by Naomi Klein
In addition to aggressive sponsorship, another marketing trend that has begun to backfire is the commercial co-optation of identity politics, discussed in Chapter 5. Rather than softening its image, Nike’s feminist-themed ads and antiracist slogans have only served to enrage women’s groups and civil-rights leaders, who insist that a company that got rich off the backs of young women in the Third World has no business using the ideals of feminism and racial equality to sell more shoes. “I think people feel uneasy about the repackaging of social justice images as commercials from the start,” U.S. media critic Makani Themba explains, “but they’re not sure why. Then you hear these charges and you’re ready to pounce on Nike as hypocritical.”20
Which might explain why the first company to feel the heat of the sweatshop police was one that had seemed to be a paragon of ethical corporatism, Levi Strauss. In 1992 Levi’s became the first company to adopt a corporate code of conduct after some of its contractors overseas were found to be treating their workers as indentured slaves. This was not the image the company had presented back home, with its commitment to nonhierarchical collective decision making and, later, its high-profile sponsorship of such girl-power events as the Lilith Fair festival. Similarly, the Body Shop —though it may well be the most progressive multinational on the planet —still has a tendency to display its good deeds in its store windows before getting its corporate house in order. Anita Roddick’s company has been the subject of numerous damning investigations in the press, which have challenged the company’s use of chemicals, its stand on unions and even its claim that its products have not been tested on animals.
We have heard the same refrain over and over again from Nike, Reebok, the Body Shop, Starbucks, Levi’s and the Gap: “Why are you picking on us? We’re the good ones!” The answer is simple. They are singled out because the politics they have associated themselves with, which have made them rich — feminism, ecology, inner-city empowerment —were not just random pieces of effective ad copy that their brand managers found lying around. They are complex, essential social ideas, for which many people have spent lifetimes fighting. That’s what lends righteousness to the rage of activists campaigning against what they see as cynical distortions of those ideas. Al Dunlap, the notorious job-slasher-for-hire who built his reputation on ruthless layoffs, may be able to respond to calls for corporate accountability with a rev of his chainsaw, but companies such as Levi’s and the Body Shop can’t shrug them off, because they publicly presented social accountability as the foundation of their corporate philosophy from the first. Over and over again, it is when the advertising teams creatively overreach themselves that — like Icarus — they fall.
Injustice — in Synergy
By some accident of fate, on February 25, 1997, the multiple layers of anti-corporate rage converged over the Mighty Ducks hockey arena in Anaheim, California. It was Disney’s annual meeting and about 10,000 shareholders crowded into the arena to rake Michael Eisner over the coals. They were upset that he had paid more than $100 million in a severance package to Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz, who’d lasted only fourteen scandal-racked months at Disney as second in command. Eisner was further attacked for his own $400 million multiyear pay package, as well as for stacking the board with friends and paid Disney consultants. As if shareholders weren’t angry enough, the obscene amounts of money lavished on Ovitz and Eisner were thrown into harsh relief by an unrelated shareholders’ resolution chiding Disney for paying starvation wages to workers in its overseas factories, and calling for independent monitoring of these practices. Outside the arena, dozens of National Labor Committee supporters were shouting and waving placards about the plight of Disney’s Haitian workforce. Of course the monitoring resolution was trounced, but the way the issues of sweatshop labor and executive compensation played off one another must have been music to Charles Kernaghan’s ears.
Eisner, who apparently expected the gathering to be little more than a pep rally, was clearly caught off guard by this confluence of events. Wasn’t he simply playing by the rules —making his shareholders rich and himself richer? Weren’t profits up a healthy 16 percent from the year before? Wasn’t the entertainment industry, as Eisner himself reminded the restless gathering, “extremely competitive”? Ever the expert at speaking to children, Eisner ventured, “I don’t think people understand executive compensation.”21
Or maybe they understood it all too well. As one shareholder commented —to much applause — “Nobody argues that Mr. Eisner hasn’t done a fantastic job. But that’s more in one year than someone like me will get in a lifetime. It’s more than the President of the United States makes —and look what he runs!”22 Still, Eisner’s confusion is understandable. He is by no means the only CEO paid truly goofy amounts of money —compared to some executives, he’s positively roughing it, with an annual base salary of only $750,000 (with bonuses and stock options on top of that, of course). And Disney certainly isn’t alone in its sweatshop woes. According to the U.S. Investor Responsibility Research Center, there were seventy-nine anti-sweatshop shareholder resolutions on the books for major American multinationals between 1996 and 1998, including Dayton Hudson, Nike, the Gap, Land’s End, J.C. Penney and Toys ‘R’ Us.23 It’s clear that what was being put on trial at that rowdy meeting in Anaheim was far more than the excesses of a single company — at issue was the central question of global economic disparity: disparity between executive and worker, between North and South, between consumer and producer, and even between individual shareholders and the boss. The Mouse’s family values provided a helpful glass structure at which to lob stones, but the truth is that virtually any Fortune 500 company could have been in the hot seat that day.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A TALE OF THREE LOGOS
The Swoosh, the Shell and the Arches
Dozens of brand-based campaigns have succeeded in rattling their corporate targets, in several cases pushing them to substantially alter their policies. But three campaigns stand out for having reached well beyond activist circles and deep into public consciousness. The tactics they have developed —among them the use of the courts to force transparency on corporations, and the Internet to bypass traditional media —are revolutionizing the future of political engagement. By now it should come as no surprise that the targets of these influential campaigns are three of the most familiar and best-tended logos on the brandscape: the Swoosh, the Shell and the Arches.
