by Naomi Klein
There is no question that many young people have compensated for the fact that they don’t trust politicians or corporations by adopting the social-Darwinist values of the system that engendered their insecurity: they will be greedier, tougher, more focused. They will Just Do It. But what of those who didn’t go the MBA route, who don’t want to be the next Bill Gates or Richard Branson? Why should they stay invested in the economic goals of corporations that have so actively divested them? What is the incentive to be loyal to a sector that has bombarded them, for their entire adult life, with a single message: Don’t count on us?
This issue is not only about unemployment per se. It would be a grave mistake to assume that any old paycheck will buy the level of loyalty and protection to which many corporations — sometimes rightly — were once accustomed. Casual, part-time and low-wage work does not bring about the same identification with one’s employer as the lifelong contracts of yesterday. Go to any mall fifteen minutes after the stores close and you’ll see the new employment relationship in action: all the minimum-wage clerks are lined up, their purses and backpacks open for “bag check.” It’s standard practice, retail workers will tell you, for managers to search them daily for stolen goods. And according to an annual industry survey conducted by the University of Florida’s Security Research Project, there is reason for suspicion: the study shows that employee theft accounted for 42.7 percent of the total amount of goods stolen from U.S. retailers in 1998, the highest rate ever recorded by the survey. Starbucks clerk Steve Emery likes to quote a line he got from a sympathetic customer: “You pay peanuts, so you get monkeys.” When he told me that, it reminded me of something I had heard only two months earlier from a group of Nike workers in Indonesia. Sitting cross-legged in a circle at one of the dorms, they told me that, deep down, they hoped their factory would burn to the ground. Understandably, the factory workers’ sentiments were much more extreme than the resentments expressed by McWorkers in the West —then again, the guards doing “bag check” at the gated entrance to the Nike factory in Indonesia were armed with revolvers.
But it is in the ranks of the millions of temp workers that the true breeding grounds of the anticorporate backlash will most likely be found. Since most temps don’t stay at one post long enough for anyone to keep track of the value of their labor, the merit principle —once a sacred capitalist tenet —is becoming moot. And the situation can be intensely demoralizing. “Pretty soon, I’ll run out of places to work in this city,” writes Debbie Goad, a temp with twenty years of secretarial experience. “I’m registered at fifteen temporary agencies. It’s like playing the slots in Vegas. They constantly call me, sounding like used-car salesmen. ‘I know I’ll get you the perfect job soon.’”14
She wrote those words in Temp Slave, a little publication out of Madison, Wisconsin, devoted to tapping a seemingly bottomless well of worker resentment. In it, workers who have been branded as disposable vent their anger at the corporations that rent them like pieces of equipment, then return them, used, to the agency. Temps traditionally have had no one to talk to about these issues —the nature of the work keeps them isolated from each other and also, inside their temporary workplaces, from their salaried co-workers. So it’s no surprise that Temp Slave, and Web sites like Temp 24–7, boil with repressed hostility, offering helpful tips on how to sabotage your employer’s computer system, as well as essays with titles such as “Everybody hates temps. The feeling is mutual!” and “The boredom, the sheer boredom of office life for temps.”
Just as temp workforces mess with the merit principle, so does the growing practice of swapping CEOs like pro ballplayers. Temp CEOs are a major assault on the capitalist folklore of the mail-room boy who works his way up to becoming president of the company. Today’s executives, since they just seem to trade the top spot with one another, appear to be born into their self-enclosed stratospheres like kings. In such a context, there is less room for the dream of making it up from the mail room —especially since the mail room has probably been outsourced to Pitney Bowes and staffed with permatemps.
That is the situation at Microsoft, and it is part of the reason why temp rage seethes there like nowhere else. Another is that Microsoft openly admits that its reserve of temps exists to protect the core of permanent workers from the ravages of the free market. When a product line is discontinued, or costs are cut in ingenious new ways, it’s the temps that absorb the blows. If you ask the agencies, they say that their clients don’t mind being treated like outdated software —after all, Bill Gates never promised them a thing. “When people know it’s a temporary arrangement, some day, when the assignment ends, there’s not a sense of a broken trust,” explains Peg Cheirett, president of Wasser Group, one of the agencies that supplies Microsoft with temps.15
There’s no doubt Gates has devised a means of downsizing that avoids those high-pitched wails of betrayal that IBM bosses faced in the late eighties when they eliminated 37,000 jobs, shocking employees who were under the impression they had secured jobs for life. Microsoft’s temps have no basis to expect anything of Bill Gates —that much is true —but while that fact may keep pickets from blocking the entrance to the Microsoft Campus, it does little to protect the company from getting hacked from inside its own computer system. (As it did throughout 1998, when the hacker cabal Cult of the Dead Cow released a made-for-Microsoft hacking program called Back Orifice. It was downloaded from the Internet 300,000 times.) Microsoft’s permatemps brush up against the hyperactive capitalist dream of Silicon Gold every day, and yet they —more than anyone else —know that it’s an invitation-only affair. So while Microsoft’s permanent employees are renowned for their corporate cultishness, Microsoft permatemps are almost un paralleled in their rancor. Asked by journalists what they think of their employer, they offer up such choice comments as: “They treat you like pond scum”16 or “It’s a system of having two classes of people, and instilling fear and inferiority and loathing.”17
Divestment: A Two-Way Transaction
Commenting on this shift, Charles Handy, author of The Hungry Spirit, writes that “it is clear that the psychological contract between employers and employed has changed. The smart jargon now talks of guaranteeing ‘employability’ not ‘employment,’ which, being interpreted, means don’t count on us, count on yourself, but we’ll try to help if we can.”18
But for some — particularly younger workers — there is a silver lining. Because young people tend not to see the place where they work as an extension of their souls, they have, in some cases, found freedom in knowing they will never suffer the kind of heart-wrenching betrayals their parents did. For almost everyone who has entered the job market in the past decade, unemployment is a known quantity, as is self-generated and erratic work. In addition, losing one’s job is much less frightening when getting it seemed an accident in the first place. Such familiarity with unemployment creates its own kind of worker divestment —divestment of the very notion of total dependency on stable work. We may begin to wonder whether we should even want the same job for our whole lives, and, more important, why we should depend on the twists and turns of large institutions for our sense of self.
