Imagine you’re at work. You’re sitting at your desk diligently toiling away at whatever task you have been assigned when your boss comes over to speak with you about what a good job you have been doing and to give you helpful advice on how to make your job both more efficient and less work intensive. You nod your head, trying to listen intently because, after all, he’s not just your superior, he’s the CEO of the whole company and he knows his stuff. But you are having a hard time concentrating on what he’s saying because as he stands before you unshaven, wearing nothing but a ratty pair of boxers, you can’t help but notice that because of either great genetics or God’s good grace his dangle bobs easily an inch below the left leg of his underwear. You look around the office at your fellow cubical monkeys to see if anyone else notices this bizarre spectacle. They all do, and they choose to politely ignore it. Your boss, without an ounce of self consciousness, dips his right hand below the elastic waistband of his underpants to scratch an itch that may be caused by either his lack of hygiene or his legendary promiscuity and, as he wraps up his pep talk, he uses the same hand to give you a friendly pat on the back that you would interpret to mean “go get ‘em, tiger” if it wasn’t for the fact that you were way too skeeved out to think about anything other than how badly you need to wash your shirt. To 99.9 % of you out there in the work force, this scenario is but the stuff that nightmares are made of. But to any of you out there that work for American Apparel, this has probably happened to you at some point in your tenure with the company.
American Apparel is the United States’ largest garment manufacturer and one of the fastest growing garment retailers in the world. Refusing to use imported goods or outsourced labor, American Apparel has proven that a company that practices fair wage can compete in the clothing industry. American Apparel also promotes environmentally friendly practices, like using organic cotton and recycling their fabric scraps. This is in addition to a 146 kilowatt solar generator that allows American Apparel to greatly lessen its carbon output. By instituting these positive labor and environmental policies, American Apparel leads the way in corporate citizenship.
At the helm of this 284 million dollar company is Dov Charney, a Canadian born Jew, who has insisted that his company break away from the traditional corporate visage of a faceless giant, hell-bent on increasing profits through less then pristine business practices. But, though Charney and American Apparel seem to be a bastion of corporate responsibility, there is a major problem: Dov Charney is a sleazy pig. Charney regularly walks around the office wearing only boxers has been known to refer to female colleagues as “sl*t,” “b*tch” and even the most horrid of curse words suitable only for allusion. Crass, unnecessary, nauseating and tasteless as these behaviors may be, Charney assures the media that his derogatory remarks about his female employees are simply a form of endearment. As for his less than professional manner of dress, it’s his company, so if he wants to show up to a meeting adorned in nothing but a tube sock covering his genitalia (this actually happened), that’s his business. Despite his cavalier attitude towards these behaviors, Charney is the subject of multiple sexual harassment lawsuits and is proof that though you can be admirable for one trait, you can still be detestable for another.
