by Naomi Klein
Much of this has to do with timing. Concerns expressed about child labor in India and Pakistan had remained at the level of a steady drone for more than a decade. But by 1995, the question of linking trade policies to human rights had been pushed so far off most governments’ agendas that when thirteen-year-old Craig Kielburger deliberately disrupted Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien’s trade mission to India to talk about the children who were working there in bonded slavery, the issue seemed urgent and exotic. Moreover, in North America, the total usurpation of foreign policy by the free-trade agenda invited disruption — the world was ready to listen.
The same is true of corporate crime in general. It may be nothing new for consumer goods to be produced under oppressive conditions, but what clearly is new is the tremendously expanded role consumer-goods companies are playing in our culture. Anticorporate activism is on the rise because many of us feel the international brand-name connections that crisscross the globe more keenly than we ever have before —and we feel them precisely because we have never been as “branded” as we are today.
Branding, as we have seen, has taken a fairly straightforward relationship between buyer and seller and —through the quest to turn brands into media providers, arts producers, town squares and social philosophers — transformed it into something much more invasive and profound. For the past decade, multinationals like Nike, Microsoft and Starbucks have sought to become the chief communicators of all that is good and cherished in our culture: art, sports, community, connection, equality. But the more successful this project is, the more vulnerable these companies become: if brands are indeed intimately entangled with our culture and our identities, when they do wrong, their crimes are not dismissed as merely the misdemeanors of another corporation trying to make a buck. Instead, many of the people who inhabit their branded worlds feel complicit in their wrongs, both guilty and connected. But this connection is a volatile one: it is not the old-style loyalty between lifelong employee and corporate boss; rather, this is a connection more akin to the relationship of fan and celebrity: emotionally intense but shallow enough to turn on a dime.
This volatility is the unintended consequence of brand managers striving for unprecedented intimacy with the consumer while forging a more casual role with the workforce. In reaching brand-not-products nirvana, these companies have lost two things that may prove more precious in the long run: consumer detachment from their global activities and citizen investment in their economic success.
It has taken us a while, but if another Kader happened tomorrow, the first question journalists would ask would be, “What toys were being produced?” “Where were they being shipped?” and “Which companies hired the contractors?” Labor activists in Thailand would be in instant communication with solidarity groups in Hong Kong, Washington, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sydney, London and Toronto. E-mails would be fired off from Washington-based Campaign for Labor Rights, from the Clean Clothes Campaign out of Amsterdam, and forwarded through a network of Web sites, listserves and fax trees. The National Labor Committee, UNITE!, the Labour Behind the Label Coalition and the World Development Movement would be organizing protests outside Toys ‘R’ Us, shouting, “Our children don’t need bloodstained toys!” University students would dress up as the cartoon characters of their childhood and hand out pamphlets comparing Bugs Bunny’s payout for Space Jam to the cost of putting in a fire exit at Kader. Meetings would be scheduled with national associations of toy manufacturers; new and tougher codes of conduct would be highlighted for consideration. The public mind is not only able but eager to make the global connections that William Greider searched for but did not find after the Kader fire.
Though anticorporate activism is seeing a renewal unparalleled since the thirties, there have, of course, been some significant anticorporate campaigns scattered between the thirties and their present-day revival. The granddaddy of modern brand-based actions is the boycott against Nestlé, which peaked in the late seventies. The campaign targeted the Swiss company for its aggressive marketing of costly baby formula as a “safer” alternative to breast-feeding in the developing world. The Nestlé case has a strong parallel with the McLibel Trial (to be discussed in detail in Chapter 16), largely because the issue didn’t really capture the world’s attention until the food company made the mistake of suing a Swiss activist group for libel in 1976.12 As with McLibel, the ensuing court case put Nestlé under intense scrutiny and led to an international boycott campaign, launched in 1977.
