No Logo

by Naomi Klein

  Nike has blamed its financial problems on everything but the human-rights campaign. The Asian currency crisis was the reason Nikes weren’t selling well in Japan and South Korea; or it was because Americans were buying “brown shoes” (walking shoes and hiking boots) as opposed to big white sneakers. But the brown-shoe excuse rang hollow. Nike makes plenty of brown shoes —it has a line of hiking boots, and it owns Cole Haan (and recently saved millions by closing down the Cole Haan factory in Portand, Maine, and moving production to Mexico and Brazil).22 More to the point, Adidas staged a massive comeback during the very year that Nike was free-falling. In the quarter when Nike nose-dived, Adidas sales were up 42 percent, its net income was up 48 percent, to $255 million, and its stock price had tripled in two years. The German company, as we have seen, turned its fortunes around by copying Nike’s production structure and all but Xeroxing its approach to marketing and sponsorships (the political implications of that will be dealt with in Chapter 18). In 1997–98, Adidas even redesigned its basketball shoes so they looked just like Nikes: big, white and ultra high tech. But unlike Nikes, they sold briskly. So much for the brown-shoe theory.

  Over the years Nike has tried dozens of tactics to silence the cries of its critics, but the most ironic by far has been the company’s desperate attempt to hide behind its product. “We’re not political activists. We are a footwear manufacturer,” said Nike spokeswoman Donna Gibbs, when the sweatshop scandal first began to erupt.23 A footwear manufacturer? This from the company that made a concerted decision in the mid-eighties not to be about boring corporeal stuff like footwear —and certainly nothing as crass as manufacturing. Nike wanted to be about sports, Knight told us, it wanted to be about the idea of sports, then the idea of transcendence through sports; then it wanted to be about self-empowerment, women’s rights, racial equality. It wanted its stores to be temples, its ads a religion, its customers a nation, its workers a tribe. After taking us all on such a branded ride, to turn around and say “Don’t look at us, we just make shoes” rings laughably hollow.

  Nike was the most inflated of all the balloon brands, and the bigger it grew, the louder it popped.

  The Shell: The Fight for Open Space

  In North America, Nike has been at the forefront of the burgeoning political movement taking aim at the power of multinationals, but in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, that dubious honor has belonged to Royal Dutch/Shell.

  It began in February 1995 when Shell finalized its plans to dispose of a rusted and obsolete oil-storage platform, known as Brent Spar, by sinking it in the Atlantic Ocean, 150 miles off the coast of Scotland. The environmental group Greenpeace was against the plan, claiming the 14,500-ton rig should be towed to land, where the oil sludge could be contained and the rig’s parts recycled. Shell countered that land disposal was unsafe, not to mention impossible. Then, on April 30, just as Shell began towing the platform to its watery grave, a group of Greenpeace activists showed up in a helicopter and tried to land on the Brent Spar. Shell fended off the aircraft with water cannons, but the entire episode was captured on videotape, and the images were sent via satellite to TV stations around the world.

  It was vintage Greenpeace, ever the made-for-TV activists. But the impact those images from the Brent Spar had on the European public took even Green peace by surprise. Before the Brent Spar incident, the group was teetering on the brink of obsolescence —the eco movement had been under attack, and appeared to be sputtering out in the wake of recession, and Green peace itself had lost credibility because of internal divisions and questionable financial and tactical policies. When Greenpeace decided to launch a campaign against the sinking of the Brent Spar, it had no idea that this rather arcane issue would become a cause célèbre. As Robin Grove-White, chairman of Greenpeace U.K., readily admits, “No one, and certainly not people within Greenpeace, anticipated the profound and continuing reverberations.”24

