Abstract
The garment industry has been aptly described as a "quintessentially immigrant industry.” Garment firms have relied heavily on "cheap" labor to ensure low production costs—and more often than not this cheap labor has translated into immigrant labor. While cheap labor has tended to connote tolerance for both low wages and substandard working conditions, more emphasis has been placed on the former in the literature. Based on 11 weeks of participantobservation in a St. Louis garment factory, this article deals with the interim of ethnic succession from the perspective of the marginalized, "established" sector. Here the emphasis will be placed upon how the maintenance of substandard working conditions appears to be equally dependent on a work force with few employment alternatives and represents the last vestige available to the dependent‐sector firm attempting to minimize production costs through the hiring of new immigrants, [sweatshop, working conditions, ethnic succession, marginalized labor]
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