Levi's Unbuttoned, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Jennifer Sey
Cover copyright © 2022 by All Seasons Press
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All Seasons Press
2881 E. Oakland Park Blvd. Suite 456
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33306
Interior design by Kim Hall
First Edition: November 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN-13: 978-1958682241
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my husband Daniel.
The only person who has ever told me to say it all.
To make myself and my voice bigger, not smaller.
I love you all the time.
If evil be said of thee, and if it be true, correct thyself;
if it be a lie, laugh at it.
-Epictetus
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1: A day in the life of me living in, and at, Levi’s
Chapter 2: The last call
Chapter 3: My asks
Chapter 4: Leaving gymnastics. The first thing I quit
Chapter 5: I’m Jewish, but barely
Chapter 6: My early work years. Humiliating, but not terrible. And not woke
Chapter 7: Leaving my first marriage. The second thing I quit
Chapter 8: The right person
Chapter 9: My Levi’s trek. A marathon, not a sprint
Chapter 10: Everyone has a Levi’s Story. Even Alicia Keys. And Snoop Dogg. And Justin Timberlake
Chapter 11: Levi’s Wokes – let’s talk about woke capitalism
Chapter 12: Colliding with the mob (this is the covid-y part)
Chapter 13: Levi’s anti-racism consciousness is raised
Chapter 14: “The Work”
Chapter 15: My first “talking to”
Chapter 16: The pushback accelerates
Chapter 17: My apology tour
Chapter 18: On spouses
Chapter 19: The predictable outcome
Chapter 20: You can’t fire me, I quit!
Chapter 21: My plan and why I made it
Chapter 22: My announcement and the aftermath
Chapter 23: A better path forward for today’s companies
Chapter 24: Why I stayed so long at Levi’s. And why I ultimately left
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
References
Prologue
In February 2022 I walked away from my job as the first female Global Brand President of Levi’s after close to twenty-three years at the company. I’d given the better part of my adult life to Levi’s because of the product itself – I do love my 501s. (I have always preferred the button-fly on my jeans, rather than the zipper.) But while I may have chosen to work there in the beginning because of the product, I stayed because of the company culture. I believed in their mantras: “profits through principles,” “harder right over easier wrong,” “use your voice.” These oft-repeated refrains were rooted in the company’s heritage, one of rugged individualism, corporate philanthropy and populist inclusiveness. I was nothing short of heartbroken to find out that, in practice, these phrases were just empty buzzwords.
The phrases are merely shibboleths of woke capitalism and have nothing to do with the company’s current guiding values, which are anything but inclusive or principled.
Of course, woke capitalism wasn’t only happening at Levi’s. In recent years, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, almost every corner of American business has become frantic to prove its do-gooder, anti-racist status. Immediately following Floyd’s death, internal memos and pronouncements on Instagram went out in companies across America. All featured the same buzzwords: social justice, anti-racism, equity and inclusion. All promised to do their part in defeating racism and all forms of discrimination. Only the foolhardy would dare challenge. Any suggestion of any doubt was defined as bigotry. And stories of cancellation were rampant.
My company, Levi’s, was among the wokest of the woke. And I was in on it. Until I dared to be one of the few who were foolhardy enough to challenge.
Woke capitalism seeks to build consumer loyalty through social justice stances rather than what the company makes and sells. Woke capitalism tries to convince buyers that companies are in business to do good and make the world a better place, not make money. Woke capitalism seeks to brainwash the world with the message that corporations care about employees, even when they lay them off at the same time as they are delivering unimaginable wealth to shareholders and executives through dividends and stock price increases.
In service of this massive lie, woke capitalism offers free speech to some employees, but not others. And woke capitalism ejects any employees suspected of wrongthink, pretending these “wrongthinkers” are a significant threat to sensitive anti-racist employees, thus creating a “hostile work environment.” In reality, the banishments are a maneuver to foster the illusion that the company is highly principled and really cares.
It’s all a deception that should be in plain view. Woke capitalists say — hey look over there — to employees and consumers, while shareholders and executives fill their coffers with obscene wealth. It’s like a kid stealing cookies from a cookie jar when nobody is looking, and then lying about it to his mom despite the fact that he has cookie crumbs all over his face, and the jar is left empty. Except the woke corporatists actually convince themselves that they are being honest about what they do, rather than distracting in order to gorge themselves and leave only scraps for everybody else. At least the kid knows he’s lying to get out of trouble. The corporate grifters really believe that they are do-gooders. They buy their own thieving charade, and it’s why, perhaps, it’s convincing to so many.
