by Naomi Klein
Part of Shell’s image overhaul has involved reaching out to black communities in Europe and North America, a strategy that has created bitter divisions in poor neighborhoods that are desperate for funding but suspicious of Shell’s motives. For instance, in August 1997, the Oakland School Board in California hotly debated the ethics of accepting a donation from Shell worth $2 million —$100,000 for scholarships and the rest for the creation of a Shell Youth Training Academy. Since Oakland has a large African-American population that includes exiled Nigerians, the debate was wrenching. “Children in Nigeria don’t have an opportunity to get a scholarship from Shell,” said Tunde Okorodudu, an Oakland parent and a Nigerian pro-democracy activist. “We really need money for the children but we don’t want blood money.”38 After months of stalemate, the board (like the Portland School Board that debated whether or not to accept Nike’s donation) eventually voted to accept the money.
But even as the new Shell goes Zen, tossing around trendy management terms like the “new ethical paradigm,” “change agents,” the “third bottom line,” and the “stakeholder economy,” and even as Shell Nigeria speaks of “healing the wounds,” the old Shell remains.39 Although it has not yet succeeded in returning to Ogoni land, Shell continues to operate in other parts of the Niger Delta, and in the fall of 1998 tensions in the area once again erupted. The issues were all too familiar: communities complained of polluted lands, devastated fisheries, gas fires and flaring, and of seeing enormous profits pumped out of their oil-rich land while they continued to live in poverty. “You go to the flow stations, you see they are very well equipped, with all modern facilities. You go to the neighboring village, there is no water to drink, no food to eat. That is bringing about the protests,” explained Paul Orieware, a local politician.40 Only this time, Shell was up against foes far less committed to nonviolence than the Ogoni. In October, Nigerian protestors seized two Shell helicopters, nine Shell relay stations and a drilling rig, halting, according to Associated Press, “the transfer of some 250,000 barrels of crude a day.”41 More Shell stations were stormed and occupied in March 1999. Shell denied any wrongdoing and blamed the violence on ethnic conflicts.
The Arches: The Fight for Choice
At the same time as the anti-Shell campaigns were breaking out, the McLibel Trial, which had been in the docket for a few years already, was turning into an international situation. In June 1995, the trial was coming up to its first anniversary in court, when the two defendants, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, held a press conference outside the London courthouse. They announced that McDonald’s (which had sued them for libel) had made a settlement offer. The company offered to donate money to a cause of Steel and Morris’s choice if the two outspoken environmentalists on trial would stop criticizing McDonald’s; then everyone would leave the whole messy nightmare behind them.
Steel and Morris defiantly refused the offer. They saw no reason to give in now. The trial, which had been designed to stem the flow of negative publicity —and to gag and bankrupt Steel and Morris —had been an epic public-relations disaster for McDonald’s. It had done almost as much as mad cow disease to promote vegetarianism, had certainly done more to raise the issue of labor conditions in the McJob sector than any union drive and had sparked a more profound debate about corporate censorship than any other free-speech case in recent memory.
The pamphlet at the center of the suit was first published in 1986 by London Greenpeace, a splinter group of Greenpeace International (which the hardcore Londoners deemed too centralized and mainstream for their tastes). It was an early case study in using a single brand name to connect all the dots on the social agenda: issues of rain-forest depletion (to raise the cattle), Third World poverty (forcing peasants off their farms to make way for export crops and McDonald’s livestock needs), animal cruelty (in treatment of the livestock), waste production (disposable packaging and litter), health (fried fatty foods), poor labor conditions (low wages and union busting in the McJob sector) and exploitative advertising (in McDonald’s target marketing to children).
But the truth is, McLibel was never really about the contents of the pamphlet. In many ways, the case against McDonald’s is less compelling than the ones against Nike and Shell, both of which are supported by hard evidence of large-scale human suffering. With McDonald’s the evidence was less direct and, in some ways, the issues more dated. The concern about litter-producing fast-food restaurants reached its peak in the late eighties and London Greenpeace’s campaign against the company clearly came from the standpoint of meat-is-murder vegetarianism: a valid perspective, but one for which there is a limited political constituency. What made McLibel take off as a campaign on a par with the ones targeting Nike and Shell was not what the fast-food chain did to cows, forests or even its own workers. The McLibel movement took off because of what McDonald’s did to Helen Steel and Dave Morris.
