Los AngeLes, CA—After ten years of existence, the jeans company True Religion Apparel was put up for sale and bought by the investment company TowerBrook Capital Partners for $835 million.
Competition among different brands of high end jeans in southern California led to lower sales and profits for True Religion. Among its main competitors are Lucky Brand Jeans, Joe's Jeans, Citizen of Humanity, and 7 for all Mankind. Add to this the recent increase in taxes in europe for these kinds of jeans, imposed by the EU bosses as part of the dog-eat-dog capitalist competition.
This move means more exploitation, speedup, and lower wages for the men and women garment workers, who barely make enough to survive with the poverty wages they get now. For the managers and owners of the company, like Jeffrey Lubell, ex-president of True Religion, the story is different. He left office with a compensation of $5.9 million that he got in salary, stock in the company, medical insurance, and a car, for the year 2012. now he is a consultant to the company. The new interim president, Lynne Koplin, was paid $3.5 million in salary and other compensation in 2012.
The workers of True Religion Apparel (TRA) produce 4 million pants which are sold for as much as $300 or more a piece in the Us and elsewhere. This enormous annual production creates fertile ground for profits. Between the contractor, manufacturer, designer, store owners, and banks, they divide up 97% of the profits and the worker is only paid 3% of the value he or she produces. All of this wealth comes from the workers' labor at the machine.
According to the Wall Street Journal ( July 7, 2011) in their article "How Can Jeans cost $300?" the cost of cutting and sewing a pair of True Religion jeans is $11.65. The manufacturers sell them wholesale to the stores for $152 each, and the stores re-sell them for $335.00 each.
That is, it is only the labor power of the men and women workers, who made the cloth and sewed the pants, that added the value so that the bosses can make so much profit that they distribute among themselves like hungry vultures. Will we have different brands in a communist society?
The bosses always paint communism as a gray, sad society, with everyone in uniforms. But reality is the complete opposite. In a communist society, we will have all the best for the working class and we will produce with joy and color for ourselves.
In terms of clothing, we will have the fabrics necessary to cover ourselves, that are also good for the environment and our health. The designs will be based on creativity and what people need, not on profit. Therefore there won't be special brands for a few individuals. Of the pants that are now sold worldwide, only 1% are "famous brands." The rest are jeans that are used for everyday work.
The workers of True Religion cannot buy the pants that they produce, nor receive any compensation from these $835 million that they created. But they can help to build this new communist society where exploitation, wage differences, and capitalist brands that only divide us no longer exist.
These men and women garment workers, from Bangladesh to Los Angeles, will be the ones who will raise the slogan of the new trend, "Communist Revolution."
We call on workers of the world to build discussion-action groups about the communist ideas in Red Flag and to join