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NEW BEDFORD, MASS. - The two might seem as unlikely together as a hand-stitched double-breasted suit jacket with a pair of work pants - Anthony Sapienza, the son of a factory manager, and Warren Pepicelli, who grew up on the union side, pounding the pavement as a business agent in Boston, walking from one of the city's 60 women's garment factories to another.

But Sapienza, president of the Joseph Abboud suit factory, and Pepicelli, who runs its union, are working hand in glove. Union and management are collaborating to revamp timeworn garment-making methods in favor of manufacturing techniques pioneered at Toyota Motor Corp. Their goal is survival in the face of cheaper foreign competitors.

The U.S. garment manufacturing industry has bled jobs for decades, as work moved first to cheaper labor in Mexico, then to Asia. As Chinese manufacturing becomes increasingly skilled and sophisticated, the few U.S. factories that remain are vulnerable, and their managers know it.

Sapienza and Pepicelli both have about 30 years in the business. Sapienza, who spent his boyhood Saturdays sweeping cuttings in his family's menswear factory and then wrestling his brother in the pile of scraps, remembers when there were 40,000 U.S. workers making men's clothing. Now there are 4,000, he said.

For Pepicelli, the days when he could stand on a street corner in Boston and look up at row after row of women sewing in second-floor factories are just a memory. Every one of those factories is closed.

''An industry can go away, it can leave this country,'' said Pepicelli, international vice president of the union UNITE HERE. ''It can become extinct.''

That's what everyone at Abboud's sprawling, skylit brick factory, built as a cotton mill around the time of the Civil War, is working to avoid. And if anyone forgets what's at stake, that person need only drive down the street, where the Cliftex menswear mill that used to employ more than 2,000 workers sits, its windows boarded.

Abboud has hired the best workers from its failed neighbors, managers there say. The city lost 67 percent of its manufacturing jobs during the 40 years ending in 2000, according to the Brookings Institute. For many of the factory's workers, Sapienza said, ''this is the one opportunity they have to continue to work.''

The push for change comes from Marty Staff, president and chief executive officer of JA Apparel Corp. Staff and private equity company J.W. Childs bought the company in 2004; the brand's founder, Joseph Abboud, left in 2005.

Keeping Abboud's suit manufacturing in the United States has advantages, such as reduced shipping time, Staff said. He also believes overseas workers can't beat the quality and price of the suits Abboud produces in New Bedford, which sell in Nordstrom Inc. and Bloomingdale's for $700 to $1,000.

To speed production and cement the factory's edge over foreign workers, Staff, who spent about two years as acting CEO of Penthouse Brand Management, read up on Toyota, poring over the book The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production. He asked Sapienza, his team and the union to embrace Toyota principles, including ''kaizen,'' a Japanese word meaning continuous improvement.

The union agreed. Pepicelli said, ''It's an answer, but not a total answer.''

The real problem, Pepicelli said, ''is an unlevel playing field; the competition from overseas makes it very difficult to be efficient and competitive.''

The company is asking workers at the factoryto abandon the ''piecework'' method of making suits, in which every worker does only one task, and move to team-based work. It's also asking workers to speak up at kaizen meetings, voicing their opinions on how they can do their jobs better. It's a big change at the factory, whose previous owners were strictly hierarchical.

So far, there are only three teams, each with eight to 10 workers, at the 600-person factory. The company hopes to move one-third of its jacket production to teams by August and all trouser production to teams by September.

For now, most of the factory's work is still done on the piecework system, which hasn't changed since the 19th century.

A 19th-century industry faces new competition

* THE SUITS: Privately held Joseph Abboud Manufacturing Corp. makes Joseph Abboud suits that retail for $700 to $1,000 at stores including Nordstrom Inc. and Bloomingdale's. It takes four weeks to make a standard suit, but only 250 minutes of work is actually put into each suit. Abboud hopes to cut the turnaround time for a standard suit to 12 working days and make custom-fit suits in three days.

* THE SHIFT: To compete with foreign garment makers, the company has embraced manufacturing methods pioneered at Toyota Motor Corp., including meetings where workers are asked how the company's production methods could be improved. Workers also are moving from a piecework system that hasn't changed since the 19th century to more team-based production.