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Company rewards productivity; critics call it anti-union
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They sew. They stitch. They cut. Their hands fly in silence as a river of garments rush along the massive factory floor at American
Apparel Inc.
On an hourly basis, workers, operating in small groups, can calculate the results of their sweat. Their pay rates are posted for everyone to see, and the faster they work, they more their group earns.
Robert Jimenez, 39, a four-year veteran, doesn’t mind the race-like production pace that others have complained about to community and labor groups.
“I want more money,” said Jimenez, whose factory owner boasts of the world’s highest-paid garment workers.
With most clothing sold in the United States manufactured overseas, American Apparel is an anomaly in a rapidly vanishing U.S. garment industry known for sweatshop conditions, low wages and few, if any, benefits. Its base pay is $9 an hour, substantially more than what other companies pay, and skilled workers can earn double that.
Yet American Apparel is not everyone’s workplace hero.
Kimi Lee, director the Garment Worker Center, a non-profit agency that counsels Los Angeles workers on their rights, said she can neither praise nor condemn the company.
“Even though there are things that make it better than other factories, it is not ideal,” Lee said.
Workers have complained to her agency, she said, about “inhumane” production speeds and unbearable pressure from the small workplace groups to keep up with the pace. Slower workers eventually switch to less productive groups, she said.
Still, Lee said, the financial rewards at American Apparel are stellar compared with other garmentmakers. A 2004 survey by her group showed that the average wage was $3.18 an hour, a violation of federal and state laws. But Lee said companies get away with it because of a lack of inspection.
The average sewer’s wage at American Apparel, which has 4,000 workers, is $12.50 an hour, and more-skilled and productive workers can earn up to $18.50 an hour. And the benefits are good.
Workers get company-supported medical coverage for themselves for only $8 a week, compared with an average of $31 a week paid by U.S. workers, according to Hewitt Associates, a health-cost consulting firm. To encourage workers to use their health-care benefits, American Apparel has a new medical clinic at the factory.
The company also offers free English and citizenship classes, which matter to the largely immigrant Latino workforce. There’s also company-supported low-cost lunches and free use of bicycles to get to and from work. Six massage therapists wander the massive, timeworn building, itself a converted seven-story railroad warehouse.
Company officials rebut criticism from those who consider it authoritarian, anti-union and, ultimately, no better than its
low-wage competitors.
“Anybody can walk in this office,” said Marty Bailey, the company’s vice president of operations. “And if folks ever decide that they can be better represented by a labor organization, then Marty Bailey
has failed.”
So, too, Dov Charney, American Apparel’s 37-year-old founder, senior partner and resident hipster, said treatment of his workers is key to his firm’s success: It is “80 percent the best way to make garments and 20 percent social responsibility.”
Labor leaders fiercely condemn American Apparel because it rebuffed a bid several years ago from Unite Here, the garment workers union, that it open the way for a union election.
After the company refused, the organizing drive fizzled, leaving the factory, like nearly all in the garment factories in Los Angeles, non-union. The union has only 1,000 members out of the more 70,000 garment workers in the area.
Among the charges raised in a complaint filed during the organizing drive over two years ago was that the company had told workers it would close the plant if they voted to organize.
“(Charney) comes out as the savior, but he is getting his numbers with his production, and he is doing it in a more sophisticated way. But he still runs a sweatshop,” contends Cristina Vasquez, a regional official in Los Angeles for Unite Here, the merged union of the garment and hotel workers unions.
Nonetheless, American Apparel clearly has been a hit with consumers.
Revenue has steadily climbed since its founding eight years ago, going from $20 million in 2001 to over $220 million last year, average annual profit has been coasting along at nearly 10 percent, said officials at the privately held company.
Its move into the retail side of the business also has been successful. From a gamble on a store in the L.A. area, the company has expanded in the last three years to 130 stores in 12 countries.
“I’m not familiar with anyone who has opened a retail operation that quickly,” Charney said.
STEPHEN FRANKLIN
Chicago Tribune
