Guess ‘Sweatshop-Free’ Ads Come Under New Criticism

Despite modifying a newspaper ad that drew objections from federal authorities, Guess Inc. has come under new criticism for continuing to claim that the company’s garments are made by “100% sweatshop-free” contractors.

California Labor Commissioner Jose Millan said the boast, which is made in both the company’s new and original ads, is dubious given the widespread labor violations in Southern California’s garment-making industry.

Millan added that when state authorities last year accused a then-Guess contractor of engaging in illegal industrial home work and improperly paying workers in cash, Guess replied that it had been lied to by the contractor and was unaware of the problems. The charges against the contractor eventually were dropped on technical grounds.

“What’s to stop a contractor from lying to them again?” Millan said.

The U.S. Labor Department, which last week publicly criticized Guess for its original ads, is reviewing the new one, agency spokesman David M. Saltz said. The new ad was revised to avoid the suggestion that state and federal authorities certified the company’s contractors as “sweatshop-free.”

The new Guess ad makes the claim without attributing it to any outside authority. Saltz said the Labor Department a year ago downgraded Guess to probationary status on his agency’s “Trendsetter List” of companies deemed to be taking extra steps to avoid doing business with sweatshops. A factor in that decision, he said, was the discovery that Guess contractors were violating minimum-wage and overtime-pay laws.

Guess spokesman Bill Barnes said company officials “have received nothing from the state or the federal Department of Labor to suggest they believe any Guess contractor is not in full compliance, and we assume they would act rapidly if they did.”

Barnes said Los Angeles-based Guess polices the workplace practices of its contractors and backs its sweatshop-free claim “with the most aggressive self-monitoring program in the industry.”

Barnes said he did not know if Guess would continue running its revised ad, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday. A spokesman for The Times, Mike Lange, said the newspaper reviewed the new ad and concluded that “there was no reason not to run it.”

“It’s not for us to referee a dispute between [the Labor Department] and an advertiser,” Lange added.