by Naomi Klein
A typical Kernaghanism is to compare and contrast the plush living conditions of the dogs on the set of 101 Dalmatians with the shacks in which the Haitian workers live who sewed Disney pajamas decorated with the movie’s characters. The animals, he says, stayed in “doggie condos” fitted with cushy beds and heat lamps, were cared for by on-call vets and served beef and chicken. The Haitian workers live in malaria-and dysentery-infested hovels, sleep on cots and can rarely afford to buy meat or go to the doctor.10 It is in this collision between the life of brand and the reality of production that Kernaghan works his own marketing magic.
The NLC’s events — far from the usual gray labor rallies — take full advantage of the powers of the loglo. An October 1997 rally in New York City was a case in point: it began in Times Square across from Disney’s flagship superstore, proceeded along Seventh Avenue, past Macy’s Tommy Hilfiger window display, past Barnes & Noble, and Stern’s department store. As the kickoff of “The Holiday Season of Conscience,” the rally had as visual backdrop for the chants and speeches Manhattan’s most enormous logos: a giant red swoosh on the skyline, the Maxell guy in his armchair getting “blown away” by digital sound and 3-D displays for The Lion King on Broadway. When Jay Mazur, president of UNITE, pronounced that “sweatshops are back and we know why,” he did so with a towering, neon-lit Little Mermaid forming a halo over his head. At another NLC-sponsored protest, this one in March 1999, participants parked a giant rubber rat outside the Disney store. And because Kernaghan’s tactics don’t demand pop-cultural asceticism in exchange for participation, they have proven hugely appealing to students, many of whom show up for these rallies as walking culture jams. Echoing the cartoonish aesthetics of rave culture, high-school kids and college students dress in fuzzy animal costumes: a six-foot pink pig holding up a sign that reads “Pigs Against Greed,” the Cookie Monster sporting a “No Justice, No Cookie” placard.
For the NLC, logos are both targets and props. Which is why, when Kernaghan speaks to a crowd —at college campuses, labor rallies or international conferences —he is never without his signature shopping bag brimming with Disney clothes, Kathie Lee Gifford pants and other logo gear. During his presentations, he holds up the pay slips and price tags to illustrate the vast discrepancies between what workers are paid to make the items and what we pay to buy them. He also takes his shopping bag with him when he visits the export processing zones in Haiti and El Salvador, pulling out items from his bag of tricks to show workers the actual price tags of the goods they sew. In a letter to Michael Eisner, he describes a typical reaction:
Prior to leaving for Haiti, I went to a Wal-Mart store on Long Island and purchased several Disney garments which had been made in Haiti. I showed these to the crowd of workers, who immediately recognized the clothing they had made … I held up a size four Pocahontas T-shirt. I showed them the Wal-Mart price tag indicating $10.97. But it was only when I translated the $10.97 into the local currency —172.26 gourdes —that, all at once, in unison, the workers screamed with shock, disbelief, anger, and a mixture of pain and sadness, as their eyes remained fixed on the Pocahontas shirt…. In a single day, they worked on hundreds of Disney shirts. Yet the sales price of just one shirt in the U.S. amounted to nearly five days of their wages!11
The moment when the Haitian Disney workers cried out in disbelief was captured by one of Kernaghan’s colleagues on video and included in the NLC-produced documentary Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti. Since then, the documentary has been shown in hundreds of schools and community centers in North America and Europe, and many young activists say that scene played a critical role in persuading them to join the global struggle against sweatshops.
Another Kind of Logo Traffic
Information about the disparity between wages and retail prices can also prove radicalizing to the workers in the factories who, as I learned in Cavite, know little about the value of the goods they produce. At the All Asia factory in the Cavite Export Processing Zone, for instance, the boss used to leave the price tags for the Sassoon skirts in plain view —$52, they said. “Those price tags were put beside the buttons, and we were able to see the prices when we passed through the packing section,” one seamstress told me. “So we computed the amount in pesos and the workers were saying, ’so the company is having this kind of sales? Then why are we getting this small pay?’” After management got wind of these covert discussions there were no more price tags left lying around at All Asia.
