From a non-existent article of apparel, to a luxury good, to an affordable necessity, to a cheap consumer good, the history of the lowly sock long and reveals much about what is viewed as human progress, industrialization and capitalism. The living memory of a time when socks were just costly enough that women darned heel and toe holes in her family's socks is rapidly disappearing. The need to do so for most disappeared a few decades ago. The skill to do so, may have already disappeared.
Unlike most clothing items, few people are required to manufacture socks. It has long been almost 100% mechanized. In the great migration of textiles from the northeast in the US to the southeast in the quest for cheaper labor, many sock factories ended up in Alabama. Labor to sew the toe together. The only step in the production process that has defied mechanization.
Those Alabama factories are now shuttered. The equipment packed up and shipped to other countries. Unable to compete with the wage differential of five cents a sock.
Ask American consumers if they is would be willing to pay ten cents more for a pair of “Made in the USA” socks and most would say yes. Just as most of us would pay an extra nickel for a tomato to increase the wages of migrant farm laborers. Too bad capitalism doesn't work that way. Getting that sock from the factory or tomato from the field to the consumer requires complex supply chains. With purveyors at each step pricing based on what she/he paid.
All other things being equal, a pair of socks that left an Alabama factory with ten cents more in labor costs than one out of a foreign factory, would have that ten cents stepped on at each point in the distribution chain. The lower the original production cost of the item, the greater the magnification of that ten cents. Consider tomatoes and those who pick them for us.
How much does a pound of tomatoes cost? ($3.00 last week at my farmer's market.) How many pounds were picked to get that pound from the field to the consumer? Two, three? Say it's at the ridiculously high number of four. So, how much do those workers earn for each four pounds of tomatoes they pick? In 1997 as reported on by Democracy Now! it was five cents!
GERARDO REYES-CHAVEZ: It’s forty cents per packet of thirty-two pounds, which is — what it means is you have to pick two tons in a day in order to make only $50.
These workers have been fighting for years to increase their wages by a mere penny a pound in this country. In a different and better world, those doing the most taxing physical labor that feeds us would earn a freaking living wage. That if those $3.00/pound tomatoes contains five cents in harvesting labor cost, I want tomatoes that cost $3.10/pound and worker harvest labor is to be fifteen cents a pound. Not one penny of that additional ten cents is to go to labor jobbers, farmers, distributors, warehouses, or retailers.
I want those sock factories moved back to this country and socks to retail for twenty cents more per pair. With that total twenty cents going to those hard workers sewing those sock seams.
When a nation doesn't support honest wages for honest work, it impoverishes all but those at the top of the income and wealth pyramid. Workers in factories and on farms do honest work. Those on Wall Street, not so much.