Especially the footwear industry’s
importance to the national economies in developing countries is underlined by
the fact that it is the main contributor to the countries export and – being a
labour intensive industry – provides employment to the most vulnerable groups
of the society (including a large number of women) in towns and villages where
other job opportunities are very scarce. The most of the leather products
and footwear industry is dominated by small- and medium-scale operations. These
SMEs lack of design information, product development knowledge, information and
educated personnel for applying up-to-date quality assurance techniques and
productive technology. The institutional background is weak in providing
necessary services, support and professional training needed for becoming
competitive and thus remaining in business (providing/maintaining working
opportunities). UNIDO with other institutions and organizations through tailor
made technical assistance assisted to up-grade and enhance leather products
sector.
Leather and leather products were
important crafts through 1850, employing 15.7 percent of all workers in
manufacturing, with shoemakers outnumbering workers in any other industry.
European handicraft techniques adopted by colonists persisted with minor
modifications throughout the mid-nineteenth century. In leather making, hides
were soaked in lime and water, and loosened hair was scraped off. After this
cleaning, hides were tanned in large vats by the chemical action of the
tannin-bearing bark of hemlock, sumac, or oak trees. Finishing improved the
suppleness of the leather, enabling the leather to be worked into a variety of
products. The most important, boots and shoes, were made by cutting leather
pieces with a knife, sewing upper-leather pieces, forming the upper around a
foot-shaped device called a last, and stitching the soles to the upper with
awls and waxed thread.
Initially, tanning was undertaken on a
small scale and often on a part-time basis. Using local materials and targeting
local markets, it was widely dispersed. Capital costs were modest, and skills
were acquired experientially. Tanneries in the United States and the colonies
that came to make it up grew with the population, passing 1,000 by 1750, 4,000
by 1810, and 8,000 by 1840. Early shoemakers were widespread; over 11,000
establishments operated in 1850. Saddlers and harness makers, numbering about
3,500 in 1850, were equally common. There was little guild activity in these
trades. Although tanners secured legislation to control their trade, it had
little effect.
The most important changes in the industry
until 1850 were organizational. Emerging regional leather markets led to the
growth of larger tanneries, the separation of merchants from tanners, and some
concentration of tanning in cities, where hides were available, and in the
Catskill Mountains in New York, where hemlock trees abounded.
Nineteenth-century wholesale shoemakers sold ready-made shoes in regional and
increasingly national markets. To supply shoes, they organized a
"putting-out system" in which upper pieces were cut in central shops,
put out to women who sewed them, and then put out again to men who bottomed the
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