by Naomi Klein
Taking a distinctly lower-tech (some might say primitive) approach is Belgian Noel Godin and his global band of political pie slingers. Although politicians and movie stars have faced flying pies, the corporate sector has been the primary target: Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro, Chevron CEO Ken Derr, World Trade Organization director Renato Ruggiero have all been hit, as well as that architect of global free trade, Milton Friedman. “To their lies, we respond with pies,” says Agent Blueberry, of the Biotic Baking Brigade (see image).2
The fad got so out of hand that in May 1999, Tesco, one of the largest supermarket chains in England, conducted a series of tests on its pies to see which ones made for the best slinging. “We like to keep abreast of what the customers are doing, and that’s why we have to do the testing,” said company spokesperson Melodie Schuster. Her recommendation: “The custard tart gives total face coverage.”3 Oh, and rest assured that none of the Tesco tarts contain any ingredients that have been genetically modified. The chain banned those from its products a month earlier — a response to a groundswell of anticorporate sentiment directed at Monsanto and the other agribusiness giants.
As we will see in a later chapter, Tesco made its decision to disassociate itself from genetically modified foods after a series of protests against “Frank en foods” were held on its doorstep —part of an increasingly popular strategy among activist groups. Political rallies, which once wound their predictable course in front of government buildings and consulates, are now just as likely to take place in front of the stores of the corporate giants: outside Nike Town (see image), Foot Locker, the Disney Store and Shell gas pumps; on the roof of the corporate headquarters of Monsanto or BP; through malls and around Gap outlets; and even at supermarkets.
In short, the triumph of economic globalization has inspired a wave of techno-savvy investigative activists who are as globally minded as the corporations they track. This powerful form of activism reaches well beyond traditional trade unions. Its members are young and old; they come from elementary schools and college campuses suffering from branding fatigue and from church groups with large investment portfolios worried that corporations are behaving “sinfully.” They are parents worried about their children’s slavish devotion to “logo tribes,” and they are also the political intelligentsia and social marketers who are more concerned with the quality of community life than with increased sales. In fact, by October 1997 there were so many disparate anticorporate protests going on around the world —against Nike, Shell, Disney, McDonald’s and Monsanto —that Earth First! printed up an impromptu calendar with all the key dates and declared it the first annual End Corporate Dominance Month. About a month later, The Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined “Hurry! There Are Only 27 More Protesting Days Until Christmas.”
“The Year of the Sweatshop”
In North America, much of this activity can be traced back to 1995–96, the period that Andrew Ross, director of American Studies at New York University, has called “The Year of the Sweatshop.” For a time that year, North Americans couldn’t turn on their televisions without hearing shameful stories about the exploitative labor practices behind the most popular, mass-marketed labels on the brandscape. In August 1995, the Gap’s freshly scrubbed façade was further exfoliated to reveal a lawless factory in El Salvador where the manager responded to a union drive by firing 150 people and vowing that “blood will flow” if organizing continued.4 In May 1996, U.S. labor activists discovered that chat-show host Kathie Lee Gifford’s eponymous line of sports wear (sold exclusively at Wal-Mart) was being stitched by a ghastly combination of child laborers in Honduras and illegal sweatshop workers in New York. At about the same time, Guess jeans, which had built its image with sultry black-and-white photographs of supermodel Claudia Schiffer, was in open warfare with the U.S. Department of Labor over a failure on the part of its California-based contractors to pay the minimum wage. Even Mickey Mouse was letting his sweatshops show after a Disney contractor in Haiti was caught making Pocahontas pajamas under such impoverished conditions that workers had to nourish their babies with sugar water.
