No Logo

by Naomi Klein

  Big companies are big targets … Thousands of companies are or have been the targets of anti-corporate activism online. With WeberWorks/ Monitor powered by eWatch, not only will WeberWorks/Monitor clients be alerted when they become a target, they will also receive critical insights for how to effectively handle the situation.

  —James M. Alexander, president of eWatch, an Internet monitoring company, May 1998

  The Internet played a similar role during the McLibel Trial, catapulting Lon don’s grassroots anti-McDonald’s movement into an arena as global as the one in which its multinational opponent operates. “We had so much information about McDonald’s, we thought we should start a library,” Dave Morris explains, and with this in mind, a group of Internet activists launched the McSpotlight Web site. The site not only has the controversial pamphlet online, it contains the complete 20,000-page transcript of the trial, and offers a debating room where McDonald’s workers can exchange horror stories about McWork under the Golden Arches. The site, one of the most popular destinations on the Web, has been accessed approximately sixty-five million times.54

  Ben, one of the studiously low-profile programmers for McSpotlight told me that “this is a medium that doesn’t require campaigners to jump through hoops doing publicity stunts, or depend on the good will of an editor to get their message across.”55 It’s also less vulnerable to libel suits than more traditional media. Ben explains that while McSpotlight’s server is located in the Netherlands, it has “mirror sites” in Finland, the U.S., New Zealand and Australia. That means that if a server in one country is targeted by McDonald’s lawyers, the site will still be available around the world from the other mirrors. In the meantime, everyone visiting the site is invited to give their opinion on whether or not McSpotlight will get sued. “Is McSpotlight next in court? Click on yes or no.”

  Once again, the broader corporate world is scrambling to learn the lessons of these campaigns. Speaking in Brussels at a June 1998 conference on the growing power of anticorporate groups, Peter Verhille of the PR firm Entente International noted that “one of the major strengths of pressure groups — in fact the leveling factor in their confrontation with powerful companies — is their ability to exploit the instruments of the telecommunication revolution. Their agile use of global tools such as the Internet reduces the advantage that corporate budgets once provided.”56 Indeed, the beauty of the Net for activists is that it allows coordinated international actions with minimal resources and bureaucracy. For instance, for the International Nike Days of Action, local activists simply download information pamphlets from the Campaign for Labor Rights Web site to hand out at their protests, then file detailed E-mail reports from Sweden, Australia, the U.S. and Canada, which are then forwarded to all participating groups.

  A similar electronic clearinghouse model was used to coordinate both the Reclaim the Streets global street parties and the picketing outside McDonald’s outlets after the McLibel verdict. The McSpotlight programmers posted a list of all 793 McDonald’s franchises in Britain and in the weeks before the verdict came down, local activists signed up to “adopt a store (and teach it some respect)” on the day of protest. More than half were adopted. I had been following all of this closely from Canada, but when I finally got a chance to see the London headquarters of the McLibel Support Campaign —the hub from which hundreds of political actions had been launched around the world, linking up thousands of protestors and becoming a living archive for all things anti-McDonald’s — I was shocked. In my mind, I had pictured an office crammed with people tapping away on high-tech equipment. I should have known better: McLibel’s head office is nothing more than a tiny room at the back of a London flat with graffiti in the stairwells. The office walls are papered in subvertisements and anarchist agitprop. Helen Steel, Dave Morris, Dan Mills and a few dozen volunteers had gone head to head with McDonald’s for seven years with a rickety PC, an old modem, one telephone and a fax machine. Dan Mills apologized to me for the absence of an extra chair.

  Tony Juniper of Britain’s environmental group Friends of the Earth calls the Internet “the most potent weapon in the toolbox of resistance.”57 That may well be so, but the Net is more than an organizing tool —it has become an organizing model, a blueprint for decentralized but cooperative decision making. It facilitates the process of information sharing to such a degree that many groups can work in concert with one another without the need to achieve monolithic consensus (which is often impossible, anyway, given the nature of activist organizations). And because it is so decentralized, these movements are still in the process of forging links with their various wings around the world, continually surprising themselves with how far unreported little victories have traveled, how thoroughly bits of research have been recycled and absorbed. These movements are only now starting to feel their own reach and, as the students and local communities profiled in the next chapter will show, their own power.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  LOCAL FOREIGN POLICY

  Students and Communities Join the Fray

  Pretty soon we’ll have to do our own offshore drilling.

