As textile and apparel production has been at the center of almost every major episode of industrialization since the sixteenth century, so too has it been a vanguard sector in the process of deindustrialization experienced by advanced capitalist countries beginning in the twentieth century. Thus it is no surprise that this sector would play a fascinating role in the world's first postcolonial effort at economic integration between two countries at vastly different levels of economic development. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), implemented in 1994, was expected to speed the two already ongoing trends of a rising apparel sector in Mexico and a steadily declining sector in the United States. US apparel firms would be expected to be an important contributor to Ross Perot's infamous “sucking sound” of jobs moving from the US to Mexico.

To some extent, the apparel sector is proof of the Perot hypothesis. As the editors show in their introductory chapter, employment in the US apparel industry fell by almost fifty percent between 1985 and 2000 while it increased almost fourfold in Mexico. Employment in Mexico's apparel maquiladors rose from about 80,000 in 1994 to about 275,000 in 2001. Mexican apparel exports to the US rose from $199 million in 1983 to $8.1 billion in 2001, representing a growth in the Mexican share of US apparel imports from two percent in 1983 to fifteen percent in 2001. But if the Perot dynamic were the whole story, this book would be the simple and neat story of cost-cutting firms in the US and Canada moving operations south. The book is essential reading for those who want to understand why this simple version is not quite right, and certainly not complete.

The story is most interesting where the changes elude Perot's great suck. And these deviations are many, from the growing sweatshops of New York, to the international organizing efforts of UNITE, to the demise of the border region economy, to the retention of considerable high value-added production and design in New York and Los Angeles, to the rise of full-package blue jeans producers in Torreon, to the development of global sourcing strategies that leave even low-wage Mexico vulnerable. This volume brings together a wide range of expertise on the garment industry and group of valuable surveys and case studies of industrial relations that have evolved during the period of NAFTA. The book is nominally about the effects of NAFTA on the US and Mexico, but with the exception of the fate of the border region, North America's apparel industry reflects broader and longer-run trends in global capitalism, including new, lean-production regimes, global production networks involving considerable international outsourcing, and significant shifts in the international division of labor and income distribution.

Most of the authors approach this broader dynamic through the lens of the global commodity chain, a concept useful in mapping the spatial shifts in global production and in analyzing the power dynamics across and with each of these spaces. The lead firms in most aspects of the apparel industry, those firms that wield most power within the apparel industry commodity chains, are retailers and designers. This characteristic (different say, from automobiles, in which producers themselves are the lead, powerful firms), has made outsourcing a longstanding feature of the industry. International trade and investment liberalization over the past fifty years has made international outsourcing the norm rather than the exception in this industry. How these new production regimes and governance structures play out in North America following the adoption of a regional trade agreement is the subject of this book.

The book is divided into parts, each focusing on a region in North America. The editors provide an excellent introductory overview and conclusion. Part two is on the United States, and the focus is on New York and Los Angeles. These two cities are the main centers of apparel production in the US, with New York the leader in design-intensive women's wear and Los Angeles at the forefront in sportswear design. In both places, the industry is highly dualistic, with a high-end, well paying fashion design intensive sector and a low-paid, largely immigrant labor intensive sector producing more mass marketed apparel. Both cities experienced steady declines in employment in the 1990s. And in both cases these job losses were heaviest among low-skill workers whose jobs were going to even lower-skill workers in other places. In her chapter on New York, Florence Palpacuer shows the persistence of the dualism despite NAFTA, showing that high-end designers and retailers have maintained control over significant aspects of the global industry and low-skill, immigrant workers, mostly Chinese and Dominican, toil in sweatshop or near-sweatshop conditions. Robert Ross argues that in fact there has been a resurgence of sweatshops in the US since the 1980s, after a decline between 1950 and 1980, the result of the same global cost-cutting pressures that has driven much of the global outsourcing in the industry. Judi Kessler's chapter on Los Angeles also finds the employment losses in the low-wage jobs such as cutting, trimming, warehouse work and, of course, sewing. While the California look in sportswear fashion does in fact emanate from Los Angeles designers, the Los Angeles industry is unique because of its proximity to Mexico which has made sourcing there, increasingly in full-package arrangements (which include, importantly, textile production) a common strategy. Thus while the Los Angeles industry continued to grow long after the decline in the New York industry began (and in fact grew at the expense of the New York industry because of its low unionization rates compared to New York), the ease of relocation in Mexico (and Asia) has made the decline more rapid than in New York. The NAFTA further encouraged corporate strategies of Mexican outsourcing. Kessler also finds the NAFTA period to be one of declining labor standards in southern California, although she finds it difficult to blame Nafta per se for these trends, which like many of those described in the book, would likely have continued even in the absence of the regional trade agreement.

