If you take the nickel tour of Arnold Lorber's textile plant in Carson, bring a phrase book. Make that several.
On the shop floor, Lorber chats with workers in staccato Spanish, one of nine languages he has mastered in 50-plus years in the textile trade. He introduces a visitor to his Russian computer expert, a German dyer and an Israeli plant manager. He then touches the keypad of a sophisticated fabric finishing machine programmed in four languages: English, Italian, German and Spanish.
"It's like the United Nations in here," says Lorber, a Czechoslovakian-born entrepreneur who cut his teeth in the South American rag trade before building one of the largest U.S. fabric mills west of the Mississippi.
Offshore competition may be shredding America's hidebound textile industry, but business is bustling in Los Angeles thanks to a new breed of import. In a decade when the U.S. has shed nearly 120,000 textile jobs, immigrant capital, labor and know-how have boosted L.A. County's fabric-making work force by more than 70% in the 1990s alone.
Koreans, Iranians, Chinese, Europeans, Pakistanis and other foreign-born entrepreneurs have found a niche here cranking out wildly colored fabrics at breakneck speed for Southern California's quick-turn apparel trade. L.A. County now is home to close to 400 knitting, dyeing and finishing concerns, 40% of them started since 1991, according to state figures.
Combining Old World training and contacts with New World hustle and technology, foreign-born entrepreneurs have built a $1.7-billion local industry employing nearly 17,000 workers by spotting fresh opportunities in a mature field.
"It's very simple," says Korean-born Thomas Rhee, explaining the fast growth of his L.A.-based Calendar Textile Inc. "Back East, those guys go home at 5
o'clock. . . . I work 12 to 14 hours a day, 6 1/2 days a week, and I don't take vacations. The textile industry has changed, and it's the immigrants who have adapted."
Industry watchers say that entrepreneurial energy, combined with heavy automation, L.A.'s proximity to Mexican sewing plants and NAFTA rules favoring onshore textile production have enabled L.A.'s nimble fabric makers to remake a small corner of a fraying domestic industry.
"I pinch myself every day," says Steve Craver, a textile industry needle supplier who says his Southern California sales have tripled in recent years. "This is truly the wild, wild West."
