by Naomi Klein
Oyinbo and his comrades accuse the company of hiring the soldiers who raided the barge, killing two men and injuring as many as thirty others. Chevron says it is not responsible for the actions taken by police officers on its rig —they were simply enforcing the law against “pirates.” Chevron spokesperson Mike Libbey denies that the company paid the security officers to intervene, though he admits to alerting the authorities and providing transportation to the platform. “We think it is unfortunate that people died, perhaps unnecessarily, but that doesn’t change the fact that in order for Chevron to do business in ninety countries around the world, we must cooperate with governments of many kinds,” he told reporters.36 The company has further enraged the community by refusing to pay damages to the families of the deceased — only burial costs. “If they want other compensations, they should write to us and the company may decide to assist them on compassionate grounds,” said Deji Haastrup, Chevron’s community relations manager.37 Perhaps fittingly, Chevron’s CEO, Ken Derr, is one of the most active members of USA*Engage and its crusade against sanctions and selective purchasing.
Unlike Shell, Chevron has not yet become the subject of an international brand boycott, though there is a growing public awareness about the deaths that took place on May 28. Perhaps because Bola Oyinbo lacks Ken Saro-Wiwa’s international connections, the deaths of his two colleagues were at first not even reported outside the Nigerian press. And it is sadly ironic that Chevron has undoubtedly benefited from the fact that activists have made a strategic decision to focus their criticism on Shell, rather than on the Nigerian oil industry as a whole. It points to one of the significant, at times maddening, limitations of brand-based politics.
Top: Craig Kielburger, the teenager who successfully brought child labor to the world’s attention, receives an award from Reebok, a company that has been embroiled in several sweatshop scandals. Bottom: “Certified Organic,” “Recycled” and “Dolphin Friendly.” Will “No Sweat” become just another logo for the conscientious consumer?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
BEYOND THE BRAND
The Limits of Brand-Based Politics
In this industry, the only reason to change is because someone has got a great cattle prod that keeps jabbing you in the rear end.
—Bud Konheim, president of Nicole Miller Inc.
clothing company, September 4, 1997
When Good Things Happen to Bad Brands
In One World, Ready or Not, William Greider writes that “focusing on the moral values of particular companies —or their immorality —invites a self-righteous response among readers that is too easy and undeserved…. Nike has concocted a particularly sick ideology to sell its shoes —glamorous images of superstar athletes concealing the human brutalities — but why single out Nike or Michael Jordan when the U.S. government itself is implicated in the same sickness?”1 Greider has a valid point. The conduct of the individual multinationals is simply a by-product of a broader global economic system that has steadily been removing almost all barriers and conditions to trade, investment and outsourcing. If companies make deals with brutal dictators, sell off their factories and pay wages too low to live on, it’s because there is nothing in our international trading rules to prevent them. But eliminating the inequalities at the heart of free-market globalization seems a daunting task for most of us mortals. On the other hand, focusing on a Nike or a Shell and possibly changing the behavior of one multinational can open an important door into this complicated and challenging political arena.
