Family-owned firms butt heads with factories

Leather goods makers say products made with cheaper labor don't meet
'Made in Italy' standards

By TRACY WILKINSON
Los Angeles Times

P RATO, ITALY — The "Made in Italy" label conjures images of little old men and women in aprons and spectacles stooped over wooden tables, cutting leather and sewing by hand in workshops that dot the hills of Tuscany. It certainly doesn't make you picture Chinese immigrants toiling long hours in ramshackle, poorly illuminated sheds and sleeping in small rooms behind thin plywood in the factories. These days, the coveted Made in Italy label on those Prada bags and Gucci shoes, which can quadruple a price, may not mean what it used to.

Thousands of Tuscan factories that produce the region's fabled leather goods are now operated and staffed by Chinese workers. Though in one of Italy's most picturesque and tourist-frequented regions, many of the factories are nothing more than sweatshops with deplorable conditions and virtually indentured laborers. Chinese workers have become such an integral cog in the high-fashion wheel that large Chinatowns have sprung up here and in Florence. In Prato, Tuscany's historic and industrious textile center 10 miles northwest of Florence, Chinese who are legal residents make up about 12 percent of the population (and probably close to 25 percent when illegal Chinese immigrants are counted, police say).

For the big-name clothing labels, Chinese-staffed workshops provide an important way of keeping costs down by supplying cheaply and quickly made purses, shoes and other products. It helps the fashion houses compete and, many argue, it's better than the alternative: moving production offshore. But for legions of Italian men and women who try to maintain painstaking but costly old-style practices, the cheaper Chinese labor is deadly. "It's a crazy competition. In fact, you can't compete," said Andrea Calistri, whose third-generation family business has been making handbags for top designers for more than a half-century.

In a way, this is representative of the dilemma facing Italy as a whole: How do you compete in a hard-edged global economy while maintaining the standards that give a native craft its panache? Three categories of problematic production plague the Italian fashion industry. First, there are the counterfeit products, part of a multibillion-dollar fraud denounced the world over. Consumers have long been aware of fakes and knockoffs, made who-knows-where, that are hawked on streets or out of car trunks. In 2007, Italian police conducted 250 raids on workshops in Tuscany and confiscated tons of cheap bags and shoes bearing fraudulent Prada, Fendi and Nike insignia.

Then there is the gray area of shoes and bags partially assembled in China, India, Malaysia and other low-cost locales, then brought to Italy for a final buckle, heel or strap. These items can bear "Made in Italy" labels. Finally, there are the products made in Italy by Chinese immigrants. That's often technically legal. But it crosses the line when the workers are in Italy without proper documents and labor conditions are especially nasty. Italian law governs safety in the workplace, the number of hours that can be worked and the minimum wage, but the law is often flouted.

It is possible that a store may have expensive designer bags made by Chinese workers in Italy displayed next to the same bags made, also in Italy, by Italian workers, Calistri said. One costs about $30 to produce, the other about $365. The price tag is the same, often many hundreds of dollars. That's plain wrong, Calistri said. "If a customer pays 1,000 euros for a bag, he has a right to expect not only the best materials and the best creation, but also a respected legal process," Calistri said.

Made in Italy means tradition, know-how and standards. ... It means not only made in Italy, but made in the Italian way." A Prada spokesman issued a statement that said the company "controls directly each phase of the production process." The spokesman declined to answer questions, saying the people at Prada were too busy. It's the season, after all: New York Fashion Week was in full swing.