Part 9 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+pped?” and ”Which companies hired the contractors?” Labor activists in Thailand would be in instant communication with solidarity groups in Hong Kong, Was.h.i.+ngton, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sydney, London and Toronto. E-mails would be fired off from Was.h.i.+ngton-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 s.p.a.ce Jam s.p.a.ce Jam to the cost of putting in a fire exit at Kader. Meetings would be scheduled with national a.s.sociations 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. to the cost of putting in a fire exit at Kader. Meetings would be scheduled with national a.s.sociations 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 Nestle, 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 Nestle 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 Nestle under intense scrutiny and led to an international boycott campaign, launched in 1977. As with McLibel, the ensuing court case put Nestle under intense scrutiny and led to an international boycott campaign, launched in 1977.
The eighties saw the largest industrial accident in human history: a ma.s.sive 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 = Hiros.h.i.+ma.”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 dictators.h.i.+ps, 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.'” 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 dictators.h.i.+ps, 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 inst.i.tutions issuing loans to the South African government, and dozens of munic.i.p.al governments pa.s.sed 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 Johannesburg. 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 like the Sierra Club. For many of these organizations, this represents a significant s.h.i.+ft 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 compet.i.tiveness 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 s.h.i.+ft 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.” 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. 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 doc.u.ments 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 a.s.sociation, expression and a.s.sembly. 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 Sh.e.l.l 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'etat coup d'etat in slow motion.” In his book about corporate power, in slow motion.” In his book about corporate power, Silent Coup 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 s.p.a.ce. 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, Sh.e.l.l and McDonald's not only reflect genuine indignation at sweatshops, oil spills and corporate censors.h.i.+p, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 Transnational 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 labor impacts of export factories and resource extraction; and pus.h.i.+ng 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. emba.s.sy official in Mew 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.
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, Was.h.i.+ngton-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.” 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 inst.i.tutions? 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.
Billboard Liberation Front jams an Apple campaign on the streets of San Francisco. 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 Hanc.o.c.k Mutual Life Insurance, January 6, 1999 Branding, as we have seen, is a balloon economy: it inflates with astonis.h.i.+ng 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 a.r.s.enal: bringing a brand's production secrets cras.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.s-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, d.i.c.kensian images like those from the Triangle s.h.i.+rtwaist 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 a.s.sembly line.
But as First World countries have s.h.i.+fted 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 a.s.sociate 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 n.o.body 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 sweats.h.i.+rt directly to the public, they have a limitless threshold for bad public relations. Building up a positive relations.h.i.+p with the shopping public, meanwhile, is left entirely in the hands of the brand-name multinationals. 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 h.e.l.lholes 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 princ.i.p.al 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 cla.s.sroom 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 j.a.pan 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.