A new phoenix?: modern putting-out in the Modena knitwear industry

Administrative Science Quarterly, March, 1995 by Mark Lazerson

Putting-out in Modena is also fundamentally different from modern subcontracting, even if it is a subset of it. Both subcontractors and putting-out workers usually own their own tools and workplace and are unsupervised. Neither group deals directly with the final consumer of the goods produced, although many subcontractors do fabricate finished products. By contrast, a putting-out firm does not make a finished product and only constitutes a small link in an external production chain. Putting-out is marked by a division of labor among firms in which each firm only undertakes a few tasks. Circumscribed tasks also correspond to the restricted organizational responsibilities of putting-out firms: They only contribute labor and the requisite machinery to transform the manufacturer's raw materials according to his explicit instructions. In contrast, subcontractors normally purchase their own raw materials and usually are responsible for product conception as well as execution. Thus some manufacturing subcontractors number [TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 1 OMITTED] among the world's largest and most powerful industrial organizations, such as Robert Bosch, the German manufacturer of automative electronic components (Lazerson, 1990b).

Subcontractors and putting-out firms also occupy different positions in the manufacturing continuum. Customers who rely on subcontractors often need to supplement their own capacity and capabilities; customers who put out work usually do so because, much like the original putting-out merchants, they do little or no manufacturing (Harrison and Kelley, 1992).

From homeworkers to artisans. Manufacturers have sharply increased the amount of putting-out since the late 1960s. When the nascent knitwear industry in Modena sprouted around Carpi after the Second World War, it built on the existing putting-out networks that had been used to produce straw hats, a traditional industry that dates from the 1600s but that had reached industrial dimensions by the turn of the century (Cappello and Prandi, 1973; Cigognetti and Pezzini, 1993). After the market for straw hats collapsed in the immediate postwar period, many of the putting-out workers switched to knitwear production, a change that slowly transformed putting-out organization (Cigognetti and Pezzini, 1993). Once, many workers were women whose husbands were either small farmers, sharecroppers, or farmhands. In the kitchen of their homes they worked alone or, depending on the season, with their children and husband for a single manufacturer. Today such women, legally defined as homeworkers, number approximately 1200 and work principally for artisans, for whom they perform minor refinishing tasks.(1) Partly because of tax and labor law reforms that provide homeworkers with fairly similar benefits to those of in-house employees, employers have less incentive to hire them. Accordingly, their numbers have declined precipitously over the last decades; some of them have chosen to work directly for artisans, while many others have become artisans themselves (Lazerson, 1990a). The number of unregistered homeworkers unrecorded by the Department of Labor is difficult to gauge. Most are believed to be pensioners who seek extra income off the books. My interviews with trade union representatives, manufacturers, artisans, and illegal homeworkers indicate that the latter have continued to dwindle since the 1970s, when a survey conducted by the city of Modena reported that they had already become marginal to the industry (Comune di Modena, 1978: 17-27).