E-Mail This Article to a Friend Trying ethics on for size (continued)
	Related links American Apparel A multi-million-dollar clothing company that promotes itself as sweatshop-free, American Apparel recently opened one of its 28 national retail shops on Newbury Street. No Sweat Apparel A Waltham-based clothing company that sells clothing manufactured only by workers who earn a living wage, have health-care benefits, and belong to labor unions. UNITE HERE Web site for the Union of Needletrades, Textiles and Industrial Employees, who merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union last July to form UNITE HERE. American Apparel in the New Yorker Staff writer Malcolm Gladwell profiles American Apparel co-founder Dov Charney in 2000. No Sweat in the San Francisco Chronicle Coverage of Adam Neiman taking on Nike’s headquarters in 2003. Jewlicious A Jewish blog riffs on an infamous interview with Dov Charney that appeared in Jane Magazine. Behind the Label A multimedia news Web site that’s an initiative of UNITE HERE posts an accusation that American Apparel is a union buster.

In the back of No Sweat’s modest headquarters are two storage rooms of merchandise: women’s athletic gear from Universal Sportswear, in Bangor, Pennsylvania; silk-screened T-shirts from Mirror Image, a union screen-printing shop in Pawtucket, Rhode Island; white camisoles from Montreal. In a third stockroom are thousands of shoeboxes from Jakarta, Indonesia. Each contains the company’s hallmark product, the No Sweat sneaker. Last May, Neiman appropriated the chunky-sole design of Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers, the classic Converse canvas shoe that was snatched up by Nike in 2003, and began selling low-rise, sweatshop-free knockoffs for $35 a pair (they’re now $46). Each box of No Sweat’s faux Chucks contains a card detailing the wages and benefits of the Indonesian workers who manufactured the shoes: the lowest-paid employee in the Jakarta factory earns $90 a month — an estimated 20 percent more than the regional minimum wage — along with a rice allowance, fully funded health insurance, and paid maternity leave. (Neiman says those monthly salaries have risen $10 since the card was printed.)

"Part of our mission is to get consumers thinking about their own working conditions," explains Neiman. "I want [consumers] to look at that sheet in the shoebox and say, ‘A hundred percent hospitalization? I don’t have that! Paid maternity? I don’t have that. How come these guys do? Oh — they have a union.’ "

For the No Sweat sneaker’s release, Neiman staged a Michael Moore–style confrontation by visiting Nike’s Oregon headquarters, armed with a free pair of No Sweat shoes for CEO Phil Knight. At a press conference, he challenged the sneaker behemoth to supply a similar wage-rate card with its products. (In 1992, Neiman’s No Sweat business partner, Jeff Ballinger, published a copy of an Indonesian Nike worker’s pay stub in Harper’s magazine; the stub revealed that the woman earned 14 cents an hour and $37.46 a month — roughly half the cost of a pair of Nikes.) Not surprisingly, Knight "wasn’t available," so Neiman met with Caitlin Morris, Nike’s spokeswoman for global issues, who said the activist’s ideas weren’t feasible for a much larger company like Nike.

Although No Sweat’s efforts were a figurative pebble tossed at Nike’s corporate armored tank, the publicity stunt provided Neiman with enough news coverage to sell 30,000 pairs of sneakers. The sneaker’s relative success boosted gross sales of No Sweat’s manufacturing company, Bienestar Inc., from $84,806 to $744,555 in one calendar year. Today, nearly 100 "fair trade" outlets worldwide carry No Sweat sneakers.

Such figures suggest there’s a viable market for sweatshop-free goods — as does a University of Michigan study from October 2004. In the report, published in the Labor Studies Journal, researchers document how they stocked two department-store racks in the Detroit area with identical socks. They labeled one stand "Good Working Conditions" — defined as "no child labor," "no sweatshops," and "safe workplaces" — and left the other rack unadorned. Increasing the price of the GWC socks incrementally over a span of five months, the researchers found that one-third of customers were willing to shell out 10 percent more for sweatshop-free garments. The report concluded that "a sizeable and profitable niche market could be developed for some consumer products manufactured under good working conditions."

"Consumers are routinely willing to pay enormous premiums for benefits and design," says Scott Nova, executive director for the anti-sweatshop Workers Rights Consortium. "Is it really so unlikely that they’ll pay three percent more to know [their clothes weren’t] made by a nine-year-old?"

And once this demand is proven, Neiman believes, the bigger clothing companies will realize they’re missing out on potential sales. "When the government tells corporations to do something, it’s like their parents telling them. When the laborers and the activists tell them, it’s like their kid brothers. But if the consumer and the investors tell them, those are the girls they want to date," he says. "If some new guy pops up on the block doing something that gets the girls’ attention, they will turn back flips to imitate them. Basically, everyone would rather be seduced than coerced."

Dov Charney wants to get the girls, too. And he clearly agrees with Neiman’s philosophy of persuasion; in fact, it’s the engine that drives his $150 million business. But instead of aiming to entice stodgy corporate types, he’s after sexy, hip young adults. Neiman can have the Mother Jones readers; Charney wants the Vice set.

In fact, Charney never set out to be a spokesman for the sweatshop-free industry. A Tufts University dropout from Montreal who endured a miserable stint working in the garment business in South Carolina, he opened his own factory so he could have total control over product quality — not because he planned to wage any labor campaigns. And yet, eight years later, he employees 3000 workers at his Los Angeles factory, and there are waiting lists to work for him.

Charney openly eschews political affiliation, deriding both the left and right as "boring." In labor-reform circles, he’s a lightning rod for criticism: anti-sweatshop activists accuse him of resisting his employees’ attempt to unionize last year. Feminists and conservatives don’t particularly like him either, since American Apparel advertisements feature young women in clingy underwear, or nude in the bathtub.

But Charney doesn’t think drawing on sex is contradictory to the rest of his business practices. "They say that because we’re sweatshop-free, our advertising can’t have beautiful people. No, we have to just boil it down to common people," explains Charney, who posed bare-ass for a Vice ad himself. "We’re saying, ‘Hey, our shit’s better. You’re going to look better in our socks.’ That’s the message, you know, that our shit’s better."

Unlike No Sweat, American Apparel has no desire to convince big-name brands like Levi’s and Fruit of the Loom to change their labor practices. "Show me where Fruit of the Loom’s sexy panties are," says Charney. "It’s not like young kids are dying to be in Fruit of the Loom. They don’t say, ‘I don’t even want to go out tonight without my Fruit of the Looms.’ [Fruit of the Loom] has lost touch with young adults. I’m not worried about changing them."