Now that the jeans, T-shirts and socks are arriving from China in record numbers, local apparel makers are puzzling over how to stay in business.

“There’s a lot fewer manufacturers out there for me to service,” said Jan Rutkin, president of 39-year-old Todd Rutkin Inc., a Huntington Park apparel contractor that cuts clothing patterns and has been losing big-volume contracts to overseas producers for years.

Apparel manufacturing, once a mainstay of L.A. County’s economy, has been struggling for years, as production moves to countries with cheaper labor. The ones that remain are mostly specialized contractors delivering quick turnarounds on high-fashion apparel or providers of ancillary functions, such as cutting and sewing.

Local contractors say they won’t realize the full impact of the Jan. 1 end of quotas for another few months, but so far the numbers are telling. Imports of Chinese textiles jumped 33.6 percent in January to $1.05 billion numbers so high that U.S. producers are lobbying for new protections. Even China has imposed its own tax to restrain exports.

Meanwhile, the U.S. apparel and textile industries lost 12,200 jobs this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Los Angeles County, apparel manufacturing employment fell to 60,800 jobs in January, down 9.4 percent from a year ago.

Not all those lost jobs are connected with the lifting of quotas; the overall trend towards overseas manufacturing has been decimating U.S. manufacturers for years. Since January 2001, 28.2 percent of all apparel jobs in L.A. County have disappeared.

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The full version of this story

is available in the March 21 edition of the Los Angeles Business Journal.