The all-star multinationals that have been the focus of this book are the celebrity face of global capitalism, but when they come under close public scrutiny, the entire system is hauled under the microscope as well. This is often a quite conscious strategy on the part of brand-based campaigns. The Campaign for Labor Rights, for instance, openly admits that “when we debate Nike, we are debating the new global economy.”2 Click on the Beyond McDonald’s icon on the McSpotlight Web site and you’ll learn that “due to its massive public prominence and indisputable arrogance [McDonald’s] has simply been used as a symbol of all corporations pursuing their profits at any price.” And Stephen Coats, in explaining why he chose to make Starbucks the center of a drive to improve conditions in the Guatemalan coffee industry, said simply: “You have to start somewhere. You start with one company.”3 Even the small-town battles against Wal-Mart take place at least partly on this symbolic level. John Jarvis, a historical preservationist and one of Wal-Mart’s most vocal foes, explains that “the good thing about Wal-Mart was that it was big enough, nasty enough, and aggressive enough to make the problem of uncontrolled growth clear.”4
But when one logo gets all the attention, even when it is being used tactically to illustrate broader issues, others are unquestionably let off the hook. As we have seen, Chevron has been awarded contracts that Shell lost, and Adidas has enjoyed a massive market comeback by imitating Nike’s labor and marketing strategies, while sidestepping all of the controversy. The most hypo critical of all is Reebok, which has rushed to capitalize on Nike’s controversies by positioning itself as the ethical shoe alternative. “Consumers are looking for what a company stands for,” Jo Harlow, Reebok’s vice president of marketing, says in relation to Nike’s fall from grace.5 And to make sure that consumers find what they are looking for in Reebok, the company has taken to handing out high-profile Reebok Human Rights Awards to activists who fight against child labor and repressive dictatorships. This is all rather sanctimonious, coming from a company that produces many of its shoes in the very same factories as Nike, and that has seen more than its own share of human-rights violations, though with less attendant publicity.
Gerard Greenfield, whose firsthand research into garment, shoe and toy factories in Asia has been the backbone of dozens of international campaigns, admits that he has become tired of the double standard. He points out that in March 1997, the international community was outraged by a report that a group of women at a Nike factory called Pou Chen in Vietnam were beaten by a supervisor and forced to run laps around the grounds. But, he writes, “less than a month later the same severe punishment was imposed on workers at another Taiwanese-invested shoe factory, Giant V…. News of this case was sent out to the groups campaigning on labor practices at Pou Chen. However, despite the similarity in these cases, it was not taken up by human-rights and labor-rights campaign groups in Europe, North America and Australia, simply because the factory does not produce Nike shoes…. It seems that unless the Nike connection is made, such incidents are irrelevant.”6 And so a warped hierarchy of oppression is emerging from the factories of the Third World: when it comes to seeking international solidarity, only designer injustices need apply.
Bob Ortega makes a similar point about the anti—Wal-Mart movement in his book In Sam We Trust.
There is a terrific irony —if one not much appreciated by Wal-Mart executives —in the fact that hundreds of towns and suburbs across North America will fight mightily to keep the dreaded Wal-Mart at bay, even as many of these communities let in scores of other superstore retailers that try to ape Wal-Mart in every way they can…. To the extent that Wal-Mart’s critics blast it for wiping out Main Street businesses, for homogenizing communities, for trying to crush any and all rivals, for selling goods made in sweatshops here and abroad, they are missing the forest for the biggest tree.7
But there is also a clear value in the big-tree approach. Ken Saro-Wiwa’s brother Owens points out that although all the gas companies have skeletons in their closets, focusing on one company —Shell Oil in the case of Nigeria —can have concrete advantages. “It is important not to make people feel powerless. After all, they need to fill their cars with something. If we tell them all companies are guilty, they will feel they can do nothing. What we are trying to really do, now that we have this evidence against this one company, is to let people have the feeling that they can at least have the moral force to make one company change.”8 He also says that since Shell cont
rols more than half of Nigeria’s oil, whatever happens to Shell will serve as a lesson to all the other oil companies, including Chevron.
When Bad Things Happen to the Unbrandables
Wiwa is convinced that with continued pressure, Shell will eventually meet the campaign’s demands for economic and environmental reparations in Ogoniland. The millions Shell has poured into public relations and restructuring already show how seriously even the most profitable company in the world must take its public image. But much of that has to do with the visibility and vulnerability of the Shell brand. Shell extracts a raw resource from the land and water in Nigeria, but it brands that resource with its logo and sells it at its own branded gas stations around the world. And it is at that point that consumers make a choice between Shell and Texaco or Shell and Chevron — a choice that is as arbitrary and image based as the one between Coke and Pepsi, McDonald’s and Burger King. Oil is a raw resource, but it only really becomes accessible to most people as a brand.
