Hey Kiera! I'm so glad we see heart to heart on this one!

My Team Ferlino shirt tag says "American Apparel Sustainable Edition" & is 100% Certified Organic Cotton! NICE!!! GO TEAM!!!

When my heart is in the right place at the moment I make a decision, especially after I have made good faith efforts to educate myself before making the decision, then I do not beat myself up about it if I later discover that I could have made an even better decision. But I frequently get frustrated w/ trying to be an ecologically responsible consumer for reasons just like this:

It turns out American Apparel has come under fire for oppressing their well-paid American employees by squashing their efforts to organize into a union... plus sexual harassment allegations are rampant. Check out this article only if you don't mind your tummy turning over the notion that even the good guys aren't so great: clamormagazine.org/issues/3...liams.php

"Adam Neiman of garment manufacturer No Sweat Apparel hypothesizes that Charney’s narrow-sightedness plays a large role in how he views the opposite sex in general and women workers specifically. The reason American Apparel’s model fails its female employees, according to Neiman, is that Charney retains all the power for himself while the women he employs have a faux sense of liberation that exists strictly within the rules, or lack thereof, that the mastermind has created.

Despite its pro-labor marketing, American Apparel has no union, no legal body to advocate for the workers. But “the worker-voiced union model is critical,” offers Neiman. “It’s not enough to have a groovy guy at the top touting, ‘We don’t need union contracts, ’cause we’re all groovy guys. Can’t you tell? We’ve got ponytails!’”

Sideshow Acts
Neiman’s is one of a few companies doing what American Apparel promised, sans over-hyped sexuality. There are also companies that take a more satirical approach. Sweatshop Labor Productions, a small operation that produces limited-edition screen-printed T-shirts, promoted their collective with sidewalk stencils that read “I [heart] Sweatshop Labor.”

In a farcical world of its own design exists the collaborative group at Sweatshop Labor Productions. These young entrepreneurial artists aren’t merely tuned in to youth culture; they are youth culture.

SLP’s Lucas feels strongly about the message American Apparel, and America more generally, is circulating about youth culture. It’s the old sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll adage – and it’s blatantly sexist, casting exploitation as masculine and strong and justice-oriented ethics as feminine and weak. “Being against sweatshop labor is a strong position to take, especially for a young company [such as Sweatshop Labor Productions] that must rely on controversy and gossip to get anywhere,” says Lucas, who believes American Apparel is really a good company behaving badly. “One of the ways that American Apparel tries to cover up for its ‘good ethics,’” Lucas says, “is with the hot girls in sexy positions. They think that by exploiting women they won’t look like a bunch of bleeding-heart pussies.”

...This is possible because, at least so far, the new niche market of liberal consumerism is primarily concerned with workers’ rights if the workers in question live far away, in an exotic locale where adding a fair-trade sticker costs a corporation pennies. Deciding to not buy a product because the company that makes it is fighting its own workers’ unionization efforts is not something Charney’s “young metropolitan adults” really do. And as long as progressive consumer standards apply only to workers’ rights in other countries, Dov Charney’s factory is unlikely to supplement the free massages with job security or a voice at work. "



WHATFREAKINEVER!!! Follow your heart folks, just follow your heart...