by Naomi Klein
At first, these failures to regulate capital left many reform and opposition movements in a state of near-paralysis: citizens, it seemed, had lost their say. Slowly, however, a handful of nongovernmental organizations and groups of progressive intellectuals have been developing a political strategy that recognizes that multinational brands, because of their high profile, can be far more galvanizing targets than the politicians whom they bankroll. And once the corporations are feeling the heat, they have learned, it becomes much easier to get the attention of elected politicians. In explaining why he has chosen to focus his activism on the Nike corporation, Washington-based labor activist Jeff Ballinger says bluntly, “Because we have more influence on a brand name than we do with our own governments.”21 Besides, adds John Vidal, “Activists always target the people who have the power … so if the power moves from government to industry to transnational corporations, so the swivel will move onto these people.”22
Already, a common imperative is emerging from the disparate movements taking on multinational corporations: the people’s right to know. If multinationals have become larger and more powerful than governments, the argument goes, then why shouldn’t they be subject to the same accountability controls and transparency that we demand of our public institutions? So anti-sweatshop activists have been demanding that Wal-Mart hand over lists of all the factories around the world that supply the chain with finished products. University students, as we will see in Chapter 17, are demanding the same information about factories that produce clothing with their school insignia. Environmentalists, meanwhile, have used the courts to X-ray the inner working of McDonald’s. And all over the world, consumers are demanding that companies like Monsanto provide clear labeling of genetically modified food and open their research to outside scrutiny.
Placing demands like these on private companies, whose only legal duty is to their shareholders, has generated a surprising number of successes. The reason is that many multinationals have a rather sizable weak spot. As we will see in the next chapter, activists around the world are making liberal use of the very factor that has been the subject of this book so far: the brand. Brand image, the source of so much corporate wealth, is also, it turns out, the corporate Achilles’ heel.
Top: Billboard Liberation Front jams an Apple campaign on the streets of San Francisco. Bottom: The Gap falls victim to a “skulling” epidemic on Toronto outdoor ads.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE BRAND BOOMERANG
The Tactics of Brand-Based Campaigns
It can take 100 years to build up a good brand and 30 days to knock it down.
—David D’Alessandro, president of John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, January 6, 1999
Branding, as we have seen, is a balloon economy: it inflates with astonishing rapidity but it is full of hot air. It shouldn’t be surprising that this formula has bred armies of pin-wielding critics, eager to pop the corporate balloon and watch the shreds fall to the ground. The more ambitious a company has been in branding the cultural landscape, and the more careless it has been in abandoning workers, the more likely it is to have generated a silent battalion of critics waiting to pounce. Moreover, the branding formula leaves corporations wide open to the most obvious tactic in the activist arsenal: bringing a brand’s production secrets crashing into its marketing image. It’s a tactic that has worked before.
Though marketing and production have not always been separated by so many bodies of water and layers of subcontractors, the two have never been exactly cozy. Ever since the first ad campaigns created folksy mascots to lend a homemade feel to mass-produced goods, it has been the very business of the advertising industry to distance products from the factories that make them. Helen Woodward, an influential copywriter in the 1920s, famously warned her co-workers that “if you are advertising any product, never see the factory in which it was made…. Don’t watch the people at work … because, you see, when you know the truth about anything, the real inner truth —it is very hard to write the surface fluff which sells it.”1
Back then, Dickensian images like those from the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire were still fresh in the minds of Western consumers. They didn’t need to be reminded of the dark side of industrialization when they were buying soap, stockings, cars or any other product that promised happiness in the self and envy in everybody else. Besides, many of the consumers being targeted by advertising were themselves factory workers, and the last thing a fluff writer wanted to do was trigger a memory of the dreary monotony of the assembly line.