Franny Armstrong, who produced a documentary about the trial, points out that Britain’s libel law was changed in 1993 “so that governmental bodies such as local councils are no longer able to sue for libel. This was to protect people’s right to criticize public bodies. Multinationals are fast becoming more powerful than governments — and even less accountable —so shouldn’t the same rules apply? With advertising budgets in the billions, it’s not as though they need to turn to the law to ensure their point of view is heard.”42 In other words, for many of its supporters, Steel and Morris’s case was less about the merits of fast food than about the need to protect freedom of speech in a climate of mounting corporate control. If Brent Spar was about loss of space, and Nike was about the loss of good jobs, McLibel was about loss of voice —it was about corporate censorship.
When McDonald’s issued libel writs against five Greenpeace activists in 1990 over the contents of the now-notorious leaflet, three members of the group did what most people would do when faced with the prospect of going up against an $11 billion corporation: they apologized. The company had a long and successful history with this strategy. According to The Guardian: “Over the past 15 years, McDonald’s has threatened legal action against more than 90 organizations in the U.K., including the BBC, Channel 4, the Guardian, the Sun, the Scottish TUC, the New Leaf Tea Shop, student newspapers and a children’s theatre group. Even Prince Philip received a stiff letter. All of them backed down and many formally apologised in court.”43
But Helen Steel and Dave Morris made another choice. They used the trial to launch a seven-year experiment in riding the golden arches around the global economy. For 313 days in court —the longest trial in English history —an unemployed postal worker (Morris) and a community gardener (Steel) went to war with chief executives from the largest food empire in the world.
Over the course of the trial, Steel and Morris meticulously elaborated every one of the pamphlet’s claims, with the assistance of nutritional and environmental experts and scientific studies. With 180 witnesses called to the stand, the company endured humiliation after humiliation as the court heard stories of food poisoning, failure to pay legal overtime, bogus recycling claims and corporate spies sent to infiltrate the ranks of London Greenpeace. In one particularly telling incident, McDonald’s executives were challenged on the company’s claim that it serves “nutritious food”: David Green, senior vice president of marketing, expressed his opinion that Coca-Cola is nutritious because it is “providing water, and I think that is part of a balanced diet.”44 In another embarrassing exchange, McDonald’s executive Ed Oakley explained to Steel that the McDonald’s garbage stuffed into landfills is “a benefit, otherwise you will end up with lots of vast empty gravel pits all over the country.”45
On June 19, 1997, the judge finally handed down the verdict. The courtroom was packed with an odd assortment of corporate executives, pink-haired vegan anarchists and rows of journalists. It felt like an eternity to most of us sitting there, as Judge Rodger Bell read out his forty-five-page ruling —a summary of the actual verdict, which was over a thousand pages lo
ng. Although the judge deemed most of the pamphlet’s claims too hyperbolic to be acceptable (he was particularly unconvinced by its direct linking of McDonald’s to “hunger in the ‘Third World’”), he deemed others to be based on pure fact. Among the decisions that went in Steel and Morris’s favor were that McDonald’s “exploit(s) children” by “using them, as more susceptible subjects of advertising;” that its treatment of some animals has been “cruel;” that it is anti-union and pays “low wages;” that its management can be “autocratic” and “most unfair;” and that a consistent diet of McDonald’s food contributes to the risk of heart disease. Steel and Morris were ordered to pay damages to McDonald’s in the amount of US$95,490. But in March 1999 an appeals court judge found that Judge Bell had been overly harsh and sided more forcefully with Steel and Morris on the claims “concerning nutrition and health risks and on the allegations about pay and conditions for McDonald’s employees.” Still finding that their claims about food poisoning, cancer and world poverty were unproven, the court nonetheless lowered the amount of damages to $61,300.46 McDonald’s has never tried to collect its settlement and has decided not to apply for an injunction to halt the further dissemination of the leaflet.
