Editorial

Citation

Jones, R. and Hayes, S. (2015), "Editorial", Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, Vol. 19 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFMM-06-2015-0044

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, Volume 19, Issue 3.

The end of the end?

It is with great pleasure that I introduce below a

commentary

written by the previous (and founding) editor of JFMM. Richard Jones and I worked closely together both on the journal and as teaching colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University where he always provided a measured and well researched opinion on the state of the textile and clothing industries. It is fair to say that towards the end of his professional academic career his view for the industry was pessimistic at best, something he alludes to in the piece below, but imagine my surprise and pleasure when I read his current thoughts (which follow) in response to the recent wave of momentum around UK repatriation of textile and apparel manufacturing (Steven Hayes).

I spent the last 20 years or so of my academic career documenting the seemingly terminal decline of apparel manufacturing in the UK. Employment, for example, fell from 258,000 in 1980 to 41,000 in 2005 Jones (2006). The fall was largely driven by a move by UK based manufacturers to offshore production in low labour cost regions necessitated by the stubbornly labour intensive nature of the seaming process. This caused great hardship in those geographic regions in which the industry was located and in which alternative employment opportunities were not available. It gives me great pleasure, therefore, to be able a decade into retirement to produce an optimistic report on the industry in the UK in 2015.

The story began with a series of newspaper articles on the findings of the Alliance Report (2015). Initially, I must confess that I read these with a deal of scepticism partly caused by the fact that most of them, such as Hiscott (2015) switched from talking about “textiles”, “clothing”, “fashion” and “the rag trade” as if these were synonymous with each other and could simply be inter-changed. The Alliance Report, it must be noted, does not do this and defines textiles as including textile manufacture, apparel manufacture and leather and contains reports on all of them. I will call this wider textiles when I discuss numbers below. The two numbers which most reports seized upon were that the industry had recently created 5,000 jobs and could create 20,000 in the next five to ten years. In addition, a number of articles commented upon the return of jobs to the UK from offshore. Warner (2015), for example, stated that “Britain’s textile and clothing industry having been virtually wiped out by Asian competition is growing again with quite widespread “on-shoring” of garment production previously outsourced to low wage economies”. This did strike me as intuitively unlikely in the case of apparel manufacture given the labour intensity of the operation noted above. This is less true in textiles, of course. It must be noted that the Alliance Report itself is much more substantial than this containing in depth analysis of both market and global trends. It is not my intention to try and review the report but rather to focus on recent employment trends in the UK. Accordingly I have analysed the statistics for the period 2009-2014 (see Table I) in part just to find out if all the dire predictions I had previously made were wrong!

I read the Alliance Report and checked the ONS (2013) data source used which was not one I was familiar with. I then cross-referenced this with another data source, which I had always used in the past – see Table I. The good news – which will be justified below – is that the textile and apparel manufacturing sectors in the UK are at last sharing in the positive news about the UK economic trends in 2015. The decline in employment has been halted and, in terms of employment, the apparel manufacturing sector seems relatively stable since around 2010. This is particularly significant because as Curran (2008) notes there had been protective devices in place in relation to textiles and apparel since the 1950s. The main device was the Multi Fibre Agreement which ran from 1974 to 2005 (in the last ten years it was known as the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing). A number of residual controls were removed in 2008 which is then a significant date and can be taken as the end of trade controls in the sector. It is true that the exact level of protection – as opposed to trade diversion – afforded by the quota system is a matter of dispute but it is unlikely that the removal could have made things easier for the industries in developed countries. This did coincide with a downturn in economic activity which may have held back demand but it can be stated that the fears of a flood of imports into the EU did not materialise and fears of a final collapse of the sector were exaggerated. In Curran’s (2008) words “It seems that the ten years of restraint and significant job losses under the ATC means that the EU is no longer highly vulnerable to low cost imports”. This seems to me to support the hypothesis that the decline in employment in the apparel manufacturing industry in the UK has bottomed out and that we are now left with a solid core which has some sort of competitive advantage and which can be relied upon as a target for investment and planning.

Let us turn to the numbers as economic analysis always revolves around accumulated numbers and it is particularly useful if a trend is confirmed in two places. First, it can be confirmed that the business register figures do confirm a 5,000 increase in wider textiles in 2013 of which 4,000 were in apparel manufacture. The total employed in wider textiles was 90,000. The labour market trends statistics with which I am more familiar is reproduced for 2009-2014 in Table I. This confirms the total employed and it can further be seen that there was a surge in employment in 2009-2010 after which it fell back to the starting figure in 2011. Since then it has fluctuated a little in the period up to 2014 but there is no sign of any further collapse as was experienced decades ago and both apparel manufacturing and wider textiles seem on a firmer footing.

