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Current music:	silence

American Apparel: Sweatshop-Free Sexual Harassment and Union-Busting!
Recently, someone I know wrote a LiveJournal entry that linked to criticism of the American Apparel company posted on NoSweatshop.org. A mysterious person whose profile states, "I work for American Apparel and I created this account so that I can respond to livejournal entries about the company... What can I say, I am an American Apparel nerd" commented on the entry to defend American Apparel, claiming, "Believe it or not, Dov Charney is not driven solely by profits (or sex for that matter). He actually cares about people who work for him. I wanted to work for him because I respect him."

She does not say, of course, whether the company is paying her to police LiveJournal entries about American Apparel this way. Perhaps American Apparel is a true leader in the futuristic trend in which no one will ever be able to even link from anywhere on the Internet to perfectly well-documented negative information about any company without having that company's public relations department leave comments pretending to be marvelously happy employees defending the company from their sheer love of it, and conveniently not mentioning that they get paid to write this stuff.

Anyway, the person I know who wrote the Livejournal entry was sufficiently bothered by the American Apparel employee's comments that she made the entry friends-only, and even made an additional entry to say that "if anyone on my friends list wants to cheer on American Apparel, please feel free!" and is now considering making her entire journal friends-only.

Had the employee's comments not created all this intimidation, it's questionable whether I would ever have gotten around to linking to the same information myself. But the fact that there's a LiveJournal account devoted entirely to defending American Apparel made me angry enough that it caused me to not only post an entry, but also do further research and collect even more information that the author of the original LiveJournal entry did not collect. And if anyone wants to try to intimidate me into making this entry friends-only, please be aware that you'll probably have to resort to filing a lawsuit against me - and I fail to see how any court could reasonably find against me for linking to information I found elsewhere on the Internet, documenting my sources, and finding no reason whatsoever to doubt the accuracy of the information I am linking to.

Let's start with a summary of what the company claims to be. From the article "Part Cotton, Part Virtue, Part Come-On" by Alex Kuczynski, from the New York Times, June 2, 2005 (reprinted on NoSweatshop.org):

Founded by Dov Charney, 36, a flamboyant Canadian, American Apparel actively promotes what its calls an anti-sweatshop policy. Every label on every T-shirt, pencil skirt and tube sock proclaims the creed, which reads in part, "All of our 1,500 employees, sewing and administrative alike, are paid fairly and have access to basic benefits like healthcare."

Yet Dov Charney has are problems. Big problems. From the ABC News article "Sexy Sweats Without the Sweatshop: American Apparel Founder Says Treating Workers Well Helps Business Thrive," December 2, 2005:

Three sex harassment lawsuits were filed by former employees, one of them claiming he fostered a "hostile work environment based on her sex." Charney is quick to point out, "None of these plaintiffs are accusing me of having an intimate relationship with them," adding, "I've never had any intimate intentions with these women. I never propositioned them in any way."

Among the charges in the lawsuits, Charney was accused of making "unwelcome, inappropriate comments, suggestive nonverbal signals … dropping his pants, revealing his underwear."

"All these allegations are false," Charney said. But he added he doesn't see any problem with wearing underwear in the office if it's connected to his work. "I think for a designer to be in his underwear when he's designing underwear is quite common. And I'm in my underwear in my office all the time," he said.

So uh, let's get this straight: Dov Charney says the charge of revealing his underwear to his employees is totally false, aside from the fact that he says he's in his underwear in his office all the time. Totally false and simultaneously true! What a neat trick!

And it gets worse. A reporter named Claudine Ko interviewed Charney for the July 2004 issue of Jane magazine and wrote in her article that right in front of her, while she was conducting her interviews of him, Charney received oral sex from one of his female employees, and then went on to masturbate in front of Ko about eight times. Here are some excerpts from Ko's article, as reprinted in a blog entry on Jewlicious.org, August 2, 2004:

I asked him how he relaxed. Oral sex he says, settling into a chair behind a cloud of smoke. "I love it . . . I am a bit of a dirty guy, but people like that right now."

Explaining exactly how the rest of the night unraveled is somewhat difficult. Let's just say, the female employee helped him "put on a show" for me. I watched, trying to be objective, detached - sorta like a . . . war reporter?

And then later in her article (also excerpted in the same blog entry), Ko goes to Charney's home to interview him further:

Soon enough he loosens his Pierre Cardin belt.

"Are you going to do it again?" I ask.

"Can I?" he says, adjusting himself in his chair.

And thus begins another compulsive episode of what Dov likes to call "self-pleasure," during which we casually carry on our interview, discussing things like business models, hiring practices and the stupidity of focus groups.

"Masturbation in front of women is underrated," Dov explains to me later over the phone. "It's much easier on the woman. She gets to watch, it's a sensual experience that doesn't involve a man violating a woman, yet once the man has his release, it's over and you can talk to the guy."

Don't you love watching sexual harassers make absurd attempts to sound "feminist"?

The author of that Jewlicious.org blog entry seems, interestingly, to have felt compelled to later drastically update it to make it far more favorable to Dov Charney and American Apparel. (Hmm, did American Apparel employees get in contact with him, too?) In his apology to American Apparel, he emphasizes that Claudine Ko did not mind watching Dov Charney masturbate and have sex with an employee:

All indications are that whatever happenned [sic] with Claudine Ko, the reporter who wrote the Jane Magazine article, was isolated and fully consensual. I spoke to Claudine and she haid [sic] this to say about Charney:

Whenever I see a picture of Dov I can’t help but smile and think fondly of him. That reporting experience was fun, engaging, stimulating and interesting. Dov Charney is a mad man and I like that.