But as First World countries have shifted into “information economies,” we have developed a certain nostalgia for the gritty authenticity of Woodward’s era of industrialization. And so the factory, long marketing’s greatest taboo, has recently found a place in advertising. The shop floor is featured in Saturn car ads, for example, where we meet empowered auto workers who can “stop the line” just because something looks a little dodgy. Interior shots of a factory also briefly appear in an early nineties Subaru ad —there to make the trademark Wieden & Kennedy point that cars really aren’t about impressing your neighbors but driving “the best machine.”
However, the factories featured in both the Saturn and Subaru campaigns aren’t the sweat shop floor that Woodward warned her fellow ad writers to never lay eyes upon; these are New Age nostalgia factories —about as realistic as Intel’s dancing techno-technicians. The role of these factories, like that of Aunt Jemima and the Quaker Oats mascot, is to associate Subaru and Saturn with a simpler time, a time when goods were made in the countries where they were consumed, when people still knew their neighbors and nobody had heard of an export processing zone. In the early nineties, at a time when car factories were closing in droves and the market was being flooded with cheap imports, the ads —though purporting to take us behind the glitz of advertising — were there not to illuminate the manufacturing process, but to obscure it.
In other words, Helen Woodward’s rule holds truer now than ever: at no point has the double life of our branded goods been more conflicted. Despite the rhetoric of One Worldism, the planet remains sharply divided between producers and consumers, and the enormous profits raked in by the superbrands are premised upon these worlds remaining as separate from each other as possible. It is a tidy formula: because the contract factory owners in the free-trade zones don’t sell a single Reebok sneaker or Mickey Mouse sweatshirt directly to the public, they have a limitless threshold for bad public relations. Building up a positive relationship with the shopping public, meanwhile, is left entirely in the hands of the brand-name multi nationals. The only catch is that for the system to function smoothly, workers must know little of the marketed lives of the products they produce and consumers must remain sheltered from the production lives of the brands they buy.
The formula has worked for quite a while. For the first two decades of their existence, export processing zones were indeed globalization’s dirty little secret —secured “labor warehouses” where the unsightly business of production was contained behind high walls and barbed wire. But the “brands, not products” mania that has gripped the business world since the early nineties is coming back to haunt the free-floating, incorporeal corporation. And no wonder. Severing brands so decisively from their sites of production and shuttling factories away into the industrial hellholes of the EPZs has created a potentially explosive situation. It’s as if the global production chain is based on the belief that workers in the South and consumers in the North will never figure out a way to communicate with each other —that despite the info-tech hype, only corporations are capable of genuine global mobility. It is this supreme arrogance that has made brands like Nike and Disney so vulnerable to the two principal tactics employed by anticorporate campaigners: exposing the riches of the branded world to the tucked-away sites of production and bringing back the squalor of production to the doorstep of the blinkered consumer.
Designer Activism: The Logo Is the Star
I’
m sitting in a crowded classroom in Berkeley, California, and somebody is turning up my collar to see the label. For a moment, I feel as if I am back in grade school with Romi the logo vigilante checking for impostors. Instead, it’s 1997 and the person examining my collar is Lora Jo Foo, president of Sweatshop Watch. She is running a seminar called “Ending Sweatshops at Home and Abroad” as part of a conference on globalization.
Every time Foo runs a seminar on sweatshops, she pulls out a pair of scissors and asks everyone to cut the labels off their clothing. She then unfurls a map of the world made of white cloth. Our liberated brand names are sewn onto the map, which, over the course of many such gatherings in several countries, has become a crazy patchwork quilt of Liz Claiborne, Banana Republic, Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Jones New York, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren logos. Most of the dense little rectangular patches are concentrated in Asia and Latin America. Foo then traces a company’s global travel routes: she begins with when its products were still being produced in North America (only a few labels remain on that part of the map); then moves to Japan and South Korea; then to Indonesia and the Philippines; then to China and Vietnam. According to Foo, clothing logos make a great teaching aid; they take faraway, complex issues and plant them as close to home as the clothes on our backs.