It can be seen that there were several periods of rising employment September 2009-September 2010 or December 2012-December 2013. In most periods – such as the first – most of the increase in wider textiles (66 per cent) was in apparel manufacture. The average employment in apparel manufacturing in the UK for the period of six years was 30,000 which represents a very small drop over the last decade. In the past I argued against trying to talk up the sector in the face of the long-term collapse of employment but now this is not necessary. Although by 2012 the total had fallen slightly, a rise of 4,000 can still be found between June 2012 and September 2013, and the authors of the Alliance Report could – if they had wished – found evidence of even bigger job creation than they did, e.g. between March 2009 and September 2010 the rise was 14,000. Of this 14,000, 9,000 were in apparel manufacturing; from September 2009 to September 2010 the rise was 9,000 with 7,000 in apparel. It cannot be stressed too heavily how big a break with the trend over the last 20 or 30 years this represents. This is, in my view, the most significant feature of the statistics, i.e. that they represent the end of a period of seemingly never ending collapse. A graph of the trend in employment in the period 2009-2014 (not reproduced here) shows a significant bulge in 2009/2010 and thereafter a more or less flat line. This suggests the remaining industry is competitive. In the apparel sector turnover and gross value added were both up and exports rose substantially from 2003 to 2013. The question as to whether or not this is the result of offshore jobs returning to the UK is more problematical and would need more research. It has been a popular argument in the press but does seem unlikely given the labour intensive nature of apparel manufacturing and yet, as has been seen above, most of the gains in wider textiles have come via the apparel rather than the textiles sector. This is very important because the wider textiles and particularly the apparel sector have long suffered from an image problem in the sense of being seen as industries beyond hope of redemption and not worth investing in. Governments have not seen them as strategically important and have been unwilling to support them in the same way as they would support other sectors such as the motor industry, pharmaceuticals or electronics. This view may now have to be revised and a strong case made that the remaining industry is soundly based. There are signs that this is already happening and that the wider textile industry is sharing in the rising level of industrial activity in the UK. The UK currently has the highest growth rate in the G7 group of nations, one of the lowest rates of unemployment in the EU and a record level of private sector job creation and it no longer seems fanciful to see the wider textile sector sharing in this experience as Spybey (2015) has reported, the northwest textile industry has benefited from around £20 million of Government money via the N. Brown led Textile Growth Programme on top of £13 million invested in 2013. For the first time in decades it was possible to read optimistic reports about investment in the wider textile sector in the northwest at the same time as reports on investment in the car industry in the Midlands – see Tovey (2015). The language used to describe the evolution of a smaller but successful car industry might, if the Alliance Report is correct, be applied to wider textiles.

There are at least two questions worthy of further research; first, it would be useful to establish exactly what caused the surge in 2009/2010 as around that time there were a lot of significant events such as the end of trade controls; the financial crash; a period of sterling weakness which should have boosted exports and so on. It should be noted that in 2007 a new classification system came in for recording employment by industry but hopefully this is not just a statistical illusion! Second, it would be helpful to confirm the exact role of repatriation of jobs especially in the apparel manufacturing sector. As I was completing this piece there was another report by Ruddick (2015) about a major UK retailer using a domestic supplier as Marks and Spencer sources branded trainers from Walsh of Bolton. However, it is important not to build analysis on the selection of isolated examples and so a more thorough investigation of this assertion would be useful. The investigation should include consideration of the impact of re-shoring on prices as this would affect demand.

Finally, I feel I must add a note of caution about the assertion that 20,000 jobs could be created over five to ten years. It is the case, as has been seen above, that there are a number or periods when a significant number of jobs were created, especially in apparel manufacturing, but this was not a cumulative increase as totals dropped back before rising again. I think it is unlikely we will see the total rise from 90,000 to 110,000 or more, for example.

Richard Jones and Steven Hayes

References

Alliance Report (2015), The Alliance Project – the Repatriation of UK Textiles Manufacturing, All Party Parliamentary Manufacturing Group, Manchester

Curran, L. (2008), “Forecasting the trade outcomes of liberalisation in a quota context”, Journal of World Trade, Vol. 42 No. 1, p. 149

Hiscott, G. (2015), Daily Mirror, 10 February

Jones, R.M. (2006), The Apparel Industry, 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishing, Oxford

ONS (2013), “Business register and employment survey”, ONS, London

Ruddick, G. (2015), Daily Telegraph, 11 May

Spybey, K. (2015), Drapers Record, 12 February

Tovey, A. (2015), Sunday Telegraph, 12 April

Warner, J. (2015), Daily Telegraph, 18 March