  Unlike the environmentally disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill four years earlier (a clear-cut case of negligence involving a drunken captain), it wasn’t as if Shell was doing anything illegal. The plan had received full approval from John Major’s governing Conservatives, and sinking had become a standard way of disposing of old platforms. Besides, it was even debatable whether Greenpeace’s land-disposal alternative was more ecologically sound than Shell’s proposed deep-sea dunk. But the image that Greenpeace generated —of an ugly, giant, rusted pollution generator fending off the good green activists that were buzzing it like dogged mosquitoes —caught people’s attention, and gave them a timely and rare opportunity to stop and think about what was being proposed. And much of the public decided that Shell wanted to sink its hunk of metal and sludge because the most profitable corporation in the world was too cheap to come up with a better plan to dispose of its garbage. This view was reinforced by a damning study that found that land disposal of the Brent Spar would cost Shell US$70 million, while sinking it would cost a mere US$16 million. Coming from a $128 billion company, this apparent penny-pinching did not impress the gasoline-buying public at all.

  That Shell’s actions were legal and Greenpeace’s were not seemed to be entirely beside the point. In the eyes of many Europeans, Shell was morally wrong. Thousands of people protested outside its gas stations, and in Germany the Shell office reported a sales drop of between 20 and 50 percent after the scandal began — “the worst we have experienced,” said the oil multinational’s German head, Peter Duncan.25 A firebomb exploded at a Shell station in Hamburg (“Don’t sink the Brent Spar Oil Platform” was the message left behind), and there was a drive-by shooting at a Frankfurt outlet. (No one was injured.) The unofficial boycott also spread through Britain to Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands.

  Four months after the protests began, on June 20, 1995, something unprecedented happened: Shell backed down. It would spend the extra millions to tow the platform to Norway, where it would be dismantled on land. According to The Wall Street Journal, it was “a humiliating and painful U-turn.”26 Grove-White articulates the extent of the Brent Spar victory: “For the first time, an environmental group had catalyzed international opinion to bring about the kind of change of policy that unsettled the very basis of executive authority. However briefly, the world turned upside down —the rule book had been rewritten.”27

  Before the Brent Spar campaign was launched, there had been internal battles within Greenpeace about whether the group could “sell” the disposal of an old industrial hunk of junk as a galvanizing, media-friendly issue. Dutch Greenpeace campaigner Giys Thieme recalls the concerns inside the organization: “It wasn’t an oil campaign, it wasn’t an atmosphere campaign, it wasn’t a chlorine campaign.”28 Neither was it a fight for fish, or whales, or even cute baby seals. Brent Spar, it turns out, was about the idea of preserving untouched space, just as the anti-logging protests in British Columbia’s Clayoquot Sound a year earlier had been about protecting one of the last remaining stands of ancient, virgin forest. Clayoquot was about biodiversity, but it was also about preserving the idea of wilderness, and Brent Spar was much the same. Although Greenpeace presented scientific studies on the ecological impact the oil platform would have on the ocean floor (getting some of its facts wrong along the way), the fight was not so much about environmental protection in the traditional sense as it was about the need to keep the Atlantic Ocean floor from being used as a junkyard. Shell’s plans to bury the monstrosity in the depths of the sea resonated in the public psyche worldwide: here was proof that if multinationals were left to their own devices, there would be no open space left on earth —even the depths of the ocean, the last great wilderness, would be colonized.

  Shell, the British government and much of the business press pointed out that this reaction was entirely irrational. “Science Loses to Joe Six-Pack” a headline in The Wall Street Journal announced, while The Economist declared “A Defeat for Rational Decision Making.” They were right, in a way. This concept of protecting the unknowable —for no empirical re
ason in the short term except that it comforts us that it is there —was indeed amorphous, but it was also powerful. As Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, Brent Spar had at least as much to do with mysticism as with science: “In the depths strange species lurk, and though we may never ever see them, we feel in our hearts that they should be left alone. Why must they share the great dark deep with bits and bobs from a dismembered oil platform?”29