In fact, I discovered that even finding out which brand names are being produced behind the locked gates of the Cavite zone requires a fair bit of detective work, work that has been embraced by the Workers’ Assistance Center outside the zone. One of the center’s walls is covered by a bulletin board that looks remarkably like Lora Jo Foo’s logo quilt. Clothing labels are pinned all over the board: Liz Claiborne, Eddie Bauer, Izod, Guess, Gap, Ellen Tracy, Sassoon, Old Navy. Beside each label on the board is the name of the factory it came from: V.T. Fashion, All Asia, Du Young. The organizers at WAC believe that this information connecting brands to work is crucial in their attempt to empower zone workers to stand up for their legal rights, particularly since the factory bosses are forever crying poor. When workers learn, for instance, that the Old Navy jeans they are sewing for pennies apiece are sold by a famous company called the Gap and will sell for $50 in America, they are more likely to demand overtime pay, or even long-promised health coverage. Many workers are eager for this information too, which is why they have taken the great risk of smuggling these clothing tags out of their factories; they slip them into their pockets at work, hope that the guards don’t find the scraps when they get searched at the gate, and then bring them over to the center. The next task for WAC is to find out something about the company that owns these names — not always easy since many of the brands aren’t even available for sale in the Philippines, and those that are can only be found in the high-priced malls of Manila’s tourist district.
In the last few years, however, gathering this information has become a little easier, in part as a result of a marked increase in activist traffic around the world. With the aid of travel subsidies from well-funded nongovernmental organizations and unions, representatives from the tiny Workers’ Assistance Center in Rosario have gone to conferences all over Asia as well as in Germany and Belgium. And only two months after I first met her in Cavite, I saw WAC organizer Cecille Tuico again in Vancouver at the November 1997 People’s Summit on APEC. The conference was attended by several thousand activists from forty countries and was timed to coincide with a meeting of the leaders of the eighteen Asia-Pacific economies —from Bill Clinton to Jiang Zemin —who were gathering in Vancouver that week.
On the last day of the summit, Cecille and I skipped out of the seminars and spent an afternoon on busy Robson Street, popping in and out of chain stores that sell many of the brand names produced in the Cavite zone. We scoured the racks of fleece Baby Gap sleepers and booties, Banana Republic jackets, Liz Claiborne blouses and Izod Lacoste shirts, and when we came across a “Made in the Philippines” tag, we scribbled down the style numbers and prices. When she returned to Cavite, Cecille converted the prices into pesos (taking into account her country’s plummeting currency rate) and carefully pinned them next to the labels on the bulletin board in the WAC office. She and her colleagues point to these figures when workers drop by the center distressed about an illegal firing, back wages owed or an endless string of overnight shifts. Together, they calculate how many weeks a zone seamstress would have to work to be able to afford one Baby Gap sleeper for her child, and workers whisper this shocking figure to each other when they return to their cramped dormitory rooms, or break for lunch at their sweltering factories. The news spreads through the zone like wildfire.
I remembered our “sweatshopping” trip (as The Nation writer Eyal Press calls these odd excursions) when I received an E-mail from Cecille some months later telling me that WAC has finally succeeded in unionizing two garment factorie
s inside the zone. The logos on the labels? Gap, Arizona Jeans, Izod, J.C. Penney and Liz Claiborne.
Act Globally
Ever since the politics of representation first captured the imagination of feminists in the early seventies, there have been women urging their movement sisters to look beyond how the fashion and beauty industries oppress Westerners as consumers, and to consider the plight of the women around the world who sweated to keep them in style. During the twenties and thirties, Emma Goldman and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union rallied the women’s movement behind sweatshop workers, but in recent decades, these connections have seemed somewhat out of step with the times. Though there has always been a component of second-wave feminism that sought to forge political connections with women in developing countries, the struggle for internationalism never quite took hold of the movement in the way that pay equity, media representation or abortion rights did. Somehow, the seventies rallying cry that “the personal is political” seemed more related to the issue of how fashion made women feel about themselves than to the global mechanisms of how the garment industry made other women work.