More outrage flowed after NBC aired an investigation of Mattel and Disney just days before Christmas 1996. With the help of hidden cameras, the reporter showed that children in Indonesia and China were working in virtual slavery “so that children in America can put frilly dresses on America’s favorite doll.”5 In June 1996, Life magazine created more waves with photographs of Pakistani kids —looking shockingly young and paid as little as six cents an hour —hunched over soccer balls that bore the unmistakable Nike swoosh. But it wasn’t just Nike. Adidas, Reebok, Umbro, Mitre and Brine were all manufacturing balls in Pakistan where an estimated 10,000 children worked in the industry, many of them sold as indentured slave laborers to their employers and branded like livestock.6 The Life images were so chilling that they galvanized parents, students and educators alike, many of whom made the photographs into placards and held them up in protest outside sporting-goods stores across the United States and Canada.
Running alongside all this was the story of Nike’s sneakers. The Nike saga started before the Year of the Sweatshop began and has only grown stronger as other corporate controversies have slipped in and out of the public eye. Scandal has dogged Nike, with new revelations about factory conditions trailing the company’s own global flight patterns. First came the reports of union crackdowns in South Korea; when the contractors fled and set up shop in Indonesia, the watchdogs followed, filing stories on starvation wages and military intimidation of workers. In March 1996, The New York Times reported that after a wildcat strike at one Javanese factory, twenty-two workers were fired and one man who had been singled out as an organizer was locked in a room inside the factory and interrogated by soldiers for seven days. When Nike began moving production to Vietnam, the accusations moved too, with videotaped testimony of wage cheating and workers being beaten over the head with shoe uppers. When production moved decisively to China, the controversies over wages and the factories’ “boot camp” style of management were right behind.
It wasn’t only the superbrands and their celebrity endorsers who felt the sting of the Year of the Sweatshop —clothing-store chains, big-box retailers and department stores also found themselves being held responsible for the conditions under which the toys and fashions on their racks were produced. The issue came home for America in August 1995, when an apartment complex in El Monte, California, was raided by the U.S. Department of Labor. Seventy-two Thai garment workers were being held in bonded slavery —some had been in the compound for as long as seven years. The factory owner was a minor player in the industry, but the clothes the women were sewing were sold by such retail giants as Target, Sears and Nordstrom.
It is Wal-Mart, however, that has taken it on the chin most frequently since sweatshops made their big nineties comeback. As the world’s largest retailer Wal-Mart is the primary distributor of many of the branded goods attracting controversy: Kathie Lee Gifford’s clothing line, Disney’s Haitian-made pajamas, child-produced clothing from Bangladesh, sweatshop-produced toys and sports gear from Asia. Why, consumers demanded, if Wal-Mart had the power to lower prices, alter CD covers and influence magazine content, did it not also have the power to demand and enforce ethical labor standards from its suppliers?
Though the revelations came out in the press one at a time, the incidents coalesced to give us a rare look under the hood of branded America. Few liked what they saw. The unsettling combination of celebrated brand names and impoverished production conditions have turned Nike, Disney and Wal-Mart, among others, into powerful metaphors for a brutal new way of doing business. In a single image, the brand-name sweatshop tells the story of the obscene disparities of the global economy: corporate executives and celebrities raking in salaries so high they defy comprehension, billions of dollars spent on branding and advertising — all propped up by a system of shanty-towns, squalid factories and the misery and trampled expe
ctations of young women like the ones I met in Cavite, struggling to survive.
The Year of the Brand Attack
Gradually, the Year of the Sweatshop turned into the Year of the Brand Attack. Having been introduced to the laborers behind their toys and clothing, shoppers met the people who grew their coffee at the local Starbucks; according to the U.S. Guatemalan Labor Education Project, some of the coffee frothed at the chain was cultivated with the use of child labor, unsafe pesticides and sub-subsistence wages. But it was in a courtroom in London, England, that the branded world was most thoroughly turned inside out. The highly publicized McLibel Trial began with McDonald’s 1990 attempt to suppress a leaflet that accused the company of a host of abuses —from busting unions to depleting rain forests and littering the city streets. McDonald’s denied the allegations and sued two London-based environmental activists for libel. The activists defended themselves by subjecting McDonald’s to the corporate equivalent of a colonoscopy: the case lasted for seven years, and no infraction committed by the company was considered too minor to bring up in court or to post on the Internet.
