Female labour: piecework on the balcony and clothing manufacturing workshops on the outskirts of Thessaloniki’s historical centre

Women who were looking for immediate employment were hired by small-scale manufacturers to embroider evening gowns, finish garments, iron shirts, etc. They worked from home and got paid by the unit.

Sofia, who used to be in this line of work, said: ‘I have a really small balcony in my house which I’ve closed off. That’s where I put my sewing machines and worked for years. I used to make garment samples for a store downtown. My employer would cut the fabric and give it to me to turn into a garment that I would then give to the other seamstresses for production. I didn’t like this kind of work back then, because I was used to haute couture, I had worked in some very good fashion houses, but at the time I had no choice but to work from home because my son was still young’.

For decades, clothing manufacturing had been associated with working from home. Even as early as the interwar period, it was common for women to sew the family’s clothes at home on sewing machines inherited by their mothers or grandmothers. One of our interviewees said about the sewing machine brought over by her grandmother from Smyrna that ‘these machines were an important dowry’, as they facilitated the household’s everyday life.

Later, when a large number of small-scale clothing industries and garment manufacturing workshops opened in downtown Thessaloniki, it was female labour, often unskilled, which played a significant part not only in the commercial growth of Northern Greece, but also in the survival of the average Greek family. Indicatively, one of our interviewees, Th., a long-time resident of Ano Poli, mentioned:    

 ‘When this whole thing started, we were living on 19 Theotokopoulou Street. It was shortly before my husband was discharged from the army. That’s when a fellow soldier who had lived in Germany told him about department stores in Germany and described how they worked. My husband learned about the export subsidies given by the Greek state to boost exports. He also learned that German department stores ordered many of their garments from small manufacturers in Greece. When we got into this business in the 1980s, it was purely a matter of survival. I had no relevant education. I watched what everybody else did, helped them and learned by doing. When we started out, we made skirts on the ground floor under our house that we had turned into a workshop. Making skirts is the hardest because you never know how the skirt will turn out. That failed so my husband went into small-scale retail: He would go to manufacturers and pick up the excess garments left over from orders placed by other companies. There were always extra pieces that we could resell. We got to meet clients that way and the profit margins were good. But often the merchandise we already had was not enough for the clients so we went back into sewing. At first, we made everything, everything the clients asked, menswear, womenswear, kids’ clothes. Sweaters and jerseys were very popular. But then, at some point in the 1990s, we started making only childrenswear […].’