This slow divestment by corporate culture has implications that reach far beyond the psychology of the individual: a population of skilled workers who don’t see themselves as corporate lifers could lead to a renaissance in creativity and a revitalization of civic life, two very hopeful prospects. One thing is certain: it is already leading to a new kind of anticorporate politics.
Table 11.6
Labor-Force Profiles in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., 1997
[Taking the U.S. statistics as an example: the unemployed, part-time, temporary and replacement workers make up close to 40 percent of people actively working or looking for work. However, if you factor in the 67 million working-age Americans who are not included in the unemployment figures because they are not actively looking for work, the percentage of adults holding down full-time perman
ent jobs slips into the minority.]
You can see it in the political computer hackers who go after Microsoft and, as the next chapter will show, in the guerrilla “adbusters” who target urban billboards. It is there as well in anarchic pranks like “Phone in Sick to Work Day,” the “Steal from Work! Because Work Is Stealing from You!” manifesto and on Web sites with names like Corporate America Sucks, just as it underlies international anticorporate campaigns like the one against McDonald’s spurred by the McLibel Trial, and the one against Nike, focusing on Asian factory conditions.
In his essay “Stupid Jobs Are Good to Relax With,” Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki contrasts the detachment he feels from the steady stream of “joke jobs” that junk up his résumé with his father’s profound dislocation at being forced into early retirement after a career of steady upward mobility. Hal helped his father pack up his desk on his last day at the office, watching as he nicked Post-it Notes and other office supplies from the company that had employed him for twelve years. “Despite his decades of labour and my years of being barely employed (and the five degrees we have between us), we have both ended up in the same place. He feels cheated. I don’t.”19
Members of the sixties youth culture vowed to be the first generation not to “sell out”: they just wouldn’t buy a ticket for the express train with the sign reading “lifelong employment.” But in the ranks of young part-timers, temps and contract workers, we are witnessing something potentially far more powerful. We are seeing the first wave of workers who never bought in —some of them by choice, but most because that lifelong-employment train has spent most of the past decade standing in the station.
The extent of this shift cannot be overstated. Among the total number of working-age adults in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., those with full-time, permanent jobs working for someone other than themselves are in the minority. Temps, part-timers, the unemployed and those who have opted out of the labor force entirely —some because they don’t want to work but many more because they have given up looking for jobs —now make up more than half of the working-age population. (See Table 11.6.)
In other words, the people who don’t have access to a corporation to which they can offer lifelong loyalty are the majority. And for young workers, consistently overrepresented among the unemployed, part-time and temporary sectors, the relationship to the work world is even more tenuous. (See Table 11.7, Appendix.)
From No Jobs to No Logo …
It should come as no surprise that the companies that increasingly find themselves at the wrong end of a bottle of spray paint, a computer hack or an international anticorporate campaign are the ones with the most cutting-edge ads, the most intuitive market researchers and the most aggressive in-school outreach programs. With the dictates of branding forcing companies to sever their traditional ties to steady job creation, it is no exaggeration to say that the “strongest” brands are the ones generating the worst jobs, whether in the export processing zones, in Silicon Valley or at the mall. Further more, the companies that advertise aggressively on MTV, Channel One and in Details, selling sneakers, jeans, fast food and Walkmans, are the very ones that pioneered the McJob sector and led the production exodus to cheap labor enclaves like Cavite. After pumping young people up with go-get-’em messages —the “Just Do It” sneakers, “No Fear” T-shirts and “No Excuses” jeans — these companies have responded to job requests with a resounding “Who, me?” The workers in Cavite may be unswooshworthy, but Nike’s and Levi’s core consumers have received another message from the brands’ global shuffle: they are unjobworthy.
