics). These fabrics then become raw-material inputs to the clothing manufacturing industry by which they are converted into items of clothing - apparel. Moving on from this stage clothing outputs are passed from converters (manufacturers) to wholesale and retail distribution firms acting as intermediaries between suppliers and customers. Customers may be the ultimate consumers of products or they may simply be further intermediaries, for example, a mother purchasing clothing for members of her family or a retail store purchasing from a wholesaler. Consumption takes place at the end of the chain. This linear forward model of a textile clothing supply chain is presented merely for clarity about the processes involved. It is important to recognise that the drivers of this chain are often retailers who interpret customer demand patterns and trigger demand for clothing manufacturers, textile mills and primary producers. Increasingly management of the supply network has been controlled by large national and international retail organisations or through large suppliers of branded clothing.
Time is an important dimension withm me textile clothing supply chain. It is useful to think of the major stages in the chain as cycles, each cycle taking a specific time to run its course. For example, it takes half a year to grow crops or produce wool; it takes anywhere between 12 and 24 weeks to secure textile fabric in the specified quantities, qualities and colours from a textile mill; it takes anywhere between 2 weeks and 16 weeks to secure finished goods inventories from clothing manufacturers; and, if you add to all these inefficiencies idle time in warehousing and shipping logistics, sourcing trips, design concepts, fabric testing, sampling and selection, then more time is consumed in these processes too.
Similarities and differences between textiles and clothing
It is important to understand economic differences between the textile and clothing industries. The textile industry is capital-intensive, requiring significant investment to develop even the smallest textile mill. A small-scale polyester plant in a relatively low-cost location may require a US$10-15 million investment. The economics of textile production are based on efficiency. Having made the investment in the asset the
Figure 1.1 Main stages in textiles-clothing supply chain
Source: Hines (2005).
organisation wants to generate an appropriate level of return on the capital expended/ invested (ROCE/ROI). The consequence is that it is important to fill plant capacity and keep it running round the clock to ensure maximum output from a given resource input. Hence, productivity is an important performance indicator for the textile industry. Higher levels of productivity reduce unit costs. In competitive markets lowering unit costs is essential. Large retail organisations, their agents or supplier networks often book mill production capacity months in advance of production to ensure that they will receive fabrics on time for their clothing manufacturers to produce garments for their stores at the right time. In contrast clothing manufacture is a labour-intensive industry, requiring little capital investment by comparison with textile firms. Often a space with sewing machines, cutting tables and storage facilities is the minimum requirement. It is in this sense more of a footloose industry, meaning that light manufacturing equipment and facilities can easily be moved between locations across the globe. It is not so easy to move a textile plant, having made the investment. It is a heavy industry. Clothing manufacture has become an industry that needs to focus its attention on being responsive to customer needs (usually those of a retailer, buying office or agent). Not only must the clothing manufacturer be responsive but also it must strive for efficiency if it has higher labour costs than its competitors.
A brief history of textiles and clothing in the UK
There are a number of salutary lessons to be drawn from the accounts that follow since in many ways we are still making history, except that the context has shifted from Britain to other parts of the globe. The stories of conservative businessmen, accusations of capitalist exploitation, worker resistance to technical innovations that reduce their wage-earning capacity and migration from countryside to towns may sound familiar to people who populate the first industrial industry across the world.
