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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
It's not the most obvious way to run a successful textile company in Los Angeles: Pay the workers a living wage and give consumers absolutely no choice.
Feb 11, 2004 | The revolution, says Dov Charney, the manic 35-year-old founder and CEO of American Apparel, will be standardized. A purveyor of "sweatshop free" T-shirts and casual wear, American Apparel is the exception to the rule in today's fashion and textile industry. The company doesn't outsource its production, and it confines all aspects of manufacturing and management to a single building in downtown Los Angeles. Everything from knitting the cloth to designing the garments takes place in a seven-story pink warehouse with the huge banner "American Apparel Is an Industrial Revolution," unfurled outside the top floor. (Or, as Charney puts it, "a FUCKING industrial revolution.")
In 2003, American Apparel grossed $80 million, double its sales figures for 2002. Those numbers are expected to double again in 2004. Last November, the company opened its first three retail stores, two in New York City and one in Los Angeles; by the end of the year, there will be outposts in London, Frankfurt and Berlin. The globetrotting Charney is scouting retail and manufacturing locations in Thailand, Mexico and China, where, he says, American Apparel is committed to paying store and factory workers U.S.-dollar minimum wage.
"Our goal is to become the biggest apparel operation in human history," says Charney, who cheerfully confesses to being, well, a megalomaniac. "We will challenge the Gap in my time."
Four years into the 21st century, any 10-year-old knows that outsourcing labor is the dominant trend in global manufacturing. More than 30,000 U.S. textile workers lost their jobs in the past year and a half, according to the American Textile Manufacturers' Institute.
But nationally and internationally, subcontracting in the garment industry is associated with lack of oversight and substandard labor conditions, says Richard Appelbaum, a UC-Santa Barbara sociologist and the author of "Behind the Label," a book on L.A.'s garment industry.
"The real problem with today's manufacturing is the outsourcing," he says. "It makes it almost impossible to know where the supply chain ends." (The word "sweatshop," after all, was first used in reference to subcontracted garment workers in 19th century England who labored in their own homes.)
Enter American Apparel, where Charney pays his 760 predominantly Hispanic shop workers an average of $11 an hour, in addition to providing health insurance, paid vacation and free English classes. The company's favorable working conditions are far from the norm, says the nonprofit Garment Workers Center in L.A., where sewing has become the largest sector in the county's manufacturing economy. According to the Department of Labor, only a third of the city's 5,000 garment factories comply with federal and state labor laws, such as minimum wage standards, overtime pay and record keeping. Over half routinely violate health and safety standards.
But don't confuse Charney with Cesar Chavez. Heir to the Jewish "garmento" tradition -- his grandfather in Montreal was an "immigrant business hustler" -- Charney wants to be recognized as a brilliant entrepreneur, not a benevolent employer. He has a love-hate relationship with the union-led anti-sweatshop movement and says that "bringing a little dignity to the workplace" is simply a byproduct of the company's hyper-efficient "vertically integrated" business model. Apply principles of good design to fashion and to factories, says this son of a painter and an urban planner, and you can solve any problem -- even the social and structural woes of present-day capitalist production.