It must be said that no one is more surprised by the power and appeal of brand-based activism than those who have spearheaded the campaigns. Many of the people leading the anti-sweatshop movement are longtime advocates on behalf of the Third World’s poor and marginalized. In the eighties, they plugged away in near-total obscurity on behalf of Nicaragua’s Sandinista rebels and El Salvador’s FMLN opposition party. After the wars ended and the pace of globalization accelerated, they learned that the new war zone for Central America’s poor was the sweatshop factory locked inside the military-guarded free-trade zone. But what they weren’t prepared for was how sympathetic the public would be to this problem. “I think that what gives this issue such widespread appeal —makes it so much more real to people than the Central American wars were —is that people make a direct connection with their own lives; it’s no longer something that’s ‘out there,’” says Trim Bissell of the Washington-based Campaign for Labor Rights. “If they eat at one of those chain outlets, they may well be putting into their bodies food that in one way or another depends on the oppression of someone else. If they buy toys for their children, those toys may have been made by children who have no childhood. It is so direct and so emotional and so human that people contact us and say ‘How can I help?’ In this work, we’re not having to say ‘There’s a problem.’ We’re mostly saying, ‘Here’s a productive way you can direct your outrage.’”2
American author Lorraine Dusky described the dynamics of this personal connection in USA Today. Watching TV reports of the May 1998 riots in Indonesia, she found herself wondering whether her logos had anything to do with a young Indonesian girl shown wailing over the dead body of a fire victim. “Were my Nikes somehow to blame?” she writes. “That bereft young girl might still have a father if Nike had insisted that workers be better paid. Because if Nike had, other sweatshop employers might have followed suit.” It may seem like a leap —blaming one’s sneakers for a death in an Indonesian pro-democracy protest —but it did provide the connection necessary, as Dusky writes, to see that “globalization means more than the easy exchange of currency and goods; it means that we are all our sisters’ and brothers’ keepers.”3
But while the effectiveness of brand-based campaigns may be in their immediate relevance to our own branded lives, there is another factor contributing to their appeal, particularly among young people. Anticorporate activism enjoys the priceless benefits of borrowed hipness and celebrity —borrowed, ironically enough, from the brands themselves. Logos that have been burned into our brains by the finest image campaigns money can buy, and lifted a little closer to the sun by their sponsorship of much-loved cultural events, are perpetually bathed in a glow —the “loglo,” to borrow a term from science fiction writer Neal Stevenson.4 As Alexis de Tocqueville predicted, it is fantastical creations like this that have the power to make us “regret the world of reality” —and no reality has come to seem more comparatively regrettable than that of people suffering under poverty and oppression in faraway places. So in the late seventies, as the loglo grew brighter, social-justice activism faded; its woefully unmarketable ways no longer held much appeal for energetic young people or for media obsessed with slick aesthetics.
But today, with so many anticorporate activists adopting the aesthetics and humor of culture jamming and the irreverent attitude of street reclaiming, that is beginning to change. From their new “leech-like” vantage point, the brands’ detractors are benefiting from the loglo in an unanticipated way. The loglo is so bright that activists are able to enjoy its light, even as they are in the act of attacking a brand. This vicarious branding may seem to some like an erosion of their political purity but it also clearly helps to lure foot soldiers to the cause. Like a good ad bust, anticorporate campaigns draw energy from the power and mass appeal of marketing, at the same time as they hurl that energy right back at the brands that have so successfully colonized our everyday lives.
