
How the NYC garment industry is changing: An interview with Daniel Boorstein
As the Brooklyn-based garment maker Samsonite opens a new facility in the Bronx, its CEO Daniel Bockstein has a message for the city’s garment workers: Make your clothes in America.
The Brooklyn, New York-based company, which made its debut at the 2012 Brooklyn Fashion Week and recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, says its New York factory is the first of its kind in the country and the only one in the United States to employ 50 people in a factory.
The factory is part of the Zippered Garment District (ZGM), a cooperative where members work together to produce products that are then sold to retailers.ZGM is a collaboration between the ZIPPERS Cooperative, the New York State Fair and the New England Leather Co-op.
Its members are also making clothes for retailers such as Zazzle, where the company sells a range of high-quality leather goods.
The co-op’s mission is to end the cycle of exploitation that makes American factories so expensive to operate.
The ZIPPers Cooperative, which is owned by New York City-based ZIPPER Group, is one of the few cooperatives in the U.S. that produce clothes directly from local workers and are committed to the same goal: helping to end factory slavery.
“This is a global movement, and the factory is one part of that movement,” Bockenstein said.
“The factories that make the clothes we buy today, those factories are not in this country.
They’re all over the world, and they’re all owned by sweatshops.
And we want to make our products here in the New Yorker.”
Bockenstein, who is married to former ZIPPING co-founder and current CEO, Linda Mascaro, has been on the frontlines of the global movement to end sweatshops since he began his career as an engineer in the mid-1990s.
“In my experience, it’s a matter of life and death,” Bockson said.
The former Brooklyn clothing worker’s personal journey began with a job as a sewing machine operator at a local shoe factory in 1994.
Bock told me he was in his late 20s and had been making clothes in his basement for about 15 years.
It was a good job, he said, but he was also paying off student loans, was struggling with a disability and was on the verge of bankruptcy.
He eventually ended up working at the Brooklyn Zippers Cooperative in 1996 and has been with the cooperative ever since.
In the mid 2000s, Bock started ZIPPering in an effort to help make the world a more fair place for workers.
He said that as the textile industry became more global, the textile and garment industries were becoming more competitive.
He also said that the Zipper factories that ZIPPing members run were not making clothes to sell in the marketplace.
“It was a very global phenomenon that we were seeing,” Bork said.
Bock explained that when a factory went bankrupt, its workers would either get laid off or be moved to the nearby factories.
Bocksons members would pick up the pieces, and when the workers were paid, they would then receive back pay from ZIPPED.
It’s an “a-ha” moment for Bock, he says, as it’s clear that the factories were profitable and that they were able to continue manufacturing.
Bockson has been a part of ZIPPEWS for 20 years and said that in addition to the benefits that Zippedys members get, they are also “the most powerful” group in the cooperative.
The first ZIPPered factory in New York, which opened in 1997, was part of an initiative that created a network of cooperatives across the U to bring workers together to make clothing and to raise awareness about the textile workers plight.
Bork, who has since returned to the Brooklyn textile industry, said that Zippers has a strong social mission and a mission to “help people.”
The Zippering co-operative, which now employs 50 people, is part with the Zuppers Cooperative.
This is part the global textile movement.
It is also part of our mission to end that cycle of slavery in our industry.
Buck said that by doing this, they can end the exploitation that exists.
The factory in the borough that Bock and his co-workers are working at is called the Z-Lounge, and it has been open for nearly three years.
Boonstein said that there are five other ZIPPELounge factories in the city and that the new facility is the largest one in New England.
Z-Lingue was founded in 2002 by ZIPPELLERS member, Linda Bocksten, and she told me that it is the most successful textile cooperative in the nation.
“The Z-Lab is really important because we’re creating jobs, and Z-lab
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