Leaving Levi's
I’m currently sitting in my office, wearing a very comfortable pair of black Levi’s jeans. They’re my favorite jeans. I actually have four pair of Levi’s and two of them are the classic 501 button fly jeans. It doesn’t get much more American than that. And, unlike another famous American brand, Nike, I do still plan on buying more Levi’s jeans in the future. I have absolutely no desire to ever wear a Nike swoosh again.
But, while I’m a fan of their products, Levi’s has a problem. It’s the same problem most big companies have in America right now, and if they don’t do something about it soon, they could become as abhorrent as Nike is to most Americans in the not too distant future.
The internal problems at Levi have been brought to light by a woman named Jennifer Sey. Jennifer Sey is a former Gymnast for the U.S. Gymnastics team. She participated in the Goodwill Games in Russia in the 1980s, and she remembers bringing along several pairs of Levi’s jeans to trade with the Russians.
She later started working for Levi’s and over a 20 year career eventually became became the President of the whole corporation.
She quit last week.
Why? Why did she walk away from a 20 year career with an iconic American brand? She said in an op-ed,
“Because, after all these years, the company I love has lost sight of the values that made people everywhere... want to wear Levi’s."
Jennifer Sey has had a habit of being outspoken. There was an article written about her and the rest of that Goodwill Games gymnastics team from 1986. Sey, who was then a teenager was asked what she thought about some local summer campers coming in and watching the gymnastics team practice to get ready for the Games. “"I think it's kind of stupid," the always honest Jennifer Sey… said.” Again, that was when she was a teen ager, so being outspoken appears to be a life long habit.
In her op-ed this week, Sey talks about several of the political things she’s engaged in while working at Levi’s. She campaigned for Elizabeth Warren. She spoke out about the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. She even talked about the abuses that occurred in the U.S. gymnastics program and the damage it was doing to young girls. Not only did Levi’s not get upset at her political speech, but it embraced her for it. Levi’s considered her a hero.
But, then, COVID hit, and as a mother of four, Jennifer Sey started talking about the damage that school lockdowns were doing to children across the country.
"I wrote op-eds, appeared on local news shows, attended meetings with the mayor’s office, organized rallies and pleaded on social media to get the schools open. I was condemned for speaking out. This time, I was called a racist—a strange accusation given that I have two black sons—a eugenicist, and a QAnon conspiracy theorist.”
She quickly went from being a hero at Levi’s to being a problem at Levi’s. I guess she understands how nurses who don’t want to get the COVID vaccine feel.
Sey wrote,
“In the summer of 2020, I finally got the call. “You know when you speak, you speak on behalf of the company,” our head of corporate communications told me, urging me to pipe down. I responded: “My title is not in my Twitter bio. I’m speaking as a public school mom of four kids.”
But the calls kept coming. From legal. From HR. From a board member. And finally, from my boss, the CEO of the company. I explained why I felt so strongly about the issue, citing data on the safety of schools and the harms caused by virtual learning. While they didn’t try to muzzle me outright, I was told repeatedly to “think about what I was saying.”"
Jennifer Sey says as long as she was speaking out on appropriate leftist ideas, she was embraced by the company. Support Elizabeth Warren for President. No problem. Speak out about the Ahmaud Arbery murder, excellent. Question why kids have to miss school, whoa! You're a racist right wing nut job.
"In the fall of 2021, during a dinner with the CEO, I was told that I was on track to become the next CEO of Levi’s—the stock price had doubled under my leadership, and revenue had returned to pre-pandemic levels. The only thing standing in my way, he said, was me. All I had to do was stop talking about the school thing."
She was then offered a million dollars to leave the company and stay quiet about why she was leaving. She said no to the money and kept her freedom to talk.
"I’ll always wear my old 501s. But today I’m trading in my job at Levi’s. In return, I get to keep my voice."
This isn't a problem limited to Levis. It's all of corporate America. Big Business is beholden to Big Government and to twitter mobs. The Marketing and HR departments of every major American Company are today are filled with leftists who use terms like birthing persons and latinx and believe silence is violence and that we have to give BIPOCs safe spaces and don't see how that's simply reintroducing segregation. That mindset is, 1 - factually wrong, and 2 - destructive to the soul of America.
The problem is that the people in those Marketing and HR departments and in the C-suites across the country are also on Twitter, and they seem to think that Twitter is representative of America. It’s not. Twitter is like a drunken anonymous audience at a slam poetry fest. They aren’t going to snap for you, but, they’ll snap at you in a heartbeat, and because you have no idea who they are, they won’t feel any pressure to be nice. Snark is king.
But, that’s not how most Americans are.
There was a saying we had in one of the newsrooms I worked in. “We are not our audience.” It was a daily reminder that if we were only thinking about things we liked and things we in that newsroom were interested in, then we were doing our jobs wrong. We had to find out what the people who were tuning in every night were interested in or wanted to know in order to serve them correctly. And, the only way to do that was to ask. And, we didn’t just ask them on Twitter. We went out into the community and met people face to face every single day.
Twitter is not the consumer. The Twitter mob isn’t buying what you’re selling anyway. But, the people in those positions in corporate America don’t understand that. And, this is why they fail.
Here’s Jennifer Sey again,
“I love Levi’s and its place in the American heritage as a purveyor of sturdy pants for hardworking, daring people who moved West and dreamed of gold buried in the dirt. The red tag on the back pocket of the jeans I handed over to the Russian girls used to be shorthand for what was good and right about this country, and when I think about my trip to Moscow, so many decades ago, I still get a little choked up.
"But the corporation doesn’t believe in that now. It’s trapped trying to please the mob—and silencing any dissent within the organization. In this it is like so many other American companies: held hostage by intolerant ideologues who do not believe in genuine inclusion or diversity."
I don't agree with all of Jennifer Sey's politics. But, that doesn't matter. At the very least, she understands the most important political opinion is the belief that people have a right to have their own political opinions. Levis' and all of Big Business in America has forgotten that. The sooner they remember the most important liberty is the right to disagree, the better off they and our nation will be.