The same cannot be said of most multinationals in the natural-resource industries. Mining, natural gas, seed and logging multinationals all trade in virtually unbranded commodities that they sell to governments and corporate clients who then transform them into consumer goods. Since resource companies don’t sell directly to the public, they barely have to worry about their public image — a factor that brings up what is perhaps the most significant limitation of brand-based campaigns: they can be powerless in the face of corporations that opt out of the branding game.
So all over the world, children work in fields with toxic pesticides, in dangerous mines and in rubber and steel factories where small fingers and hands are sliced off or mangled in heavy machinery. Many of these children are producing goods for the export market: canned fish, tea, rice, rubber for tires. But their plight has never captured the world’s imagination like that of the kids who make soccer balls with swooshes on them or clothing for Barbie dolls, because their exploitation is unbranded, and therefore less identifiable, less visible, in our image-obsessed world.
The Free Burma movement has felt this limitation keenly. The campaign has been astonishingly successful at shaming nearly every brand-name company out of the country, from Pepsi to Texaco. When Heineken pulled out in July 1996, CEO Karel Vuursteen minced no words in explaining his decision: “Public opinion and issues surrounding this market have changed to a degree that could have an adverse effect on our brand and corporate reputation” —another casualty of the branding boomerang.9 Relatively speaking, however, beer, soft-drink and clothing companies were never major players on the Burmese scene. The largest foreign development —accounting for half of all foreign investment — is a $1.2 billion gas line financed by Unocal, which is U.S. based, and Total, which is French-owned. But “Unocal,” as Human Rights Watch noted in its 1997 World Report, “remained indifferent to protests.” CEO Roger Beach defiantly told the press: “Let me say unequivocally that the only way we will leave is if we are forced to by the enactment of law.”10 And why should Beach care what a bunch of university students and church groups have to say? In 1997, Unocal sold the last of its U.S. retail outlets and refiners. So we don’t go and buy our bottles of Unocal at Wal-Mart, or slap the Unocal logo on baseball hats and T-shirts. Activists have tried to fight the gas company through the courts, but so far without luck. When brand image is the weapon, an unbranded company can get off the hook entirely.
Secondary Boycotts
There are, however, ways around this obstacle, as the Lubicon Cree discovered when the Japanese pulp-and-paper giant Daishowa Marubeni-International unveiled plans for a major logging and mill operation on land that the Cree claimed was rightfully theirs. The area in Northern Alberta has been the subject of a fierce land-claim dispute in which the Canadian government has managed to avoid negotiating a settlement for sixty-five years. In the meantime, logging and mining have caused massive damage to the ecosystem and to the Lubicon way of life. So when Daishowa refused to withdraw its $500 million logging operation until the land claim was settled, the Lubicon saw it as the final straw. If neither the government nor the company would listen, they would have to go after Daishowa directly. But how? Daishowa is hardly a household name —it cuts down trees and turns them into paper goods that it then sells in bulk to other large corporations. How can you target a company that has absolutely no interaction with the general public?
The Friends of the Lubicon, an activist support group, were struggling with that very question over pizza one night in 1989 when one member of the group looked down at the Pizza Pizza paper bag on the table and saw, printed in small lettering at the bottom, the Daishowa trademark. There it was. The campaign strategy, the Lubicon soon decided, would be to call for a “secondary boycott”: they would ask Daishowa’s clients — among them Pizza Pizza, the Canadian clothing retailer Roots and Woolworths to sever their ties to Daishowa or face boycotts themselves. Though Daishowa has no brand image itself, many of its clients do, and good customer relations are of central importance to them. It wasn’t long before many of them started getting their paper bags elsewhere. The strategy proved so successful that in 1995, Daishowa took the Friends of the Lubicon to court, claiming the boycott was unlawful and had cost the company $14 million in lost revenue.11 But on April 14, 1998, an Ontario court judge ruled in favor of the Friends of the Lubicon. After the ruling, the Lubicon vowed to bring back the boycott with renewed force unless Daishowa agreed to stay off the disputed land. Two weeks later, Daishowa pledged “not to harvest or purchase timber” in the entire contested area until the land claim was resolved.12
From the beginning of its clash with the Lubicon Cree, Daishowa insisted it was being unfairly targeted, caught in the crossfire of a dispute between the band and government. In many ways, that is true. The targeting of the multinational and its clients was an act of desperation. As Kevin Thomas, spokesperson of the Friends of the Lubicon, says, “The government was never going to settle so long as the Lubicon people were the only ones suffering —the only ones unable to carry on with business as usual.”13 By making sure that Daishowa was also unable to carry out its business, the Lubicon drew one step closer to achieving a sustainable political solution. Greider is right: individual corporations are only one piece of the puzzle. But as the Daishowa case shows, they can be a piece of the puzzle that acts as a lever to achieve broader and more lasting political change.