The Swoosh: The Fight for Good Jobs
Nike CEO Phil Knight has long been a hero of the business schools. Prestigious academic publications such as The Harvard Business Review have lauded his pioneering marketing techniques, his understanding of branding and his early use of outsourcing. Countless MBA candidates and other students of marketing and communications have studied the Nike formula of “brands, not products.” So when Phil Knight was invited to be a guest speaker at the Stanford University Business School — Knight’s own alma mater — in May 1997, the visit was expected to be one in a long line of Nike love-ins. Instead, Knight was greeted by a crowd of picketing students, and when he approached the microphone he was taunted with chants of “Hey Phil, off the stage. Pay your workers a living wage.” The Nike honeymoon had come to a grinding halt.
No story illustrates the growing distrust of the culture of corporate branding more than the international anti-Nike movement —the most publicized and tenacious of the brand-based campaigns. Nike’s sweatshop scandals have been the subject of over 1,500 news articles and opinion columns. Its Asian factories have been probed by cameras from nearly every major media organization, from CBS to Disney’s sports station, ESPN. On top of all that, it has been the subject of a series of Doonesbury cartoon strips and the butt of Michael Moore’s documentary The Big One. As a result, several people in Nike’s PR department work full time dealing with the sweatshop controversy —fielding complaints, meeting with local groups and developing Nike’s response —and the company has created a new executive position: v
ice president for corporate responsibility. Nike has received hundreds and thousands of letters of protest, faced hundreds of both small and large groups of demonstrators, and is the target of a dozen critical Web sites.
For the last two years, anti-Nike forces in North America and Europe have attempted to focus all the scattered swoosh bashing on a single day. Every six months they have declared an International Nike Day of Action, and brought their demands for fair wages and independent monitoring directly to Nike’s customers, shoppers at flagship Nike Towns in urban centers or the less glamorous Foot Locker outlets in suburban malls. According to Campaign for Labor Rights, the largest anti-Nike event so far took place on October 18, 1997: eighty-five cities in thirteen countries participated. Not all the protests have attracted large crowds, but since the movement is so decentralized, the sheer number of individual anti-Nike events has left the company’s public-relations department scrambling to get its spin onto dozens of local newscasts. Though you’d never know it from its branding ubiquity, even Nike can’t be everywhere at once.
Since so many of the stores that sell Nike products are located in malls, protests often end with a security guard escorting participants into the parking lot. Jeff Smith, an activist from Grand Rapids, Michigan, reported that “when we asked if private property rights ruled over free speech rights, the [security] officer hesitated and then emphatically said YES!” (Though in the economically depressed city of St. John’s, Newfoundland, anti-Nike campaigners reported that after being thrown out of a mall, “they were approached by a security guard who asked to sign their petition.”1 ) But there’s plenty that can be done on the sidewalk or in the mall parking lot.
SLOGANS FROM THE INTERNATIONAL ANTI-NIKE MOVEMENT:
Just Don’t Do It Just Don’t Nike, Do It Just Justice. Do it, Nike The Swooshtika Just Boycott It Ban the Swoosh Nike —Fair Play? Nike, Nein, Ich Kaufe Es Nicht! (Nike —No, I Don’t Buy It!) Nike Soyez Sport! (Nike Be a Sport) Just Duit (It’s just money)
Campaigners have dramatized Nike’s labor practices through what they call “sweatshop fashion shows,” and “The Transnational Capital Auction: A Game of Survival” (the lowest bidder wins), and a global economy treadmill (run fast, stay in the same place). In Australia, anti-Nike protestors have been known to parade around in calico bags painted with the slogan “Rather wear a bag than Nike.” Students at the University of Colorado in Boulder dramatized the difference between the legal minimum wage and a living wage by holding a fundraising run in which “participants pay an entrance fee of $1.60 (daily wages for a Nike worker in Vietnam) and the winner will receive $2.10 (the price of three square meals in Vietnam).”2 Meanwhile, activists in Austin, Texas, made a giant papier-mâché Nike sneaker piñata, and a protest outside a Regina, Saskatchewan, shopping center featured a deface-the-swoosh booth. The last stunt is something of a running theme in all the anti-Nike actions: Nike’s logo and slogan have been jammed so many times —on T-shirts, stickers, placards, banners and pins —that the semiotic bruises have turned them black and blue (see list below).
