American Apparel makes t shirts, hoodies et al. They very much focus their mar­keting around the fact that they don’t use sweat­shop labour, but rather all of their man­u­fac­turing is done in the US. I have more than one friend who uses American Apparel tshirts for their tshirt-​​requiring-​​projects on those grounds.

I guess I always assumed that “sweat­shop free, made in the USA” meant “union made”. I guess they never actu­ally said that, and I guess I was wrong.

More dis­turbing than their lack of a union is that they are accused of engaging in active union-​​busting tac­tics:

Hopefully this story will get around and they will have to defend themselves.

Every aspect of the pro­duc­tion of our gar­ments, from the knit­ting of the fabric to the pho­tog­raphy of the product, is done in-​​house. By con­sol­i­dating this entire process, we are able to pursue effi­cien­cies that other com­pa­nies cannot because of their over­re­liance on outsourcing.

In that case, they can hardly give the “we didn’t know what our sub­con­trac­tors were up to” defense.