  The lesson Greenpeace took away from its Brent Spar victory, writes Grove-White, was about the sanctity of “the global commons” —places not named on any map, not owned by any private interest and thus belonging to everybody. The group also learned another lesson, something the anti-Nike campaigners had also discovered: targeting a big, rich, ubiquitous multinational corporation is to the late nineties what saving the whales was to the late eighties. It is populist and it is popular, and it was enough to bring Greenpeace back from the brink of death. After Brent Spar, the group was showered with members and money and, as The Guardian reported, it was even bequeathed estates. “One woman had phoned to say she had changed her will. ‘Left all estate to Greenpeace,’ says the note. Wants us to ‘buy an inflatable with it and bash Shell.’”30 In its Brent Spar postmortem The Wall Street Journal noted gravely that in the current climate, “economic warfare may be the best way to wage eco-warfare.”31

  Shell’s capitulation also provided activists with another lesson. After going to the wall defending the appropriateness and inescapability of Shell’s original plan, Prime Minister John Major was left looking like a corporate lap dog —and an unloved one at that. When Shell reversed its position, Major could only mutter that the executives were “wimps” for caving in to public pressure. His position was so compromised that it may well have played a role in his decision, only two days after Shell’s U-turn, to step down as head of the Conservative Party and force a vote on his leadership. In this way, Brent Spar proved that corporations — even a notoriously cagey and cloistered company like Royal Dutch/Shell —are sometimes as vulnerable to public pressure as democratically elected governments (occasionally more so).

  The lesson proved particularly relevant in the next Shell challenge —the need to focus world attention on the multinational’s role in the despoliation of Nigeria, under the protection of the corrupt government of the late General Sani Abacha. If the general wasn’t vulnerable to pressure, Shell certainly was.

  From the Ocean as Trash Pit to the Land as Oil Slick

  Since the 1950s, Shell Nigeria has extracted $30 billion worth of oil from the land of the Ogoni people, in the Niger Delta. Oil revenue makes up 80 percent of the Nigerian economy —$10 billion annually — and, of that, more than half comes from Shell. But not only have the Ogoni people been deprived of the profits from their rich natural resource, many still live without running water or electricity, and their land and water have been poisoned by open pipelines, oil spills and gas fires.

  Under the leadership of the writer and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) campaigned for reform, and demanded compensation from Shell. In response, and in order to keep the oil profits flowing into the government’s coffers, General Sani Abacha directed the Nigerian military to take aim at the Ogoni. They killed and tortured thousands. The Ogoni not only blamed Abacha for the attacks, they also accused Shell of treating the Nigerian military as a private police force, paying it to quash peaceful protest on Ogoni land, in addition to giving financial support and legitimacy to the Abacha regime.

  Facing mounting protests within Nigeria, Shell withdrew from Ogoni land in 1993 — a move that only put further pressure on the military to remove the Ogoni threat. A leaked memo from the head of the Rivers State Internal Security Force of the Nigerian Army was quite explicit: “Shell operations still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence…. Recommendations: Wasting operations during MOSOP and other gatherings making constant military presence justifiable. Wasting targets cutting across communities and leadership cadres especially vocal individuals of various groups.”32

  On May 10, 1994 —five days after the memo was written —Ken Saro-Wiwa said, “This is it. They [the Nigerian military] are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell.”33 Twelve days later, he was arrested and tried for murder. Before receiving his sentence, Saro-Wiwa told the tribunal, “I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial…. The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come.” Then, on November 10, 1995 — despite pressure from the international community, including the Canadian and Australian governments, and to a lesser extent the governments of Germany and France —the Nigerian military government executed Saro-Wiwa along with eight other Ogoni leaders who had protested against Shell. It became an international incident and, once again, people took their protests to their Shell stations, widely boycotting the company. In San Francisco Greenpeaceniks staged a re-enactment of Saro-Wiwa’s murder, with the noose fastened around the towering Shell sign (see image, page 364).