After the first verdict, McDonald’s was quick to declare victory, but few were convinced. “Not since Pyrrhus has a victor emerged so bedraggled,” read The Guardian’s editorial the next day. “As P.R. fiascos go, this action takes the prize for ill-judged and disproportionate response to public criticism.”47 In fact, while all this was going on, the original pamphlet had gathered the cachet of a collector’s item, with three million copies distributed in the U.K. alone. John Vidal had published his critically acclaimed book McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial; 60 Minutes had produced a lengthy segment about the trial; England’s Channel 4 had run a three-hour dramatization of it; and Franny Armstrong’s documentary McLibel: Two Worlds Collide had made the rounds of the independent film circuit (having been turned down by every major broadcaster because of —ironically —libel concerns).
For Helen Steel, Dave Morris and their supporters, McLibel was never solely about winning in court —it was about using the courts to win over the public. And judging by the crowds outside the McDonald’s outlets two days after the verdict came down, they had every right to be declaring victory. Standing outside their neighborhood McDonald’s in North London on a Saturday afternoon, Steel and Morris could barely keep up with the demand for “What’s wrong with McDonald’s?” the leaflet that started it all. Passersby requested copies, drivers pulled over to get their McLibel mementos and mothers with toddlers stopped to talk to Helen Steel about how difficult it can be for a busy parent when her child demands unhealthy food —what can a mother do?
Across the United Kingdom, a similar scene was playing itself out at more than five hundred McDonald’s outlets, all of which were simultaneously picketed on June 21, 1997, along with thirty in North America. As with the Nike protests, every event was different. At one British franchise, the community put on a street performance featuring an ax-wielding Ronald McDonald, a cow and lots of ketchup. At another, people passed out free vegetarian food. At all of them, supporters handed out the famous leaflet: 400,000 copies that weekend alone. “They were flying out of their hands,” said Dan Mills of the McLibel Support Campaign, amused at the irony: before McDonald’s decided to sue, London Greenpeace’s campaign was winding down, and only a few hundred copies of the contentious leaflet had ever been distributed. It has now been translated into twenty-six languages and is one of the hottest properties in cyberspace.
Lessons of the Big Three: Use the Courts as a Tool
It’s a good bet that many brand-name giants besides McDonald’s have paid close attention to the goings-on in that British courtroom. In 1996, Guess dropped a libel suit it had launched against the L.A. women’s group Common Threads, in response to a poetry reading about the plight of garment workers sewing Guess jeans.48 Similarly, though Nike consistently accuses its critics of fabrication, it has stayed away from trying to clear its name in court. And no wonder: the courtroom is the only place where private corporations are forced to open shuttered windows and let the public look in.
