In these chapters of Sewing Women, the differences between the Chinese and the Korean sectors of the garment industry are further examined. This was interesting to me because I did not know a Korean sector existed at all. When I hear about garment factories, I assume the ones mentioned are the ones located in Chinatown that employed Chinese workers. The existence of the Korean sector uptown from the Chinese sector is significant. Working uptown can be seen as a step upwards with regards to social mobility. However, it was surprising to me that most of the workers there were undocumented immigrants. It was also surprising that Korean owners found Chinese workers to be unreliable in the assembly line system they had set up. In this way, the two sectors were isolated because they rarely overlapped.

The existence of the two sectors also revealed a much more dynamic garment industry. In the Chinese sector there was a give-and-take system between the owners and the workers. In this way both parties benefited. However the system of sponsoring a new worker also created a liability and prevented the workers from earning higher wages. This was relevant to the disadvantages of coethnic networks mentioned in “Moving On”. As a result of personal connections, workers never acquired the skills to find a job outside of the garment industry or outside of Chinatown. Therefore, in the industry, there is a constant duality of benefits and risks. Workers get health insurance coverage and can be referred to job positions by fellow coethnics, but are exploited by owners, who try to give low wages and minimize expenses spent on training and recruitment, and are restricted to work in the garment industry alone.

      One question that I had while reading was about the owners of the garment factories. Most of the text was about the experience of the worker and what the owners expected of them. However, what was the situation of the factory owners? Did the retailers above them pressure them as well? In this way, the way the owners treated the garment workers becomes subjective because they probably had their own family to support and provide for too.

-Wendy Li