The McLibel defendants’ allegations about food safety dovetailed with another anticorporate movement taking off across Europe at the same time: the campaign against Monsanto and its bio-engineered agricultural crops. At the center of this dispute was Monsanto’s refusal to inform consumers which of the foods they bought at the supermarket were the product of genetic engineering, setting off a wave of direct action that included the uprooting of Monsanto test crops.
As if that weren’t enough, multinationals also found themselves under the microscope for their involvement with some of the world’s most violent and repressive regimes: Burma, Indonesia, Colombia, Nigeria and Chinese-occupied Tibet. The issue was by no means new, but like the McDonald’s and Monsanto campaigns, it came to a new prominence in the mid-to late nineties, with much of the activity focusing on the host of familiar brand names operating in Burma (now officially known as Myanmar). The bloody coup that brought the current military regime to power in Burma took place in 1988, but international awareness about brutal conditions inside the Asian country skyrocketed in 1995 when opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was released from six years of house arrest. In a videotaped appeal smuggled out of the country, Suu Kyi condemned foreign investors for propping up the junta that had disregarded her party’s overwhelming election victory in 1990. Companies operating in Burma, she stated, are directly or indirectly profiting from state-run slave-labor camps. “Foreign investors should realize there could be no economic growth and opportunities in Burma until there is agreement on the country’s political future.”7
The first response from human-rights activists was to lobby governments in North America, Europe and Scandinavia to impose trade sanctions on the Burmese government. When this failed to halt the flow of trade, they began targeting individual companies based in the activists’ own home countries. In Denmark, the protests centered on the national brewer, Carlsberg, which had entered into a large contract to build a brewery in Burma. In Holland, the target was Heineken; in the U.S. and Canada, Liz Claiborne, Unocal, Disney, Pepsi and Ralph Lauren were in the crosshairs.
But the most significant landmark in the growth of anticorporate activism also came in 1995, when the world lost Ken Saro-Wiwa. The revered Nigerian writer and environmental leader was imprisoned by his country’s oppressive regime for spearheading the Ogoni people’s campaign against the devastating human and ecological effects of Royal Dutch/Shell’s oil drilling in the Niger Delta. Human-rights groups rallied their governments to interfere, and some economic sanctions were imposed, but they had little effect. In November 1995, Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists were executed by a military government who had enriched themselves with Shell’s oil money and through their own people’s repression.
The Year of the Brand Attack stretched into two years, then three and now shows no sign of receding. In February 1999, a new report revealed that workers sewing Disney clothes in several Chinese factories were earning as little as 13.5 cents an hour and were forced to put in hours of overtime.8 In May 1999, ABC’s 20/20 returned to the island of Saipan and brought back footage of young women locked inside sweatshop factories sewing for the Gap, Tommy Hilfiger and Polo Ralph Lauren. New revelations have also come out about violent clashes surrounding Chevron’s drilling activities in the Niger Delta, and about Talisman Energy’s plans to drill on contested territory in war-torn Sudan.
The volume and the tenacity of public outrage directed against them has blindsided the corporations, in large part because the activities for which they were being condemned were not particularly new. McDonald’s has never been a friend of the working poor; oil companies have a long and uninterrupted history of collaborating with repressive governments to extract valuable resources with little concern for the people who live near them; Nike has produced its sneakers in Asian sweatshops since the early seventies, and many of the clothing chains have been doing so for even longer. As The Wall Street Journal’s Bob Ortega writes, labor unions had been collecting evidence of child laborers in Bangladesh making clothing sold at Wal-Mart since 1991, “But even though the unions had photos of children on the assembly lines … the accusations didn’t get much play, in print or on television.”9
Obviously much of the current focus on corporate abuses has to do with the tenacity of activists organizing around these issues. But since so many of the abuses being highlighted have been going on for decades, the current groundswell of resistance raises the question, Why now? Why did 1995–96 become the Year of the Sweatshop, turning quickly into the Years of the Brand Attack? Why not 1976, 1984, 1988, or, perhaps most relevant of all, why not 1993? It was in May of that year that the Kader toy factory in Bangkok burned to the ground. The building was a textbook firetrap, and when the piles of plush fabric ignited, the flames raced through the locked factory, killing 188 workers and injuring 469 more. Kader was the worst fire in industrial history, taking more lives than the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire that killed 146 young workers in New York City in 1911. The parallels between Triangle and Kader —separated from each other by half a world, and eighty-two years of so-called development —are chilling: it was as if time hadn’t moved forward, but had simply shifted locations.