The Daishowa precedent serves as a powerful warning to all the other faceless, resource-based corporations that conduct their operations in relative obscurity. Investigative activists are starting to track the progress of harvested natural resources through the economy to the point that they turn into consumer goods; at that stage public pressure can be applied at the mall, superstore or grocery chain. Nickel turns into batteries, genetically modified agricultural crops into packaged foods, old-growth wood into furniture, gold into jewelry…. There is no harvested resource that does not, eventually, turn into a brand.
This strategy has already proved enormously successful in the European campaign against genetically modified foods. For years campaigners had been railing against agribusiness giant Monsanto (that most impenetrable of multinationals) and its refusal to label which foods had been modified and which had not — and, in the case of soybeans, actually mixing the two together. But when campaigners broadened their focus to include not just companies like Monsanto and Novartis, responsible for the genetic engineering, but also the supermarkets that sold their foods, the issue finally grabbed the world’s attention. With shoppers shouting about “Frankenfoods” on their door steps and Greenpeace campaigners leading customers on “gene food tours” through their aisles, the supermarkets could not afford to share Monsanto’s cloistered attitude. Eventually, several large British supermarket chains including Sainsbury, Tesco and Safeway all removed bio-engineered foods from their private-label brands. Marks & Spencer went further, banning from its stores, in March 1999, all foods containing genetically modified ingredient
s.14 Chains across Western Europe followed suit, as did food giants Unilever U.K., Nestlé U.K. and Cadbury.
Environmentalists have taken a similar tack with the forestry companies logging old-growth trees in British Columbia. Rather than continuing to face off against loggers in the deep woods —as was the strategy during the Clayoquot Sound demonstrations of 1993 —Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Net work now target high-profile brands that buy products derived from old-growth timber. In response to this pressure, in December 1998, twenty Fortune 500 companies — including 3M, Kinko’s, Hallmark, IBM and Nike —agreed to phase out their use of old-growth products, and they made their commitment public in a full-page ad in The New York Times. But Home Depot —“the world’s largest retailer of ancient forest products,” according to the campaign —refused to sign on, sparking a wave of protests at dozens of Home Depot outlets across North America, as well as at the company’s annual general meeting in Atlanta, in May 1999. The strategy proved successful: in August 1999, Home Depot announced it would phase out old-growth wood products by 2002.
The Writing on the Wall
Despite the success of these strategies, it nonetheless seems odd that we need to go to such great lengths to reshape social and environmental injustices just so that they can be brought home to us shoppers. In a way, these campaigns help us to care about issues not because of their inherent justice or importance but because we have the accessories to go with them: Nike shoes, Pepsi, a sweater from the Gap. If we truly need the glittering presence of celebrity logos to build a sense of shared humanity and collective responsibility for the planet, then maybe brand-based activism is the ultimate achievement of branding. According to Gerard Greenfield, international political solidarity is becoming so dependent on logos that these corporate symbols now threaten to overshadow the actual injustices in question. Talk about government, talk about values, talk about rights —that’s all well and good, but talk about shopping and you really get our attention. “If we can only talk about workers’ collective rights and struggles in the context of what people choose to buy as consumers,” writes Greenfield, “then it seems we face a greater challenge to building a critical, popular social consciousness than we might imagine.”15