In 1983, the American academic Cynthia Enloe was one of the voices in the wilderness. She insisted that the “Made in Hong Kong” and “Made in Indonesia” labels that were appearing with greater frequency inside her clothing provided a non-abstract starting point for women who wanted to understand the complexities of global economics. “We can become more able to talk about, and to make sense of such alleged ‘abstractions’ as ‘international capital’ and the ‘international sexual division of labour.’ Both of these concepts, so long the presumed intellectual preserve of male theoreticians (most of whom never ask who weaves and who sews) are in reality only as ‘abstract’ as the jeans in our closets and the underwear in our dresser drawers,” she wrote.12
At the time, thanks to a combination of too little awareness, cultural barriers and First World parochialism, few were ready to listen. But many are listening today. Once again, this shift may be an unexpected by-product of branding ubiquity. Now that the corporations have spun their own global rainbow of logos and labels, the infrastructure for genuine international solidarity is there for everyone to see and use. The logo network may have been designed to maximize consumption and minimize production costs, but regular people can now turn themselves into “spiders” (as the members of the Free Burma Coalition call themselves) and travel across its web as easily as the corporations that spun it. Which is where Lora Jo Foo’s logo map comes in —and Cecille Tuico’s bulletin board and Charles Kernaghan’s shopping bag and Lorraine Dusky’s sneaker epiphany. It’s like the Internet in general: it may have been built by the Pentagon, but it quickly became the playground of activists and hackers.
So while cultural homogenization —the idea of everyone eating at Burger King, wearing Nike shoes and watching Backstreet Boys videos —may inspire global claustrophobia, it has also provided a basis for meaningful global communication. Thanks to the branded web, McDonald’s workers around the world are able to swap stories on the Internet about working under the arches; club kids in London, Berlin and Tel Aviv can commiserate about the corporate co-optation of the rave scene; and North American journalists can talk with poor rural factory workers in Indonesia about how much Michael Jordan gets paid to do Nike commercials. This logo web has the unprecedented power to connect students who face ad bombardment in their university washrooms with sweatshop workers who make the goods in the ads and frustrated McWorkers who sell them. They may not all speak the same language, but they now have enough common ground to begin a discussion. Playing on the Benetton slogan, one Reclaim the Streets organizer described these new global networks as the “United Colors of Resistance.”
A world united by Benetton slogans, Nike sweatshops and McDonald’s jobs might not be anyone’s utopian global village, but its fiber-optic cables and shared cultural references are nonetheless laying the foundations for the first truly international people’s movement. That may mean fighting Wal-Mart when it comes to town, but it also means using the Net to network with the other fifty-odd communities in North America that have fought the same battle; it means bringing resolutions about global labor offenses to the local city council meeting, and joining the international fight against the Multi lateral Agreement on Investment. It also means making sure that the cries from a toy factory fire in Bangkok can be heard loud and clear outside the Toys ‘R’ Us at the mall.
Following the Logo Trail
As global brand-based connections gain popularity, that trail from the mall to the sweatshop becomes better traveled. I certainly wasn’t the first foreign journalist to pick through the laundry of the Cavite Export Processing Zone. In the few months before I arrived, there had been, among others, a German television crew and a couple of Italian documentary filmmakers who hoped to dig up some scandal on their homegrown brand, Benetton. In Indonesia, so many journalists have wanted to visit Nike’s infamous factories that by the time I arrived in Jakarta in August 1997 the staff at the labor-rights group Yakoma were starting to feel like professional tour guides. Every week another journalist — or “human-rights tourist,” as Gary Trudeau calls them in his cartoons —descended upon the area. The situation was the same at a factory I tried to visit outside Medan, where child laborers were stitching Barbie’s itsy-bitsy party outfits. I met with local activists at the Indonesian Institute for Children’s Advocacy and they pulled out a photo album filled with pictures of the NBC crew that had been there. “It won awards,” program director Muhammad Joni proudly informs me of the Dateline documentary. “They dressed up as importers. Hidden cameras — very professional.”13 Joni glances down at my little tape recorder and at the batik sundress I bought the week before on the beach, unimpressed.