Of course, woke capitalism is more than just one thing. For some, it is capitalism’s road to redemption, elevating business beyond mere greed into the realm of noble altruism. These true believers are mostly young and hyper-active on social media. For them, woke-ism is a quasi-religion, and the workplace is where they seek to proselytize.
Even when these woke employees are laid off, they don’t realize that they are being used to further leadership’s deceptive message. In reality, these unsuspecting employees are often laid off primarily so that the rich can stay rich and keep getting richer. But the message broadcast to the world is that it was a “tough call” intended to maintain employment for as many as possible. The employees and consumers who believe this “we really care” message are being manipulated and taken advantage of in this woke capitalist game.
For a great many others, us oldsters in the upper echelons of American business leadership, woke capitalism is a ploy. It is a pose, a communications strategy, a way for corporate executives to feel like philanthropic heroes, and be celebrated as such, all while getting rich in the same way that they always have. Only this time, they are selling a side of righteousness and social justice activism to go with their t-shirts, instead of offering a mere assurance that insecure teenagers will look cool and feel confident on the first day of school.
In their cynical way, these leaders are more relentlessly destructive than the most zealous social justice warriors, for they are even more willing to cancel anyone who challenges the narrative of companies as do-gooders. Anyone who pushes back on the causes of the moment is deemed an apostate of the social justice movement, because they risk exposing the C-suiters for the frauds that they are. And so, like all infidels, the challengers must be ousted and shunned.
Which is to say, woke capitalism is, above all, a lie. There is no justice in it. Only protection of intergenerational wealth for the already wealthy, and enforced obedience and conformity of thought for employees to protect the lie. Challenge the charade at your peril.
And while Levi’s is not the biggest company to foster this lie, and its executives and shareholders are not the richest from profiting off of it, it is, in fact, the epitome of woke capitalism.
Having come from the progressive side of the aisle, I was caught short and alarmed by the “progressive” savagery in policing their own, by the unforgiving drive to purge the unworthy and heretical. For those on the side that supposedly celebrates diversity, to trample anyone who veers from government-issued talking points – to hold any such dissent as profane – seems such a transparent and obvious trespass against their own stated values.
At Levi’s, these “values” of individualism, corporate philanthropy and inclusion were supposedly baked into the company’s DNA.
It all started at Levi’s inception in San Francisco back in 1853. Levi Strauss himself donated a portion of his first profits to a local orphanage. And in the 1900s, Levi’s applied their values internally, seeking to take care of employees by doing the right thing. During World War II, when the company hired black sewing machine operators and laborers in its California factories, it integrated the workforce. And then, in the early 1960s, the company opened a desegregated factory in Blackstone, Virginia, despite local opposition. In 1992, the company offered same-sex partner benefits, before any other large company had even seriously considered such a thing.
The other important point is that this approach of ensuring equality and fairness for employees never detracted from the company’s purpose: to deliver the best possible product, at a fair price, in order to maximize profits for the company. As we used to say at Levi’s, our mission was to clothe the world.
But by 2020, this principled approach of equitable treatment of employees had morphed into a way of being and operating that can only be described as the wokest imaginable version of woke capitalism. The “profits through principles” ideology had oozed into every aspect of our brand image-creation, even though it was now completely untrue.
As the company’s egalitarian principles for all employees mutated over time into woke capitalism, it happened slowly, then all at once. I participated. I contributed. I didn’t see it. And by the time I did, it was too late for me.
The mob had taken over. And our mission to “clothe the world” had been usurped by employees demanding we fight to change the world instead.
This seemed patently absurd to me. And impossible. We could change the lives of some of our employees by treating them with fairness. We could provide high quality jeans that lasted a lifetime to our fans, who included everyone from blue-state mini-van moms to cowboys and those insecure teenagers who just want to look cool on the first day of school. But the idea that one little jean maker should be responsible for fomenting political change seemed not only ridiculous, but destined to fail. It would limit the size and growth of our business. It would also, eventually, detract from our focus enough to dissipate the thing that people really wanted from us: pants. And the business would suffer, and perhaps even go under.
But not only was I in the minority, I was the only leader who seemed to feel this way. Leadership caved time and time again to the demands of a woke mob of employees.
The company didn’t believe that Levi’s was for everyone anymore. We only wanted the woke to work at Levi’s, and judging by our public stances, we only wanted the woke to buy Levi’s.
As someone still committed to traditional liberal values like free speech and due process – those I thought the Left was committed to – I felt as if I’d been swindled and, not so much betrayed, as like an idiot. I worked at Levi’s longer than I’ve ever done anything else, in part because I believed in these things we said. But they were fabrications. And so, my time was over.