You can see this jujitsu strategy in action in what has become a staple of many anticorporate campaigns: inviting a worker from a Third World country to come visit a First World superstore —with plenty of cameras rolling. Few newscasts can resist the made-for-TV moment when an Indonesian Nike worker gasps as she learns that the sneakers she churned out for $2 a day sell for $120 at San Francisco Nike Town. Since 1994, there have been at least five separate tours of Indonesian Nike workers through North America and Europe —Cicih Sukaesih, who lost her job for trying to organize a union in a Nike factory, has been back three times, her trips sponsored by coalitions of labor, church and school groups. In August 1995, two Gap seamstresses —seventeen-year-old Claudia Leticia Molina from Honduras and eighteen-year-old Judith Yanira Viera from El Salvador — went on similar North American speaking tours, addressing crowds outside dozens of Gap outlets. Perhaps most memorably, shoppers were able to put a face to the issue of child labor when fifteen-year-old Wendy Diaz appeared before the U.S. Congress. She had been working in a Honduran factory sewing Kathie Lee Gifford pants since she was thirteen. Diaz testified to the presence of “about 100 minors like me —thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old —some even twelve…. Sometimes they kept us all night long, working…. The supervisors scream at us and yell at us to work faster. Sometimes they throw the garment in your face, or grab and shove you…. Sometimes the managers touch the girls. Pretending it’s a joke they touch our legs. Many of us would like to go to night school but we can’t because they constantly force us to work overtime.”5
No group has taken advantage of the branding economy’s various leaks and cracks with more laser-like accuracy than the National Labor Committee, under its director, Charles Kernaghan. In the five years between 1994 and 1999, the NLC’s three-person office in New York has used Greenpeace-style media antics to draw more public attention to the plight of sweatshop workers than the multimillion-dollar international trade union movement has achieved in almost a century. As the garment-industry bible Women’s Wear Daily put it, “Charles Kernaghan and his anti-sweatshop battle have been shaking up the issue of labor abuses in the apparel industry like nothing since the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.”6
The NLC didn’t achieve this rather remarkable feat by lobbying government or even by organizing workers. It did it by setting out to sully some of the most polished logos on the brandscape. Kernaghan’s formula is simple enough. First, select America’s most cartoonish icons, from literal ones like Mickey Mouse to virtual ones like Kathie Lee Gifford. Next, create head-on collisions between image and reality. “They live or die by their image,” Kernaghan says of his corporate adversaries. “That gives you a certain power over them … these companies are sitting ducks.”7
Like the best culture jammer
s, Kernaghan has a natural feel for the pitch. He knew that he could “sell” overseas sweatshops to the U.S. media —notorious for its double-jeopardy bias against labor and problems in places where people don’t speak English. But what he needed to do was steer clear of obscure labor laws and arcane trade agreements, and keep the focus squarely on the logos behind the violations. It’s a formula that has brought the sweatshop story under serious scrutiny on 60 Minutes and 20/20 and in The New York Times —and ultimately even to Hard Copy, which sent a crew to accompany Kernaghan on a tour of Nicaraguan sweatshops in fall 1997.
The tabloid news show and the gutsy labor group didn’t make as strange bedfellows as one might think. We are a celebrity-obsessed culture, and such a culture is never in finer form than when one of its most loved icons is mired in scandal. What Kernaghan had seized upon is that the fanatical obsession with logos extends not only to building them up, but also to tearing them down. Though on a vastly different scale, Nike’s sweatshops are to labor reporting what O.J. Simpson’s trial was to the legal beat: designer dirt. And the NLC, for better or for worse (definitely for worse, say its critics), is indeed the Hard Copy of the labor movement, forever searching out that intersection between the dazzling celebrity stratosphere and real life on the mean streets.
So Kernaghan lays out the facts and figures of the global economy in Disney pajamas, Nike running shoes, Wal-Mart aisles and the personal riches of the individuals involved —and crunches the numbers into homemade statistical contraptions that he then wields like a mallet. For example: all 50,000 workers at the Yue Yen Nike Factory in China would have to work for nineteen years to earn what Nike spends on advertising in one year.8 Wal-Mart’s annual sales are worth 120 times more than Haiti’s entire annual budget; Disney CEO Michael Eisner earns $9,783 an hour while a Haitian worker earns 28 cents an hour; it would take a Haitian worker 16.8 years to earn Eisner’s hourly income; the $181 million in stock options Eisner exercised in 1996 is enough to take care of his 19,000 Haitian workers and their families for fourteen years.9