  As Reclaim the Streets’ John Jordan said of multinationals: “Inadvertently, they have helped us see the whole problem as one system.” And here was that interconnected system in action: Shell, intent on sinking a monstrous oil platform off the coast of Britain, was simultaneously entangled in a human-rights debacle in Nigeria, in the same year that it laid off workers (despite earning huge profits), all so that it could pump gas into the cars of London —the very issue that had launched Reclaim the Streets. Because Ken Saro-Wiwa was a poet and playwright, his case was also claimed by the international freedom-of-expression group, PEN. Writers, including the English playwright Harold Pinter and the Nobel Prize—winning novelist Nadine Gordimer, took up the cause of Saro-Wiwa’s right to express his views against Shell, and turned his persecution into the highest-profile free-expression case since the government of Iran declared a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, offering a bounty on his head. In an article for The New York Times, Gordimer wrote that “to buy Nigeria’s oil under the conditions that prevail is to buy oil in exchange for blood. Other people’s blood; the exaction of the death penalty on Nigerians.”34

  The convergence of social-justice, labor and environmental issues in the two Shell campaigns was not a fluke —it goes to the very heart of the emerging spirit of global activism. Ken Saro-Wiwa was killed for fighting to protect his environment, but an environment that encompassed more than the physical landscape that was being ravaged and despoiled by Shell’s invasion of the delta. Shell’s mistreatment of Ogoni land is both an environmental and a social issue, because natural-resource companies are notorious for lowering their standards when they drill and mine in the Third World. Shell’s opponents readily draw parallels between the company’s actions in Nigeria, its history of collaborating with the former apartheid government in South Africa, its ongoing presence in the Timor Gap in Indonesian-occupied East Timor and its violent clashes with the Nahua people in the Peruvian Amazon —as well as its standoff with the U’wa people of the Colombian Andes, who threatened in January 1997 to commit mass suicide if Shell went ahead with its drilling plans.

  In Saro-Wiwa, civil liberties came together with antiracism; anticapitalism with environmentalism; ecology with labor rights. The bright yellow bulbous logo of Shell —Saro-Wiwa’s Goliath of an opponent —became a common enemy for all concerned citizens, to the extent that their governments around the world were required to put the matter on the international agenda. PEN protested against Shell, as did the campaign department at the Body Shop, the activist shareholders who placed the Ogoni plight on the agenda of three consecutive Shell annual meetings and thousands upon thou sands of others. In June 1998, Owens Wiwa, Ken’s brother, wrote this of the company’s situation:

  For centuries, corporations have declared huge profits from evil practices like the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, Apartheid and [from] dictatorships whose action
s are genocidal. They have often gotten away with their loot, leaving governments to apologize. In this case, at the twilight of the 20th century, Shell has been caught in the triangle of ecosystem destruction, human rights abuse and health impairment of the Ogoni people. An apology will not be enough. We anticipate a clean-up of our soil, water and air; adequate, fair and equitable compensation for (a) the environmental damages, (b) human rights abuses due directly and indirectly to Shell activities and (c) the negative health impacts their services have on the people.35

  To hear Shell tell it, these reparations are already well under way. “Shell continues to invest in community and environmental projects in Nigeria,” R.B. Blakely, a spokesperson for Shell Canada, informed me. “Last year, Shell spent $20 million establishing hospitals, schools, educational programs and scholarships” (MOSOP put the figure at closer to $9 million, and says only a fraction of this amount was spent on Ogoni land). The company has also, according to Blakely, revised its “statement of business principles. These principles, which include the company’s environmental performance as well as its responsibilities to the communities where we operate, apply to all companies in the Shell Group in all parts of the world.”36

  To arrive at these principles, Shell has looked deep into its corporate psyche and has focus grouped and deconstructed itself into a pulp. It has put its employees through a kind of New Age—consultancy boot camp, resulting in some awfully silly displays from such a grand old firm. In the interest of reinvention, Shell executives, according to Fortune magazine, have “helped each other climb walls in the freezing Dutch rain. They’ve dug dirt at low-income housing projects and made videotapes of themselves walking around blindfolded. They’ve tracked their time to figure out whether they’re adding any value. They’ve even taken Myers-Briggs personality tests to see who fits in at the new Shell and who doesn’t.”37