Globalize L.A.?

American Apparel is about to go public.

Emblazoned with the command "Legalize L.A.," American Apparel's factory is as much a fixture of the downtown Los Angeles cityscape as its hyper-sexual and socially progressive brand is a fixture of American youth culture. The company's politics are a bit more elusive, however, than the image it has crafted would lead one to believe. Despite its pro-immigrant, anti-sweatshop labor practices and public pronouncements, in 2003, American Apparel's founder and owner Dov Charney defeated a UNITE-HERE union organizing drive at his downtown factory by employing standard union-busting tactics familiar to workers in meatpacking plants and nursing homes.

Whether American Apparel is a renegade company swimming upstream in a globalized race to the bottom or a shrewd manipulator of the political sympathies of its target consumers is anyone's guess. Now the answer may become a bit more discernible.

When Google went public, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin chose to structure the deal with "dual class voting," which allows management the authority to make decisions on behalf of the company that may not be popular with stockholders. This was because Google felt that stockholders' focus on short-term gain should play second fiddle to the founders' commitment to the company's long-term, core mission. The latter includes both its risk-taking entrepreneurialism and its charitable goals.

So far, no such precautions against the stock market impinging upon the "non-rational" priorities of a mission-based company like American Apparel appear to be forthcoming in the $244 million deal. Perhaps outsourcing is in American Apparel's future after all, or perhaps investors will leave the company's anti-sweatshop policies alone as long (and only as long) as the image helps move product. Either outcome would indicate an accomodation between the corporate rebel and the globalized free market forces it was ostensibly created to reject. American Apparel may be on its way to becoming Global Apparel, which is to say to becoming a facsimile of every other garment manufacturer in the world. Which, in a sense, would not be such a radical departure from its mission, which concludes with the statement:

"Not to suggest that we are more ethical than the next business. We're just out to try something different, to make a buck, to bring people the clothes they love, to be human, and have a good time in the process. So far, so good."

All of that can be accomplished as easily from China as from downtown L.A.