Eighteenth-century Britain - the birth of the textile industry
In 1700 the most important part of the British textiles industry was woollen cloth manufacture. It was the largest English export, with three areas in particular responsible for the majority of manufacture: East Anglia, the West Country and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Merchant clothiers dominated the industry: usually men of great wealth and substance. Raw material (wool) was cleaned and dyed; then combed to separate long and short strands or carded to turn it into a workable roll, It was then spun into yarn and woven into cloth which was fulled, washed, stretched, bleached and dressed. The factory system of the Industrial Revolution had not yet developed and many of these jobs were performed by part-time workers in the 'domestic system' (men, women and children), endeavouring to increase their main income drawn from the land. In the specialised areas workers were employed full-time and were craftsmen of the wool trade. Fulling and dressing required the use of mills powered by water or horses, and dye and bleaching processes needed equipment that was too large for cottages. However, the key processes of spinning and weaving were conducted in the homes of workers. The word 'spinster' originally applied to the women who carried out these processes (men usually did the weaving). Spinning-wheels and handlooms could easily be set up in the cottages. Merchants controlled the whole process, buying raw materials from farmers, moving it through the various processes, before selling on the finished cloth. These merchants were the capitalists who paid for materials and various wage costs before drawing their profits from the sale of finished cloth. This general pattern of development was similar in the silk trade and other textiles, and the industry was dominated by a few wealthy men, So important was the wool trade to the British economy that these men had their own lobbyists at Parliament and acts had been passed to regulate the price, quality, weights and methods of drying and dyeing. During Charles II's reign every person who died on English soil had to be buried in a woollen shroud. In William Ill's time the developing Irish wool trade was stifled by excessive export duties. In the early 1700s the woollen merchants did their best to kill off the developing cotton trade by forbidding the import of printed fabrics from Asia. Nevertheless, the prohibition of foreign trade simply acted as a catalyst, stimulating the English cotton industry which would come to rival woollens and challenge for supremacy.
Wealthy wool merchants who had little incentive to change a system that served them well stifled technical progress. However, the newly establishing cotton and silk industries were more open to change. Cotton had to fight for supremacy with wool, and the silk trade was forced by strong French competition to become more efficient. The increasing use of water power in silk production was epitomised by the factory set up by Thomas Lombe on an island in the River Derwent, Derbyshire, between 1718 and 1722. It contained silk-throwing machines based on Italian designs and smuggled into England. Despite being a success for Lombe, resulting in his knighthood, silk remained a minor industry in the UK, and was conducted mainly in the Peak District. The greatest-impact early development was Kay's flying shuttle in the 1730s when he worked for a clothier in Colchester, Essex. Kay, a native of Bury, Lancashire, was an ingenious mechanic, having already developed a carding process more efficient than anything previous, and had now developed a gadget for saving the weaver time and labour at the loom: the flying shuttle. The shuttle worked by being struck to and fro by hammers which the weaver controlled by strings, and it made it possible to produce wider widths of cloth since the weaving width was no longer limited by the length of the weaver's arms, as in the previous process. It was very unpopular with weavers, who saw the invention as depriving them of their livelihood. Kay was forced to leave Colchester by the strength of feeling, moved to Leeds, where manufacturers adopted his shuttle without paying him for his patent, and then back to his native Bury, where once again he was forced to leave after riots in which his house was sacked. He died penniless in France.
The cotton industry firmly established itself in South Lancashire during the first half of the eighteenth century. The location was no accident: a major port in Liverpool; rapid streams for water power; a damp climate with little change in temperature and a humid atmosphere suited to cotton thread. There was growing demand for cotton cloth (muslin and calicoes) both at home and overseas. Output grew as demand grew, and cotton was better suited than wool to the machine age because it was finer and easier to handle by machine processes. Spinners had always struggled to meet the demands of weavers because they were unable to supply sufficient yarn in time. The flying shuttle had exacerbated this problem by halving the time that weavers needed to produce cloth. The urgent industry need was to find a way of increasing the output of spinners. Around 1765 James Hargreaves, a Blackburn weaver, invented the spinning jenny, a machine that could spin 6 threads at once, although later it was developed to spin 80 threads at once. In its original form it was designed for use at home by hand. It came into widespread use in Lancashire and 10 years after Hargreaves's death in 1778 there were 20,000 or more spinning jennies used in England. A second important development occurred in 1769 when Richard Arkwright, originally from Preston, invented the water frame, a device similar to an earlier invention by Lewis Paul which had been less successful than Arkright's. It was much bigger than the spinning jenny, using rollers to stretch threads, and the yarn produced was much stronger than that of the spinning jenny, but it did require power to drive it. So began the factory age, as large mills began to be established. Arkwright was more businessman than inventor, and some doubt that he was truly the originator of the water frame, alleging that he cribbed his ideas from a number of previous inventors, Nevertheless, he did indeed apply the invention vigorously in his growing empire of mills stretching from Cromford, Derbyshire on the banks of the Derwent (opened 1771) through to Lancashire and (in conjunction with David Dale) on to the New Lanark mills on the banks of the Clyde, Scotland.