The eighties saw the largest industrial accident in human history: a massive toxic leak in 1984 at a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, killed two thousand people immediately and has taken five thousand more lives in the years since. Today, graffiti on the wall of the dilapidated and abandoned factory reads “Bhopal = Hiroshima.”13 Despite this tragedy, widely recognized to be the result of weak safety precautions including a switched-off alarm system, the eighties were a dry spell for most political movements that questioned the beneficial power of capital. Although there was a broad recognition during the Central American wars that U.S. multinationals were propping up various dictatorships, solidarity work in North America focused primarily on the actions of governments, as opposed to multinational corporations. As one report on the subject notes, “attacking [corporations] tended to be seen as a hangover from the ‘silly seventies.’”14
There was, however, one major exception to this rule: the anti-apartheid movement. Frustrated by the international community’s refusal to impose meaningful trade sanctions on South Africa, anti-apartheid activists developed a series of alternative roadblocks designed, if not to prevent multinationals from profiting from the racist regime, at least to inconvenience them if they persisted in doing so. Students and faculty members at several universities set up tent cities demanding that schools divest themselves of their endowments from any company doing business with the African nation. Church groups disrupted corporate shareholder meetings with demands for immediate withdrawal, while more moderate investors pushed corporate boards to adopt the Sullivan principles — a set of rules for companies in South Africa that purported to minimize their complicity with the apartheid regime. Meanwhile, trade unions pulled their pensions and bank accounts from institutions issuing loans to the South African government, and dozens of municipal governments passed selective purchasing agreements canceling large contracts with companies invested in South Africa. The most creative blockades were erected by the international trade-union movement. Several times a year, the unions would call a day of action, during which dock workers refused to unload cargo that had come from South Africa, and airline ticket agents refused to book flights to and from Johannes burg. In the words of campaign organizer Ken Luckhardt, workers became “activists at the point of production.”15
Though there are definite similarities, there is one key difference between the apartheid actions and the kind of anticorporate campaigning gaining momentum today. The South Africa boycott was an antiracist campaign that happened to use trade (whether the importing of wine or the exporting of General Motors dollars) as a tool to bring down the South African political system. Many of the current anticorporate campaigns are also rooted in a political attack —but what they are attacking is as much a global economic system as a national political one. During the years of apartheid, companies such as the Royal Bank of Canada, Barclays Bank in England and General Motors were generally regarded as morally neutral forces that happened to be entangled with an aberrantly racist government. Today, more and more campaigners are treating multinationals, and the policies that give them free rein, as the root cause of political injustices around the globe. Sometimes the companies commit these violations in collusion with governments, sometimes they commit them despite a government’s best efforts.
This systemic critique has been embraced, in recent years, by several established human-rights groups like Amnesty International, PEN and Human Rights Watch, as well as environmental rights organizations l
ike the Sierra Club. For many of these organizations, this represents a significant shift in policy. Until the mid-eighties foreign corporate investment in the Third World was seen in the mainstream development community as a key to alleviating poverty and misery. By 1996, however, that concept was being openly questioned, and it was recognized that many governments in the developing world were protecting lucrative investments —mines, dams, oil fields, power plants and export processing zones —by deliberately turning a blind eye to egregious rights violations by foreign corporations against their people. And in the enthusiasm for increased trade, the Western nations where most of these offending corporations were based also chose to look the other way, unwilling to risk their own global competitiveness for some other country’s problems. The bottom line was that in parts of Asia, Central and South America and Africa, the promise that investment would bring greater freedom and democracy was starting to look like a cruel hoax. And worse: in case after case, foreign corporations were found to be soliciting, even directly contracting, the local police and military to perform such unsavory tasks as evicting peasants and tribespeople from their land; cracking down on striking factory workers; and arresting and killing peaceful protestors —all in the name of safeguarding the smooth flow of trade. Corporations, in other words, were stunting human development, rather than contributing to it.
Arvind Ganesan, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, is blunt about what his organization refers to as “a shift in the terms of the debate over corporate responsibility for human rights.”16 Rather than improved human rights flowing from increased trade, “governments ignore human rights in favor of perceived trade advantages.”17 Ganesan points out that the severing of the connection between investment and human-rights improvements is today clearest in Nigeria, where the long-awaited transition to democracy has been coupled with a renewed wave of military brutality against Niger Delta communities protesting against the oil companies.
Amnesty International, in a departure from its focus on prisoners persecuted for either their religious or political beliefs, is also beginning to treat multinational corporations as major players in the denial of human rights worldwide. More and more, recent Amnesty reports have found that people such as the late Ken Saro-Wiwa have been persecuted for what a government sees as a destabilizing anticorporate stance. In a 1997 report, the group documents the fact that Indian villagers and tribal peoples were violently arrested, and some killed, for peacefully resisting the development of private power plants and luxury hotels on their lands. A democratic country, in other words, was becoming less democratic as a result of corporate intervention. “Development,” Amnesty warned, is “being pursued at the expense of human rights….”
This pattern highlights the degree to which the central and state authorities in India are prepared to deploy state force and utilize provisions of the law in the interests of development projects, curtailing the right of freedom of association, expression and assembly. India’s moves to liberalize its economy and develop new industries and infrastructure have in many areas marginalized and displaced communities and contributed to further violations of their human rights.18
India’s situation, the report states, is not “the only or the worst” one, but is part of a trend toward the disregarding of human rights in favor of “development” in the global economy.