As Helen Steel and Dave Morris write,
If companies do choose to use oppressive laws against their critics then court cases do not have to only be about legal procedures and verdicts. They can be turned into a public forum and focus for protest, and for the wider dissemination of the truth. This is what happened with McLibel … Maybe for the first time in history, a powerful institution (it just happened to be a fast-food chain, but in some ways could’ve been any financial organization or state department) was subject to lengthy, detailed and critical public scrutiny. That can only be a good thing!49
The message has not been lost on Steel and Morris’s fellow activists around the world; everyone who followed McLibel saw how effective a long, dramatic trial could be at building up a body of evidence and stoking sentiment against a corporate opponent. Some campaigners, not waiting to be sued themselves, are taking their corporate opponents to court instead. For instance, in January 1999, when U.S. labor activists decided they wanted to draw attention to the ongoing sweatshop violations in the U.S. territory of Saipan, they launched an unconventional lawsuit in California court against seventeen American retailers, including the Gap and Tommy Hilfiger. The suit, filed on behalf of thousands of Saipan garment workers, accuses the brand-name retailers and manufacturers of participating in a “racketeering conspiracy” in which young women from Southeast Asia are lured to Saipan with promises of well-paid jobs in the United States. What they get instead is wage cheating and “America’s worst sweatshop,” in the words of Al Meyer-hoff, lead attorney on the case. A companion lawsuit further alleges that by labeling goods from Saipan “Made in the U.S.A.” or “Made in the Northern Marianas, U.S.A.,” the companies are engaging in false advertising, leaving customers with the impression that the manufacturers were subject to U.S. labor laws, when they were not.50
Meanwhile, the Center for Constitutional Rights has taken a similar tack with Royal Dutch/Shell, filing a federal lawsuit against the company in a New York court on the first anniversary of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s death. According to the Center’s David A. Love, “The suit —filed on behalf of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other Ogoni activists who were executed by Nigeria’s military regime in November 1995 —alleges that the executions were carried out with ‘the knowledge, consent, and/or support’ of Shell Oil.” It further alleges that the hangings were part of a conspiracy “to violently and ruthlessly suppress any opposition to Royal Dutch/Shell’s conduct in its exploitation of oil and natural gas resources in Ogoni and in the Niger Delta.” Shell denies the charges and is challenging the legitimacy of the suit. At the time of writing, neither the Saipan case nor the Shell case had been settled.51
Lessons of the Big Three: Use the Net to Shine a McSpotlight
If the courts are becoming a popular tool to pry open closed corporations, it is the Internet that has rapidly become the tool of choice for spreading information about multinationals around the world. All three of the campaigns described in this chapter have distinguished themselves by a pioneering use of information technologies, an approach that continues to unnerve their corporate targets.
Each day, information about Nike flows freely via E-mail between the U.S. National Labor Committee and Campaign for Labor Rights; the Dutch-based Clean Clothes Campaign; the Australian Fairwear Campaign; the Hong Kong—based Asian Monitoring and Resource Centre; the British Labour Behind the Label Coalition and Christian Aid; the French Agir Ici and Artisans du Monde; the German Werkstatt Okonomie; the Belgian Les Magasins de Monde; and the Canadian Maquila Solidarity Network —to name but a few of the players. In a September 1997 press release, Nike attacked its critics as “fringe groups, which are again using the Internet and fax modems to promote mistruths and distortions for their own purposes.” But by March 1998, Nike was ready to treat its on-line critics wit
h a little more respect. In explaining why it had just introduced yet another package of labor reforms, company spokesman Vada Manager said, “You make changes because it’s the right thing to do. But obviously our actions have clearly been accelerated because of the World Wide Web.”52
Shell was similarly humbled by the mobility of both the Brent Spar campaign and the Ogoni support movement. Natural-resource companies had grown accustomed to dealing with activists who could not escape the confines of their nationhood: a pipeline or mine could spark a peasants’ revolt in the Philippines or the Congo, but it would remain contained, reported only by the local media and known only to people in the area. But today, every time Shell sneezes, a report goes out on the hyperactive “shell-nigeria-action” listserve, bouncing into the in-boxes of all the far-flung organizers involved in the campaign, from Nigerian leaders living in exile to student activists around the world. And when a group of activists occupied part of Shell’s U.K. headquarters in January 1999, they made sure to bring a digital camera with a cellular linkup, allowing them to broadcast their sit-in on the Web, even after Shell officials turned off the electricity and phones.
Shell has responded to the rise of Net activism with an aggressive Internet strategy of its own: in 1996, it hired Simon May, a twenty-nine-year-old “Internet manager.” According to May, “There has been a shift in the balance of power, activists are no longer entirely dependent on the existing media. Shell learned it the hard way with the Brent Spar, when a lot of information was disseminated outside the regular channels.”53 But if the power balance has shifted, it is May’s job to shift it back in Shell’s favor: he oversees the monitoring of all on-line mentions of the company, responds to E-mail queries about social issues and has helped to establish Shell’s on-line “social concerns” discussion forum on the company Web site.