What marked the beginning to my end at Levi’s? I was outspoken about the policies impacting children during the COVID-19 pandemic: closed schools, closed playgrounds, the masking of toddlers. I’d spoken out since the very beginning – March 2020 – in defense of maintaining as much normalcy as possible for kids and ensuring that they were not carrying an undue burden on behalf of society. I expressed serious concerns, backed with data, about the age stratification of risk from covid (people over seventy were at three thousand times the risk of death as children were) and how that should inform public policy on the matter, but didn’t. Restrictions that unfairly burdened low-risk children were driving learning loss, an increasing educational gap between the haves and have-nots, and a mental health crisis among teens due to intense isolation and lack of normalcy.
All of these “unintended consequences” were a direct result of long-term public school closures and other onerous restrictions on kids. I pointed out that this would happen and harms would be done, and then the harms actually happened. I said it again and again, with increasing passion, on social media, in op-eds, on the local news and then on Fox (you guessed it, this is when things really went south). I was hoping to help bring some sense to these cruel and abusive policies that were hurting disadvantaged kids, those most likely to be in public schools, the most.
My boss at Levi’s and my peers all begged me to “just stop,” even as their own kids returned to in-person schooling at their elite private institutions while public school kids remained stranded at home.
Only gradually did it dawn on me that our campaign slogan “Use Your Voice” did not apply to me.
I was challenging all-knowing public health authorities – the same public health authorities who kept playgrounds closed in San Francisco – where Levi’s is headquartered and where I lived – for the better part of a year. The ones who closed beaches and disallowed surfing, filled skate ramps with sand to make them unusable, boarded up basketball rims to prevent kids from shooting hoops. Those all-knowing public health authorities.
For saying we should focus resources on the most vulnerable – the elderly being at the top of that list – while letting low-risk children have their lives, I was deemed a granny-killer. In saying that closing hiking trails and gyms was a bad idea, and that perhaps public health authorities should consider a “get healthy” outreach effort given that obesity is a primary risk factor for poor covid outcomes, I was attacking the overweight. I was also denying science. The “science” behind the mandatory masking of diapered toddlers, and the bleaching of groceries, and plexiglass barriers and shuttered schools.
Though Levi’s prides itself on being a company unafraid of taking controversial stands, standing up for kids was apparently a bridge too far. Employees in the company called me every name they could think of: racist, ableist, eugenicist, fat-phobe, anti-trans. These sentiments were reiterated and given force by anonymous social media trolls outside the company, as well.
And eventually, in January 2022, I was told that there would be no place for me in the company going forward. Despite my years of service, my stellar work performance, the rapid recovery of the business post-lockdowns (led by me, in large part, as the Brand President) and my unofficial role as an embodiment of the ethos of the company – an inspiring leader and “culture carrier” – I no longer represented the company’s “values.” My views were out of sync with Levi’s political ideology. And I was deemed a risk to the company’s reputation.
I chose to quit rather than accept Levi’s framing of my exit. I wanted to leave on my own terms, without one million dollars in hush money and a non-disclosure agreement to ensure my silence on the context of my departure. I felt the aggressive silencing of debate on matters of public concern, the viewpoint discrimination within supposed bastions of liberalism like San Francisco, and the general obliteration of a culture of free speech were too important, and needed to be discussed. In fact, alarms needed to be sounded. And so, the most important thing to me was to leave not only with my integrity intact, but my voice as well. So that’s what I did.
I’ve said much of this publicly – maybe you’ve read it or heard it or maybe you haven’t. But there is more to it, and I’ll lay it out here. It’s about me – yes – and that’s an egotist’s endeavor no doubt. But it’s also about so much more than me. I know it’s not such a big deal that one well-paid executive got pushed out of a company for spouting off on Twitter. It is a big deal, however, WHY I got pushed out. And this should, in fact, concern us all.
I was pushed out because I stood up for kids during covid, in direct violation of the progressive mainstream’s manufactured narrative. I said kids should be in school when Democratic leaders, the media, the Centers for Disease Control, local public health officials and teachers’ unions all said schools must stay closed or else we’ll kill all the kids and teachers, and anyone who wants them open is a very bad person.
They were wrong. I was right.
The wrong ones contrived consensus by silencing doctors who offered another perspective and “normies” like me who just knew how to read and interpret data. But I dared to continue to shout about it all, even after I was warned to stop. I failed to heed their warnings, again and again. And so, I was a person unworthy of employment.
I am loyal to principles, not party. I am against hypocrisy. I think that there are a lot of people who feel the same way. And that, in fact, we are the majority.