At Triangle, as at Kader, the workers were almost all young women —some as young as fourteen, but most about nineteen. A report issued after the Triangle fire found that most of the dead were Italian and Russian immigrants, and almost half had come to America ahead of their families, seeking employment to subsidize the journeys of parents and siblings — so similar to the situation of the migrant peasant girls who perished at Kader. Like the Kader factory, the Triangle building was an accident waiting to happen, complete with fake fire exits, mounds of flammable material and doors that stayed locked all day to keep out the union organizers. Like the young women at Kader, many of the girls at Triangle wrapped themselves in cloth and jumped out the factory windows to their deaths —that way, they reasoned, their families would at least be able to identify their bodies. A New York World reporter described the gruesome Triangle scene. “Suddenly something that looked like a bale of dark dress goods was hurled from an eighth-story window…. Then another seeming bundle of cloth came hurtling through the same window, but this time a breeze tossed open the cloth and from the crowd of five hundred persons came a cry of horror. The breeze disclosed the form of a girl shooting down to instant death.”10
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire was the defining incident of the first anti-sweatshop movement in the United States. It catalyzed hundreds of thousands of workers into militancy and promoted a government response that eventually led to a fifty-four-hour weekly cap on overtime, no work past 9 p.m. and breakthroughs in health and fire regulations. Perhaps the most significant advance as a result of the fire was the introduction of what today would be called independent monitoring —the founding of the New York Factory Investigation
Commission, which was authorized to stage surprise raids on suspected sweatshop operators.
So what did the 188 deaths in the Kader fire accomplish? Sadly, despite the fact that several international labor and development groups stepped in to denounce the unlawful factory operator, Kader didn’t become a symbol of the desperate need for reform the way Triangle Shirtwaist had done. In One World, Ready or Not, William Greider describes visiting Thailand and meeting victims and activists who had been fighting hard for retribution. “Some of them were under the impression that a worldwide boycott of Kader products was underway, organized by conscience-stricken Americans and Europeans. I had to inform them that the civilized world had barely noticed their tragedy…. A fire in Bangkok was like a typhoon in Bangladesh, an earthquake in Turkey.” Little wonder, then, that only six months after Kader, another devastating sweatshop fire — this one at the Zhili toy factory in Shen zhen, China —took the lives of another 87 young workers.
At the time, it didn’t seem to register with the international community that the toys the Kader women had been sewing were destined for the joyful aisles of Toys ‘R’ Us, to be wrapped and placed under Christmas trees in Europe, the United States and Canada. Many news reports failed even to mention the names of the brands being stitched in the factory. As Greider writes, “The Kader fire might have been more meaningful for Americans if they could have seen the thousands of soot-stained dolls that spilled from the wreckage, macabre litter scattered among the dead. Bugs Bunny, Bart Simpson and the Muppets. Big Bird and other Sesame Street dolls. Playskool ‘Water Pets.’”11
But in 1993 few people in the West —and certainly not in the Western media —were ready to make the connection between the burned-out building in Bangkok, buried on page six or ten of their newspapers, and the brand-name toys filling North American and European homes. That is no longer the case today. What happened in 1995 was a kind of collective “click” on the part of both the media and the public. The cumulative response to the horror stories of Chinese prison labor, the scenes of teenage girls being paid pennies in the Mexican maquiladoras, and burning in fires in Bangkok, has been a slow but noticeable shift in how people in the West see workers in the developing world. “They’re getting our jobs” is giving way to a more humane reaction: “Our corporations are stealing their lives.”