  —Berkeley, California, city councilor Polly Armstrong

  on her council’s decision to outlaw municipal gasoline

  purchases from all the major oil companies

  “Okay. I need people on each door. Let’s go!” shouted Sean Hayes in the distinctive clipped baritone of a high-school basketball coach, which, as it happens, he is. “Let’s go!” Coach Hayes bellowed again, clapping his meaty hands loud enough for the sound to bounce off the walls of the huge gymnasium of St. Mary’s Secondary School in Pickering, Ontario (a town best known for its proximity to a nuclear power plant of questionable quality).

  Hayes had invited me to participate in the school’s first “Sweatshop Fashion Show,” an event he began planning when he discovered that the basketball team’s made-in-Indonesia Nike sneakers had likely been manufactured under sweatshop conditions. He’s an unapologetic jock with a conscience and, together with a handful of do-gooder students, had organized today’s event to get the other two thousand kids at St. Mary’s to think about the clothes they wear in terms beyond “cool” or “lame.”

  The plan was simple: as student models decked out in logowear strutted down a makeshift runway, another student off to the side would read a prepared narration about the lives of the Third World workers who made the gear. The students would quickly follow that with scenes from Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti and a skit about how teenagers often feel “unloved, unwanted, unacceptable and unpopular if you do not have the right clothes.” My part would come at the end, when I was to give a short speech about my research in export processing zones, and then facilitate a question-and-answer period. It sounded straightforward enough.

  While we were waiting for the bell to ring and the students to stream in, Hayes turned to me and said, with a forced smile: “I hope the kids actually hear the message and don’t think it’s just a regular fashion show.” Having read the students’ prepared narration I couldn’t help thinking that his concern sounded, frankly, paranoid. True, fashion shows have become such a high-school stalwart that they now rival car washes as the prom fundraiser of choice. But did Hayes actually think his students were so heartless that they could listen to testimony about starvation wages and physical abuse and expect that the clothing in question would be on sale at a discount after the assembly? Just then, a couple of teenage boys poked their heads in the door and checked out the frantic preparations. “Yo, guys,” one of them said. “I’m guessing fashion show — this should be a joke.” Coach Hayes looked nervous.

  As two thousand students piled onto the bleachers, the room came alive with the giddiness that accompanies all mass reprieves from class, whether for school plays, AIDS education lectures, teachers’ strikes or fire alarms. A quick scan of the room turned up no logos on these kids, but that was definitely not by choice. St. Mary’s is a Catholic school and the students wear uniforms —bland af
fairs that they were nonetheless working for all they were worth. It’s hard to make gray flannel slacks and acrylic navy sweaters look like gangsta gear but the guys were doing their best, wearing their pants pulled down halfway to their knees with patterned boxer shorts bunched over their belts. The girls were pushing the envelope too, pairing their drab tunics with platform loafers and black lipstick.

  As it turned out, Coach Hayes’s concerns were well founded. As the hip-hop started playing and the first kids bounded down the runway in Nike shoes and workout wear, the assembly broke into cheers and applause. The moment the young woman saddled with reading the earnest voice-over began, “Welcome to the world of Nike …” she was drowned out by hoots and whistles. It didn’t take much to figure out that they weren’t cheering for her but rather at the mere mention of the word Nike —everyone’s favorite celebrity brand.

  Waiting for my cue, I was ready to flee the modern teenage world forever, but after some booming threats from Coach Hayes, the crowd finally quieted down. My speech was at least not booed and the discussion that followed was among the liveliest I’ve ever witnessed. The first question (as at all Sweatshop 101 events) was “What brands are sweatshop-free?” —Adidas? they asked. Reebok? The Gap? I told the St. Mary’s students that shopping for an exploitation-free wardrobe at the mall is next to impossible, given the way all the large brands produce. The best way to make a difference, I told them, is to stay informed by surfing the Net, and by letting companies know what you think by writing letters and asking lots of questions at the store. The St. Mary’s kids were deeply skeptical of this non-answer. “Look, I don’t have time to be some kind of major political activist every time I go to the mall,” one girl said, right hand planted firmly on right hip. “Just tell me what kind of shoes are okay to buy, okay?”

  Another girl, who looked about sixteen, sashayed to the microphone. “I’d just like to say that this is capitalism, okay, and people are allowed to make money and if you don’t like it maybe you’re just jealous.”

  The hands shot up in response. “No, I’d just like to say that you are totally screwed up and just because everyone is doing something doesn’t mean it’s right —you’ve got to stand up for what you believe in instead of just standing in front of the mirror trying to look good!”