Tellingly, the anti-Nike movement is at its strongest inside the company’s home state of Oregon, even though the area has reaped substantial economic benefits from Nike’s success (Nike is the largest employer in Portland and a significant local philanthropist). Phil Knight’s neighbors, nonetheless, have not all rushed to his defense in his hour of need. In fact, since the Life magazine soccer-ball story broke, many Oregonians have been out for blood. The demonstrations outside the Portland Nike Town are among the largest and most militant in the country, sometimes sporting a menacing giant Phil Knight puppet with dollar signs for eyes or a twelve-foot Nike swoosh dragged by small children (to dramatize child labor). And in contravention of the principles of nonviolence that govern the anti-Nike movement, one protest in Eugene, Oregon, led to acts of vandalism including the tearing-down of a fence surrounding the construction of a new Nike Town, gear pulled off shelves at an existing Nike store and, according to one eyewitness, “an entire rack of clothes … dumped off a balcony into a fountain below.”3
Local papers in Oregon have aggressively (sometimes gleefully) followed Knight’s sweatshop scandals, and the daily paper The Oregonian sent a reporter to Southeast Asia to do its own lengthy investigation of the factories. Mark Zusman, editor of the Oregon newspaper The Willamette Week, publicly admonished Knight in a 1996 “memo”: “Frankly, Phil, it’s time to get a little more sophisticated about this media orgy … Oregonians already have suffered through the shame of Tonya Harding, Bob Packwood and Wes Cooley. Spare us the added humiliation of being known as the home of the most exploitative capitalist in the free world.”4
Even Nike’s charitable donations have become controversial. In the midst of a critical fundraising drive to try to address a $15 million shortfall, the Portland School Board was torn apart by debate about whether to accept Nike’s gift of $500,000 in cash and swooshed athletic gear. The board ended up accepting the donation, but not before looking their gift horse publicly in the mouth. “I asked myself,” school board trustee Joseph Tam told The Oregonian, “Nike contributed this money so my children can have a better education, but at whose expense? At the expense of children who work for six cents an hour?… As an immigrant and as an Asian I have to face this moral and ethical dilemma.”5
Nike’s sponsorship scandals have reached far beyond the company’s home state. In Edmonton, Alberta, teachers, parents and some students tried to block Nike from sponsoring a children’s street hockey program because “a company which profits from child labor in Pakistan ought not to be held up as a hero to Edmonton children.”6 At least one school involved in the city-wide program sent back its swooshed equipment to Nike headquarters. And when Nike approached the City of Ottawa Council in March 1998 to suggest building one of its swooshed gymnasium floors in a local community center, it faced questions about “blood money.” Nike withdrew its offer and gave the court to a more grateful center, run by the Boys and Girls Clubs. The dilemma of accepting Nike sponsorship money has also exploded on university campuses, as we will see in the next chapter.
At first, much of the outrage stemmed from the fact that when the sweatshop scandal hit the papers, Nike wasn’t really acting all that sorry about it. While Kathie Lee Gifford and the Gap had at least displayed contrition when they got caught with their sweatshops showing, Phil Knight had practically stonewalled: denying responsibility, attacking journalists, blaming rogue contractors and sending out flacks to speak for the company. While Kathie Lee was crying on TV, Michael Jordan was shrugging his shoulders and saying that his job was to shoot hoop, not play politics. And while the Gap agreed to allow a particularly controversial factory in El Salvador to be monitored by local human-rights groups, Nike was paying lip service to a code of conduct that its Asian workers, when interviewed, had never even heard of.
But there was a critical difference between Nike and the Gap at this stage. Nike didn’t panic when its scandals hit the middle-American mall, because the mall, while it is indeed where most Nike products are sold, is not where Nike’s image was made. Unlike the Gap, Nike has drawn on the inner cities, merging, as we’ve seen, with the styles of poor black and Latino youth to load up on imagery and attitude. Nike’s branding power is thoroughly intertwined with the African-American heroes who have endorsed its products since the mid-eighties: Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen, Michael Johnson, Spike Lee, Tiger Woods, Bo Jackson —not to mention the rappers who wear Nike gear on stage. While hip-hop style was the major influence at the mall, Phil Knight must have known that as long as Nike was King Brand with Jordan fans in Compton and the Bronx, he could be stirred but not shaken. Sure, their parents, teachers and church leaders might be tut-tutting over sweatshops, but as far as Nike’s core demographic of thirteen-to seventeen-year-old kids was concerned, the swoosh was still made of Teflon.
By 1997, it had become clear to Nike’s critics that if they were serious about taking on the swoosh in an i
mage war, they would have to get at the source of the brand’s cachet —and as Nick Alexander of the multicultural Third Force magazine wrote in the summer of that year, they weren’t even close. “Nobody has figured out how to make Nike break down and cry. The reason is that nobody has engaged African Americans in the fight…. To gain significant support from communities of color, corporate campaigns need to make connections between Nike’s overseas operations and conditions here at home.”7
The connections were there to be made. It is the cruelest irony of Nike’s “brands, not products” formula that the people who have done the most to infuse the swoosh with cutting-edge meaning are the very people most hurt by the company’s pumped-up prices and nonexistent manufacturing base. It is inner-city youth who have most directly felt the impact of Nike’s decision to manufacture its products outside the U.S., both in high unemployment rates and in the erosion of the community tax base (which sets the stage for the deterioration of local public schools).