To add insult to injury, as we saw in Part I, “No Space,” this abandonment by brand-name corporations is occurring at the very moment when youth culture is being sought out for more aggressive branding than ever before. Youth style and attitude are among the most effective wealth generators in our entertainment economy, but real live youth are being used around the world to pioneer a new kind of disposable workforce. It is in this volatile context, as the final section will show, that the branding economy is becoming the political equivalent of a sign hanging on the back of the body corporate that says “Kick Me.”
Top: A call to Depression-era ad jammers from The Ballyhoo. Bottom: Two tobacco ad parodies by Ron English.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CULTURE JAMMING
Ads Under Attack
Advertising men are indeed very unhappy these days, very nervous, with a kind of apocalyptic expectancy. Often when I have lunched with an agency friend, a half dozen worried copy writers and art directors have accompanied us. Invariably they want to know when the revolution is coming, and where will they get off if it does come.
—Ex-adman James Rorty, Our Master’s Voice, 1934
It’s Sunday morning on the edge of New York’s Alphabet City and Jorge Rodriguez de Gerada is perched at the top of a high ladder, ripping the paper off a cigarette billboard. Moments before, the billboard at the corner of Houston and Attorney sported a fun-loving Newport couple jostling over a pretzel. Now it showcases the haunting face of a child, which Rodriguez de Gerada has painted in rust. To finish it off, he pastes up a few hand-torn strips of the old Newport ad, which form a fluorescent green frame around the child’s face.
When it’s done, the installation looks as the thirty-one-year-old artist had intended: as if years of cigarette, beer and car ads had been scraped away to reveal the rusted backing of the billboard. Burned into the metal is the real commodity of the advertising transaction. “After the ads are taken down,” he says, “what is left is the impact on the children in the area, staring at these images.”1
Unlike some of the growing legion of New York guerrilla artists, Rodriguez de Gerada refuses to slink around at night like a vandal, choosing instead to make his statements in broad daylight. For that matter, he doesn’t much like the phrase “guerrilla art,” preferring “citizen art” instead. He wants the dialogue he has been having with the city’s billboards for more than ten years to be seen as a normal mode of discourse in a democratic society —not as some edgy vanguard act. While he paints and pastes, he wants kids to stop and watch —as they do on this sunny day, just as an old man offers to help support the ladder.
Rodriguez de Gerada even claims to have talked cops out of arresting him on three different occasions. “I say, ‘Look, look what’s around here, look what’s happening. Let me explain to you why I do it.’” He tells the police officer about how poor neighborhoods have a disproportionately high number of billboards selling tobacco and hard liquor products. He talks about how these ads always feature models sailing, skiing or playing golf, making the addictive products they promote particularly glamorous to kids stuck in the ghetto, longing for escape. Unlike the advertisers who pitch and run, he wants his work to be part of a community discussion about the politics of public space.
Rodriguez de Gerada is widely recognized as one of the most skilled and creative founders of culture jamming, the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages. Streets are public spaces, adbusters argue, and since most residents can’t afford to counter corporate messages by purchasing their own ads, they should have the right to talk back to images they never asked to see. In recent years, this argument has been bolstered by advertising’s mounting aggressiveness in the public domain — the ads discussed in “No Space,” painted and projected onto sidewalks; reaching around entire buildings and buses; into schools; onto basketball courts and on the Internet. At the same time, as discussed in “No Choice,” the proliferation of the quasi-public “town squares” of malls and super stores has created more and more spaces where commercial messages are the only ones permitted. Adding even greater urgency to their cause is the belief among many jammers that concentration of media ownership has successfully devalued the right to free speech by severing it from the right to be heard.
All at once, these forces are coalescing to create a climate of semiotic Robin Hoodism.
A growing number of activists believe the time has come for the public to stop asking that some space be left unsponsored, and to begin seizing it back. Culture jamming baldly rejects the idea that marketing —because it buys its way into our public spaces —must be passively accepted as a one-way information flow.
The most sophisticated culture jams are not stand-alone ad parodies but interceptions —counter-messages that hack into a corporation’s own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended. The process forces the company to foot the bill for its own subversion, either literally, because the company is the one that paid for the billboard, or figuratively, because anytime people mess with a logo, they are tapping into the vast resources spent to make that logo meaningful. Kalle Lasn, editor of Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine, uses the martial art of jujitsu as a precise metaphor to explain the mechanics of the jam. “In one simple deft move you slap the giant on its back. We use the momentum of the enemy.” It’s an image borrowed from Saul Alinsky who, in his activist bible, Rules for Radicals, defines “mass political jujitsu” as “utilizing the power of one part of the power structure against another part … the superior strength of the Haves become their own undoing.”2 So, by rappelling off the side of a thirty-by-ninety-foot Levi’s billboard (the largest in San Francisco) and pasting the face of serial killer Charles Manson over the image, a group of jammers attempts to leave a disruptive message about the labor practices employed to make Levi’s jeans. In the statement it left on the scene, the Billboard Liberation Front said they chose Manson’s face because the jeans were “Assembled by prisoners in China, sold to penal institutions in the Americas.”
