Running along the ceiling of the Joseph Abboud suit factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts, are what appear to be upside-down railroad tracks. The system shuttles fabric between workstations — from cutting to stitching to buttonholing — all on its own.

Installed in 2019, the fabric railroad boosted the factory’s efficiency by about 8%, said Joe Bahena, vice president of manufacturing.

“In the old days, there was somebody with a book out on the floor that was moving those goods to one job or another,” he said.

By automatic fabric transport, Bahena has been able to keep the plant’s labor costs in check, at least enough to stay in business. Many competing garment factories have shuttered amid a decades-long decline in U.S. apparel production. 

“We used to have over 10 times more people employed making apparel in the U.S. just 35 years ago,” said Jason Miller, an economist at Michigan State University. 

Many of those jobs have moved to places like China, where labor is cheaper. Miller said tariffs won’t be enough to bring them back. 

“Quite frankly, for everyday clothes that the vast majority of Americans wear, we will never be competitive again,” said Miller.

So long, socks and underwear. 

But Miller said men’s suits — particularly high-end ones — are different. They can be a once-in-a-lifetime purchase, where the customer really wants something special. 

In other words, consumers of fancy clothes tend to be less price-sensitive, said Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan. That provides an opportunity for domestic producers.

“For a garment manufacturer that is able to continue in this environment, it almost has to be focusing on quality rather than low cost,” said Stevenson.

High quality is achievable thanks, in part, to one key competitive advantage the U.S. labor force still maintains, said Stevenson: “We have very high skilled labor.”

At the Joseph Abboud plant, Bahena said skill and years of experience is required for what he calls “the hardest job in the factory” — sleeve-setting.

A worker at a sewing machine plucks a sleeve off the automated fabric railroad and carefully stitches it onto a navy coat. The job is so important to the look and feel of the suit, Bahena said 100% of the coats they produce get inspected after sleeve-setting.

“We’re gonna make that coat look perfect before it moves on and it gets to our customer,” he said.

Because if you can’t win on price, you pretty much have to be a perfectionist.