Where the Power Is
At the heart of this convergence of anticorporate activism and research is the recognition that corporations are much more than purveyors of the products we all want; they are also the most powerful political forces of our time. By now, we’ve all heard the statistics: how corporations like Shell and Wal-Mart bask in budgets bigger than the gross domestic product of most nations; how, of the top hundred economies, fifty-one are multinationals and only forty-nine are countries. We have read (or heard about) how a handful of powerful CEOs are writing the new rules for the global economy, engineering what Canadian writer John Ralston Saul has called “a coup d’état in slow motion.” In his book about corporate power, Silent Coup, Tony Clark takes this theory one step further when he argues that citizens must go after corporations not because we don’t like their products, but because corporations have become the ruling political bodies of our era, setting the agenda of globalization. We must confront them, in other words, because that is where the power is.
So although the media often describe campaigns like the one against Nike as “consumer boycotts,” that tells only part of the story. It is more accurate to describe them as political campaigns that use consumer goods as readily accessible targets, as public-relations levers and as popular-education tools. In contrast to the consumer boycotts of the seventies, there is a more diffuse relationship between lifestyle choices (what to eat, what to smoke, what to wear) and the larger questions of how the global corporation —its size, political clout and lack of transparency — is reorganizing the world economy. Behind the protests outside Nike Town, behind the pie in Bill Gates’s face and the bottle shattering the McDonald’s window in Prague, there is something too visceral for most conventional measures to track — a kind of bad mood rising. And the corporate hijacking of political power is as responsible for this mood as the brands’ cultural looting of public and mental space. I also like to think it has to do with the arrogance of branding itself: the seeds of discontent are part of its very DNA.
“Look, Mike, there’s a real market for the truth about Nike…. Our debut product will be a proprietary database of Nike labor abuses! I see a Web presence and a CD-ROM of stats, worker affidavits, human rights reports and hidden camera video clips.”
“Kind of niche product, isn’t it, babe?”
“No. This will be huge!”19
So goes an exchange in Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoon strip —and it’s a joke with a strong sting to it. The continuing attacks on brands like Nike, Shell and McDonald’s not only reflect genuine indignation at sweatshops, oil spills and corporate censorship, they also reflect how large the antagonistic audience has become. The desire (and ability) to back up free-floating anti-corporate malaise with legitimate facts, figures and real-life anecdotes is so widespread that it even transcends old rivalries within the social and ecological movements. The United Food and Commercial Workers’ union, which started targeting Wal-Mart because of its low wages and union-busting tactics, now collects and disseminates information on Wal-Mart stores being built on sacred Native burial grounds. Since when did a grocery-store workers’ union weigh in on indigenous land claims? Since puncturing Wal-Mart became a cause in and of itself. Why did the London eco-anarchists behind the McLibel Trial —who don’t believe in working for the Man in any form —take up the plight of teenage McDonald’s workers? Because, for them, it’s another angle from which to attack the golden beast.
The political backdrop to this phenomenon is well known. Many citizens’ movements have tried to reverse conservative economic trends over the last decade by electing liberal, labor or democratic-socialist governments, only to find that economic policy remains unchanged or caters even more directly to the whims of global corporations. Centuries of democratic reforms that had won greater transparency in government suddenly appeared ineffective in the new climate of multinational power. What good was an open and accountable Parliament or Congress if opaque corporations were setting so much of the global political agenda in the back rooms?
Disillusionment with the political process has been even more pronounced on the international stage, where attempts to regulate multinationals through the United Nations and trade regulatory bodies have been blocked at every turn. A significant setback came in 1986 when the U.S. government effectively killed the little-known United Nations Commission on Trans national Corporations. Started in the mid-seventies, the commission set out to draft a universal code of conduct for multinational corporations. Its goals were preventing corporate abuses such as companies dumping, in the Third World, drugs that are illegal in the West; examining the environmental and lab
or impacts of export factories and resource extraction; and pushing the private sector toward greater transparency and accountability.
The merit of these goals seems self-evident today but the commission, in many ways, was a casualty of its time. American industry was opposed to its creation from the start and in the heat of Cold War mania managed to secure their government’s withdrawal on the grounds that the commission was a Communist plot and that the Soviets were using it for espionage. Why, they demanded, were Soviet-bloc national enterprises not subject to the same probing as American companies? During this era, criticisms of the abuses of multinational corporations were so bound up in anti-Communist paranoia that when the Bhopal tragedy happened in 1984, the immediate response of a U.S. embassy official in New Delhi was not to express horror but to say, “This is a feast for the Communists. They’ll go with it for weeks.”20
More recently, attempts to force the World Trade Organization to include enforcement of basic labor laws as a condition of global trade have been dismissed by member nations who insist such enforcement is the job of the UN’s International Labor Organization. The ILO “is the competent body to determine and deal with these standards, and we affirm our support for its work in promoting them,” states the WTO’s Singapore Ministerial Declaration of December 13, 1996. However, when the ILO embarked on an initiative to draft a meaningful corporate code of conduct, it too was blocked.