The place most clearly affected by the introduction of NAFTA is the US-Mexico border region, which is the subject of Part three of the book. Both David Spener's chapter on El Paso Texas and Robine van Dooren's chapter on Ciudad Juarez show that the vibrant apparel sector on the border resulted largely from the US policy that gave duty-free benefits to most of the value of Maquila operations in Mexico, leaving the border towns in the US ample business contracting and finishing and supplying inputs. The adoption of NAFTA effectively removed this special status, and production moved to the interior of Mexico and full-package production expanded in Mexico as well. This latter development, a highly promising one for economic development in Mexico, is the subject of the next section of the book, and especially the chapter by Gereffi, Bair and Martha Martinex on “Torreon: The New Blue Jeans Capital of the World.” The authors identify a NAFTA effect, which encouraged full-package production in Mexico, with branding and marketing remaining in the US as the core competence of American firms. The NAFTA effect meant an upgrading of the Mexican industry and an increase in the power of Mexican firms, who began establishing joint ventures with U.S. partners. Employment in Torreon expanded during the 1990s and wages and benefits also rose. Working conditions, the authors find, “often are better than those in similar factories in the United States.” The chapter by Enrique Dussel Peters, Clemente Ruiz Duran and Michael J. Piore also concerns full-package production, but adds a political dimension to the case for industrial upgrading in Mexico. The authors show that Mexican employment growth in apparel veils the decline of small-scale, labor intensive production and the rise of more large-scale, capital intensive operations. But even these larger-scale operations will only succeed, the authors argue, if industrial policy focuses on the promotion of learning best practice techniques and the diffusion of cutting-edge technology.

The extent of industrial upgrading in Mexico and the possibility of implementing industrial policies to further promote this, constitute an exciting development in the highly contested relation between liberalization and economic development. But the degree to which the Torreon experience can be sustained and spread to other Mexican sectors is very hard to predict. Mexico's experience during the NAFTA period has been one of rapid export growth along with very slow real economic growth and declining real wages. Thus the Torreon experience, while clearly significant, is not obviously representative or replicable. The overall evidence thus far does not lead us to reject the maquilization prediction of NAFTA's effect made by many on the political left.

Note that just as it would be wrong to credit NAFTA with causing the pockets of industrial upgrading, so too would it be wrong to see NAFTA as the cause of stagnation. These tendencies would likely have built up with or without NAFTA, the result of broader trends in the globalization of production. This issue of NAFTA's impact per se is further complicated by the Peso crisis that coincided with the adoption of NAFTA in the mid-1990s. A shocking reminder of the broader trends hit me as I was finishing this review: The US government announced that in the first month since the phase-out of the old Multifiber Arrangement (MFA January 2005) Chinese exports of major apparel products to the US shot up 546 percent over the previous year. The predictions that with the phase-out of the MFA that China would “clothe the world” appear to be borne out. The disruption in the global industry that will result is enormous given how many countries rely on apparel production and exports to provide their people jobs, income and foreign exchange. Poorer countries in South Asian and Sub-Saharan Africa will be severely injured by the Chinese gains in world market share. What about North America? Here the story is not as obvious. Trade diversion resulting from NAFTA had already injured Caribbean countries, as shown in the chapter by Michael Mortimore and in Dale Mathews' chapter on Dominican Export Processing Zones. But the MFA phaseout trumps NAFTA as far as the apparel sector is concerned. Mexico's industry will clearly be severely injured, and lead US firms in the global apparel commodity chain will continue to lead and are likely to profit nicely from the production shift. It is likely that two aspects of the market will remain in North America, The high-end, fashion intensive apparel that requires a close link between designer and manufacturer will likely remain. It is also possible, although not as likely, that a small but significant portion of North American and even Mexican production will continue in more mass-based, lower-priced apparel markets in North America. Even with its great cost advantages, the Chinese cannot completely dominate the market. In part, this is because with the never-ending effort to reduce inventory carrying costs, local suppliers will be essential in responding to unexpected shifts in demand. While such a “buffer” role may not seem significant, Abernathy et al (2000) have identified this aspect of the market as a possible source of growth in North American and even US production.

Free Trade and Uneven Development is an informative, well-researched and clearly-argued book. For an anthology, it is remarkably focused in its scope and unusually consistent in its methodology. It is a book of value to sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, political scientists and economists. What the book lacks most—an analysis of the North American apparel industry following the MFA phaseout—will be provided, this reviewer sincerely hopes, by a sequel volume from the same group of experts.