American Apparel is known for using sexual imagery in its advertising. A risky choice perhaps, given lawsuits against it for sexual harassment and the fact that its 2013 annual report states all eight of its directors are men, but hardly a concern unique to one company.
The company’s real problem is the same as the strength it proclaims on its website. Namely, that it is an integrated clothing manufacturer as well as retailer, which produces all its products in the United States.
For this reason, it boasts of being “sweatshop free” and highlights the claim that “A garment worker in Bangladesh earns an average of $600 a year. An experienced American Apparel garment worker can earn $30,000+ and receive benefits.”
Leaving aside the implicit protectionism and recent improvements to the minimum wage, this statement does beg many further questions. How experienced for instance?
Also, California’s minimum wage rate, which is due to go up to $9 an hour, falls short of a living wage for Los Angeles county where AA’s manufacturing workers are based.
LA city councillors recently proposed making $15/hr ($32,000), a benchmark. And MIT’s living wage calculator suggests that for one adult supporting one child resident in LA, the living wage should be $23/hr (or $48,000 a year.)
However much the company may take pride in its worker benefits, the facts suggest its wages are not dramatically higher than market rates.
For it to use its branding to imply otherwise is bad enough. To go further and explicitly denigrate retailers who source from Bangladesh, many of whom are working to raise standards and all of whom collectively employ millions of women, is not just cynical but actually harms the interests of Bangladeshi workers.
