'Kinky Boots' Is a Nice Story, But a Fairy Tale In Reality

In the play “Kinky Boots”, Steve Pateman shifts his footwear plant to produce high-end boots for the Tran market, and saves a company and its jobs in an economically besieged British factory town. Nice story, but a fairy tale. In reality, Pateman’s company went out of business soon after, and Pateman settled for a job as a firefighter.

The play offered an appealing plot, but in real life no footwear firm can hope to survive without shifting considerable production to developing countries.

In the play, a character based on Pateman saves the struggling shoe company he inherited from his father - and the jobs of its workers, by forming an unlikely partnership with a drag queen to produce a line of long, leather high-heel boots.

A heart-warming story, but in truth the only remnants of the company is a scrap book of publicity surrounding BBC coverage of the factory’s temporary turnaround. When the BBC returned for a follow-up 18 months after its original production bringing attention to the firm, it was to cover the company’s shutdown.

For a time, Pateman tried to make a go of it in the mail-order business, but that too soon folded. The plant is now the site of a housing development - the fate that Pateman saves it from in the play.

The fact is, any story about the long-term success of a footwear plant and the semi-skilled jobs it provides - in the U.K or any developed country - is bound to be a fantasy.

Almost all high-income countries have seen their footwear production fall, shifting to developing countries capable of producing large supply at a low cost. Now, 99 percent of shoes sold in the United States are imported, mostly from China, Vietnam and Indonesia. The number of Americans employed in manufacturing footwear has declined by over 80 percent. Major brands like Nike and Adidas have been developing new technology, but they still rely on factory workers abroad, who are far more nimble than robots.

But the industry is far from dead even in developed countries. However, the focus in on higher-end, higher-paid jobs in design and marketing - leaving the cutting, gluing and stitching to plants overseas.

In this respect, offshore production in developing countries can actually save jobs in developed countries, by providing relatively inexpensive labor and ensuring the company’s ability to compete - even as actual production jobs move thousands of miles away.

Kinky Boots is an appealing fairytale. But the fact is, shoe companies can survive only by outsourcing labor to workers who will settle for far lower wages than anyone in the developed world would accept. There are well-paid jobs in the industry - but only in companies that retain their competitiveness - and that requires inexpensive production that a company based solely in the U.K can’t achieve.