In 1779 a further spinning invention by a Bolton weaver, Samuel Crompton, produced a machine that was a mix of the spinning jenny and the water frame which was given the name 'The Mule'. It combined rolling with a moving carriage to produce fine strong yarn. Unfortunately for Crompton he did not patent his invention, unlike Arkwright, and made little money from it. He died a poor and broken man in 1827 after inventing a carding machine, which he then destroyed, fearing others would profit from this too. Originally William Kelly, manager at the New Lanark Mill, harnessed the Mule to water power in 1790 and its use spread rapidly as British manufacturers began to produce high-quality yarn to rival those of Indian craftsmen (fine muslins). This branch of the cotton industry established itself on the banks of the Clyde and in Bolton. Steam power was first applied to spinning machinery in 1785 and spread during the 1790s. Mills were no longer restricted to locating by rivers for water power and so began to migrate to towns and cities. In the early part of the century weavers had often been unemployed while waiting for yarn to be spun; but now, at the turn of the new century, there were not enough weavers to satisfy the demand for cloth. As a consequence wages were driven upwards. Bolton weavers, who earned 3s 6d a yard for fine muslins, adopted airs and graces and often wore £5 notes in their hatbands to display their new-found wealth. However, this golden age did not last, as unskilled men rushed to satisfy the growing demand for weavers, attracted by high rates of pay and partly by the dislocation of the industry as the Napoleonic wars with France developed.
A further major development occurred in 1784 when Edmund Cartwright, a clergyman and professor of poetry at Oxford University, developed a loom driven by power, after hearing a discussion in which Manchester weavers claimed that it was impossible. Cartwright built a factory with 400 steam-powered looms which attracted fierce opposition from hand-loom weavers and they burned it down in 1792, though the power loom came into widespread use in both cotton and wool manufacture throughout the nineteenth century. These technical developments marked the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
The British textiles and clothing industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Cheaper clothing came at a price. Social consequences from these economic developments were many, and the trends established in the textile industry in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain have been repeated the world over, as well as having established the foundations and pattern for life as we know it today in the UK. As steam became the prominent source of power, Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield and other Yorkshire towns became great centres of the woollen industry, just as Lancashire with Manchester at the centre had become the great centre for 'King Cotton' (The Cottonopolis). Within a few years the populations of these towns grew tenfold. Slums, overcrowding, disease, squalor and misery for many were the tangible results of this economic progress. Town planning did not exist; there were few public health regulations, and lighting, drainage and clean water supplies were a hit-and-miss affair. It was during this period that row upon row of poorly built, two-up, two-down houses were established for the growing bands of workers attracted to the large industrial centres like Manchester. People toiled fourteen hours a day, and child labour was prevalent and without regulation. Simple economics dictated that women and children were more widely employed, as they were generally cheaper as labour and less vocal in protest than men. Factory conditions were generally poor, with lighting, ventilation, health and safety being low on the list of priorities for owners. It was during this time that punctuality became a major issue for working times and deductions were made for lateness, illness and singing at work which was regarded as disruptive to production. Rigid discipline and conditions of work akin to those of a prison became the norm for the new factories. Workers began to form trade unions to fight for better working conditions in factories but this did not go unnoticed by the capitalist mill owners. It was significant that the Combination Acts prohibiting trade unions were passed by Parliament in 1799. The development of an improved communication and transport infrastructure, with the canal system at the latter part of the eighteenth century, continuing until the railway system developed in the 1830s and throughout the nineteenth century, facilitated industrial development.
It is estimated that textiles accounted for 7-8 per cent of output measured as gross national product (GNP) for the UK economy in 1812, rising to 11 per cent by 1836. In 1851 the UK textile and clothing industries combined accounted for 21 per cent of employment, representing 10 per cent of the total population (Deane and Cole 1969). Briscoe (1971) estimated that employment levels rose to nearly 2 million people by 1923 with 1.3 million in textiles and a further 651,000 in clothing manufacture. Competition from newly industrialising countries (NICs) and other developed economies had taken their toll throughout the twentieth century as employment levels and output began to fall from the 1930s onward. Britain's involvement in two world wa...