After four years of research, what I find most shocking is that so many supposed “dirty little secrets” are crammed into the global broom closet with such a casual attitude. In the EPZs, labor violations are a dime a dozen —they come tumbling out as soon as you open the door even a crack. As The Wall Street Journal’s Bob Ortega writes, “in truth, the entire apparel industry was one continuing and underreported scandal.”14
With such corporate carelessness at play, no public-relations budget has proved rich enough to clearly dissociate the brand from the factory. And the wider the disparity between the image and the reality, the harder the company seems to get hit. Family-oriented brands like Disney, Wal-Mart and Kathie Lee Gifford have been forced to confront the conditions under which real families produced their wares. And when the McLibel crew released many of their most gruesome tidbits about McDonald’s-tortured chickens, and hamburgers infested with E. coli bacteria, they displayed these facts over an image of the manic plastic face of Ronald McDonald. The logo adopted by the McLibel defendants was a cigar-chomping fat cat hiding behind a clown mask because, as the McLibelers put it, “Children love a secret, and Ronald’s is especially disgusting.”15
When the brand being targeted is anchored by a well-known personality, as is increasingly the case in the era of the superbrand, these collisions between image and reality are potentially even more explosive. For instance, when Kathie Lee Gifford was exposed for using sweatshops, she didn’t have the option of reacting like a corporate CEO —whom we expect to be motivated exclusively by shareholder returns. The bubbly talk-show host is the human Aspartame of daytime TV. She could hardly start talking like a callous capitalist cowboy when fifteen-year-old Wendy Diaz publicly pleaded, “If I could talk to Kathie Lee I would ask her to help us, to end all the maltreatment, so that they would stop yelling at us and hitting us, and so they would let us go to night school and let us organize to protect our rights.”16 After all, five minutes before, Gifford might have been confessing to the free world that a child’s illness had moved her to such copious tears that she was forced to reduce the swelling under her eyes with Preparation H. She is, as Andrew Ross writes, “a perfect foil for revelations about child labor.” C
onfronted with Diaz’s words, Gifford had two options: throw away her entire multimillion-dollar TV-Mom persona, or become the fairy godmother of the maquiladoras. The choice was simple enough. “It took Gifford only two weeks to ascend to the saintly rank of labor crusader,” Ross recounts.17
In an odd twist of marketing fate, corporate sponsorship itself has become an important lever for activists. And why shouldn’t it? When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) became mired in bribery and doping scandals in late 1998, the media immediately focused on how the controversy would affect the games’ corporate sponsors —companies that claimed to be aghast at the IOC’s innocence lost. “It goes to the heart of why we’re involved in the Olympics. Anything that affects the positive image of the Olympics affects us,” said a spokesperson for Coca-Cola.18
But surely that theory cuts both ways: if sponsors can be tarnished by corruption in the events they sponsor, those events can also be tarnished by the dubious activities of their sponsors. This is a connection that is being made with increasing frequency as the sponsorship industry balloons. In August 1998, Celine Dion’s concert tour was picketed by human-rights activists in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Although she was unaware of it, her tour sponsor — Ericsson cellular —was among Burma’s most intransigent foreign investors, refusing to cease its dealings with the junta despite the campaign for an international boycott. But when the brand bashing moved beyond Ericsson proper and began to spill onto Dion’s diva image, it took only a week of protests to induce Ericsson to announce its immediate withdrawal from Burma. Meanwhile, sponsors that fail to shield performers from anticorporate campaigns being waged against them have also found themselves under attack from all sides. For instance, at Suzuki’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Mara thon in San Diego, California, in May 1999, the bands mutinied against their corporate sponsor. Hootie and the Blowfish —hardly known for their radical political views —decided to join forces with the campaigners who were targeting the event because of Suzuki’s business dealings with the Burmese junta. Band members insisted that a Suzuki banner be taken down before they got on stage and then performed wearing “Suzuki out of Burma” T-shirts and stickers.19
