People keep asking me about why I don’t use American Apparel T Shirts in my store. I don’t, and I won’t for multiple reasons. the first reason is that I wasn’t very impressed with the durability of the products. I always buy a blank shirt and wear it myself for a while before I have anything silk screened on it for my shop. I want to make sure the quality is good and that people of many body types can wear them. American Apparel was too tight in the wrong places, the fabric was thin and the stitching ran in a month. I even tried one of their bras which I ended up promptly throwing in the trash after less than one day.

Then I did some quick research about their business practices and found some horriffic shit.

I am shocked that American Apparel still has this allure of being a happy pro-worker company. American Apparel seems to be really good at drowning out their lack of ethics by flooding the media with their marketing campaigns. If I had that much cash to blow, I’d buy a space station and grow cacti on it.

If I had to choose between The GAP and NIKE, two companies who have been criticized for using sweatshops, or American Apparel, I’ll take The GAP and NIKE because they are not lying to me. If I have to choose between two bad companies, I’ll take the one that doesn’t try to cover up its unethical business practices and appeal to causes it really doesn’t care about to sell more stuff.

There has been a lot of talk in the business world about American Apparel’s definition of “sweatshop free”. The Jewish Journal says:

““Based on anecdotal evidence we’ve heard, he’s a cut above other manufacturers in Los Angeles, but I don’t know if he really lives up to the extravagant claims he makes,” said Richard Applebaum, author of “Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry” (UC Press, 2000). “He claims to pay higher wages, a living wage, but there’s no independent evidence of it. He made insurance available to his employees, but they had to pay for it. It’s like saying something is kosher, without having a rabbi look at it.”

and:

“Charney is a master PR man, a great self-promoter, a very effective entrepreneur and hustler,” said Peter Dreier, a professor of public policy at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

“The only way to know if a garment factory is ‘sweat free’ is still to look for the union label,” he said. “There are garment factories in the U.S. where employees have union contracts, get full family health benefits, decent wages, three and four weeks of paid vacations, a decent pension and respect from their supervisors. When you buy a shirt, a dress, a suit or a T-shirt from these companies, you can shop with a conscience. This isn’t the case at American Apparel.”

In addition to this nasty piece of business, Dov Charney, the founder and CEO has had multiple lawsuits from female workers that he has done things like masturbate in front of them while on the job, forced the hiring of women specifically so that he could have sex with them, held meetings only in his underwear, among other things. He is one of the distasteful people who claims to be Libertarian not for a desire to do good, but so that he can get his way and use “Freedom of Speech” as a method to encourage young women to have sex with him. Or else. Many female employees report that they were absolutely “terrified” of being alone with him.

Again, The Jewish Journal states,

“Let me make this clear: Everybody is flawed. But we are dealing with a person whose fame and fortune came from a public refusal to exploit workers — the very same people whom he is now accused of intimidating and abusing. That is, in my estimation, an incongruity that cannot be chalked up to ‘people are complex.’ It is utterly impossible to separate out economic and social justice — an environment of sexual intimidation is just as intimidating and abusive as a sweatshop in which a worker is afraid she’ll lose her job if she takes a bathroom break.”

” Heather Pithie claims that “throughout the course of her employment,” she was subjected to “continual, repeated, egregious, sexually explicit comments, gestures and behavior.” At least once, he allegedly yelled at her: “I want you to find some hot girls: The kind of girls I am going to want to [word deleted]. He also allegedly told her to hire “any kind of _____, black, white, Asian, ooh! I love Asians, I just want to ____ them all.”

Pithie also accused Charney of simulating sex in front of her and telling her she need to stop this “feminist ____.””

When interviewed about his conduct in this same article,

“As for exposing himself, he joked: “I could pull my penis out right now, and I guarantee you no one would be offended.””

His excuse is that it’s his “First Amendment Right” to have sex with who he wants. I’m not kidding. Here are some more articles about this mentally ill individual:

New York Times

BusinessWeek

New York Times (2)

Adam Neiman of NoSweatApparel.com says:

“In my opinion, one good boss is no more a solution to the problem of wage slavery than one good plantation owner was a solution to human slavery.” Unlike companies like No Sweat, AA has no strict policies or principles against sweatshops and only cultivate their anti-sweatshop image only so long as it serves them–and they’ve actually tried to distance themselves from it. I think they’ve begun to realize that it’s so effective to sell using women’s bodies that they don’t need to appeal to people’s sense of ethics. I wouldn’t be surprised if they quietly start sourcing from sweatshops.:

“Sweatshop Free” often isn’t. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the conditions are that great for the workers. It just means the company has defined themselves that way in their marketing ads, often through fancy language. I am generally more alarmed by a big company that trumpets “Sweatshop Free”, because it is extremely difficult to get that big while maintaining a marketable price point and still be really “Sweatshop Free” without some kind of off-color business going on.

Regardless of if you agree with me about Dov Charney’s character, the fact remains that this man’s conduct and business practices do not seem very far removed from the big “sweatshop” companies out there like Nike or The GAP. I am not content to pay for a slightly different kind of oppression. Moreover, I get REALLY FUCKING MAD when people distort the truth in order to sell to a humanitarian cause.

I’m not extremely political. I don’t claim to know everything about labor issues. However, I am Anti-Asshole.

EDIT: Here is a really good article in PDF form from Clamor Magazine with more discussion of this topic.

I’m never one to bitch about something without suggesting an alternate method. Since I bitched about the Asian eye surgery thing, I figured I would post a tutorial for achieving the smoky eye look on natural Asian eyes.

Or, if you have a little Japanese goth metal in you, you can go wild with the following. (That means you, J Rock Cosplayers!

So yeah, a lot of people seem to like camping. I do not. I will tell you one reason why! When I was a kid I always thought that those white floaty moths that hang out in the bathrooms where the light is could fly up my anus when I was taking a shit so I was afraid to shit when I was camping because I wished for my buttcrack to not have moths in it.

Seriously.

For real! Would YOU like moths in YOUR butt? I’ll bet not!

OK, really soon some of my tutorials are getting redone. I’ve gotten so much better since I wrote some of them that some of them really need an update.

And what’s wrong with you guys that no one told me one of the images in the inking tutorial was wrong this whole time? Heh. Actually I can see why. The image that was there did sort of make sense and it wasn’t a necessary image anyhow. Whatever, it’s fixed now.

I think things like the pen tool require a video companion. Because I say so and it will be awesome.

Genius.

Thanks to Aaron of the Geek Like Me webcomic for finding this gem.