Sorry, but that doesn’t sound sinister at all. Sounds like some folks had a good time together.

Yes, and that's all well and good (though there's no accounting for Claudine Ko's taste) - except that one of Charney's employees was also involved in putting on that sexual "show" for Claudine Ko! About that, the Jewlicious.org blogger has this to say:

[W]ith respect to sleeping with his employees, this is where I hang my head in shame the most. I was so quick to judge and yet, when I think about it, pretty much every woman I have had a serious relationship with in the past 8 years is someone I met at work. What a shocker given that I spend almost 90% of my waking hours at work. Like Charney, I am also in an executive position and like Charney, I was always careful that everything I did was consensual. So what’s the big deal?

Um. The fact that those employees can't feel free to refuse you without risking being fired by you is the big deal. Believe me, I am not opposed to romance between coworkers where neither one supervises the other; my own parents met that way, and I wouldn't exist if they hadn't. But my parents were of equal rank in their office. So since the Jewlicious.org blogger does not have the moral authority to criticize Dov Charney for sexual harassment, I will criticize both of them myself instead, because I do. I solemnly swear that I have never once in my entire life had the slightest sexual interaction with anyone I supervised at work. Nor with anyone who supervised me at work. Nor even with anyone who was ever employed by the same company as me or ever affiliated with my workplace in any way! Nor have I ever even supervised anybody in the first place! Okay? So I have the moral authority to call these people sexual harassers. That is what they are.

Amusingly, Dov Charney apparently feels that Claudine Ko victimized him. From the ABC news article again:

Charney said it was a "consensual exchange." He added, "I had no idea she was going to write about my personal life in the way she did."

"Personal" life? When you're masturbating during interviews that someone else is paid to conduct with you, then no matter how consensual it may have been, I don't see any grounds for calling that your personal life. And when you're having sex with one of your employees in front of said reporter during the interviews, ditto. He doesn't even claim he ever asked her not to write about those things, either. Apparently the idea that a reporter might actually write about things that took place during interviews simply never occurred to him.

But Dov Charney appears to be much in the habit of accusing the women he's accused of sexually exploiting of instead sexually exploiting him. Here's another quote from that New York Times article I quoted at the beginning of this entry:

Mr. Charney said in a telephone interview this week that the Jane article was accurate. "I've had deep intimacy and love relationships with many women, some of whom have worked for me," he said. "We're so conditioned to think that sex between co-workers is exploitative. Well, maybe these women were exploiting their potential to be with me."

Uh, right. And it gets better! From the article "Man in his Carlsberg Years Leads Youth Revolution: American Apparel Founder Speaks About Sex, Youth, and the After-Taste of Social Justice by Jon Meyer, McGill Daily, November 22, 2004:

"Feminism is extremely restrictive. You can't call a woman a bitch, you can't call her this, you can't call her that. But that's what life's really like. Yet she can do whatever she wants. It's out of balance and that's why young people haven't embraced feminism, because it's out of balance."

Charney's rant against the "lawsuit culture" of the West seems convenient, considering the man is rumoured to sleep with each and every one of his female models, and once masturbated in front of an interviewer from Jane Magazine.

He pursues his point. "Out of a thousand sexual harassment claims how many do you think are exploitive? There are almost no sexual harassment charges from men against women. They're not acceptable – it's considered that only women are the victims.

"Women initiate most domestic violence, yet out of a thousand cases of domestic violence maybe one is involving a man." And this, Charney decries, "has made a victim culture out of women."

It's unclear where Charney gets his facts. According to the most recent survey done by the U.S. Department of Justice, 85 per cent of victimizations by intimate partners in 2001 were against women. Even if Charney is referring to unreported face-slaps, these sorts of instances pale compared to the 1,247 women (versus 440 men) who were killed in 2000 by an intimate partner.

But of course we know all those women initiated the violence against them! They served dinner a degree too hot or too cold, and everyone knows that men whose female partners don't do all the cooking for them, and to perfection at that, have a right to beat their partners up!

Not only that, but even the company's claims of being sweatshop-free are misleading! From the article "American Apparel Not Progressive, Just Perverse" by Jason Rowe, Washington Square News (nyunews.com), January 27, 2005 (reprinted on NoSweatshop.org):

According to a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board and settled by the company, American Apparel engaged in tactics of intimidation to bust an attempt at unionization, including interrogating workers about their support for a union, soliciting workers to withdraw their union authorization cards and threatening to close the facility if a union was formed. The company also allegedly printed armbands to be worn at work which read, "no union," and forced employees to attend an anti-union rally.

As a result of their settlement with the National Labor Relations Board, American Apparel signed an agreement promising not to engage in union-busting tactics in the future.

Furthermore, the article "American Apparel: All Sweaty" by Abram Sauer, from brandchannel.com, explains:

American Apparel's "sweatshop free" claim is a bit like saying brandchannel is "illiteracy-free." Here's what I mean and why it's true: There's no denying AA makes high-quality garments, but to do this it needs to be in close control of the process as well as have access to skilled labor. Most developing nations on the "sweatshop-circuit" either do not, or make it very difficult to, fulfill either of these prerequisites. And while AA does pay above average garment industry wages, it is essentially claiming something that could be said by almost any other clothing brand legitimately made in a developed nation. . . . AA's founder Dov Charney recently said, "I think [being sweatshop-free] is a secondary appeal and I'm getting a little bored with it myself. I'm de-emphasizing it" (Los Angeles Business Journal, May 2004).

Perhaps achieving maximum profitability from the politically progressive niche market might have required him to give up sexually harassing his employees - and since he has no intention of doing anything as drastically progressive as that, the mainstream exploitation market is starting to look more appealing to him now.