  After watching thousands of Ricki and Oprah episodes, these kids take to the talk-show format as naturally as Elizabeth Dole. Just as they had cheered for Nike moments before, the students now cheered for each other —dog-pound style, with lots of “you-go-girls.” Moments before the bell for next period, Coach Hayes made time for one last question. A boy in saggy slacks sauntered across the gym holding his standard-issue navy blue sweater away from his lanky body with two fingers, as if he detected a foul odor. Then, he slouched down to the mike and said, in an impeccable teenage monotone, “Umm, Coach Hayes, if working conditions are so bad in Indonesia, then why do we have to wear these uniforms? We buy thousands of these things and it says right here that they are ‘Made in Indonesia.’ I’d just like to know, how do you know they weren’t made in sweatshops?”

  The auditorium exploded. It was a serious burn. Another student rushed to the mike and suggested that the students should try to find out who makes their uniforms, a project for which there was no shortage of volunteers. When I left St. Mary’s that day, the school had its work cut out for it.

  There’s no denying that the motivation behind the St. Mary’s students’ newfound concern over Indonesian labor conditions was that they had just discovered a high-minded excuse to refuse to wear their lame-ass uniforms —not an entirely selfless concern. But even if it was inadvertent, they had also stumbled across one of the most powerful levers being used to pry reform out of seemingly amoral multinational corporations.

  When high schools, universities, places of worship, unions, city councils and other levels of government apply ethical standards to their bulk purchasing decisions, it takes anticorporate campaigning a significant step beyond the mostly symbolic warfare of adbusting and superstore protesting. Such community institutions are not only collections of individual consumers, they are also consumers themselves — and powerful ones at that. Thousands of schools like St. Mary’s ordering thousands of uniforms each —it adds up to a lot of uniforms. They also buy sports equipment for their teams, food for their cafeterias and drinks for their vending machines. Municipal governments buy uniforms for their police forces, gas for their garbage trucks and computers for their offices; and they also invest their pension funds on the stock market. Universities, for their part, select telecommunications companies for their Internet portals, use banks to hold their money and invest endowments that can represent billions of dollars. And, of course, they are also increasingly involved in direct sponsorship arrangements with corporations. Most important, bulk institutional purchases and sponsorship deals are among the most sought after contracts in the marketplace, and corporations are forever trying to outbid one another to land them.

  What all these business arrangements have in common is that they exist at a distinctive intersection between civic life (ostensibly governed by principles of “public good”) and the corporate profit-making motive. When corporations sponsor an event on a university campus or sign a deal with a municipal government, they cross an important line between private and public space —a line that is not part of a consumer’s interaction with a corporation as an individual shopper. We don’t expect morality at the mall but, to some extent, we do still expect it in our public spaces —in our schools, national parks and municipal playgrounds.

  So while it may be cold comfort to some, there is a positive side effect of the fact that, increasingly, private corporations are staking a claim to these public spaces. Over the past four years, there has been a collective realization among many public, civic and religious institutions that having a multinational corporation as a guest in your house —whether as a supplier or a sponsor —presents an important political opportunity. With their huge buying power, public and non-profit institutions can exert real public-interest pressure on otherwise freewheeling private corporations. This is nowhere more true than in the schools and universities.

  Students Teach the Brands a Lesson

  As we have already seen, soft-drink, sneaker and fast-food companies have been forging a flurry of exclusive logo allegiances with high schools, colleges and universities. Like the Olympic games, many universities have “official” airlines, banks, long-distance carriers and computer suppliers. For the sponsoring companies, these exclusive arrangements offer opportunities to foster warm and fuzzy logo loyalties during those formative college years —not to mention a chance to pick up some quasi-academic legitimacy. (Being the official supplier of a top-flight university sounds almost as if a panel of tenured professors got together and scientifically determined that Coke Is It! or Our Fries Are Crispier! For some lucky corporations, it can be like getting an honorary degree.)

  However, these same corporations have at times discovered that there can be an unanticipated downside to these “partnerships”: that the sense of owner ship that goes along with sponsoring is not always the kind of passive consumer allegiance that the companies had bargained for. In a climate of mounting concern about corporate ethics, students are finding that a great way to grab the attention of aloof multinationals is to kick up a fuss about the extracurricular activities of their university’s official brand —whether Coke, Pepsi, Nike, McDonald’s, Starbucks or Northern Telecom. Rather than simply complaining about amorphous “corporatization,” young activists have begun to use their status as sought-after sponsorees to retaliate against forces they considered invasive on their campuses to begin with. In this volatile context, a particularly aggressive sponsorship deal can act as a political catalyst, instigating wide-ranging debate on everything from unfair labor conditions to trading with dictators. Just ask Pepsi.

  Pepsi (as we saw in Chapter 4) has been at the forefront of the drive to purchase students as a captive mar
ket. Its exclusive vending arrangements have paved the way for copycat deals, and fast-food outlets owned by PepsiCo were among the first to establish a presence in high schools and on university campuses in North America. One of Pepsi’s first campus vending deals was with Ottawa’s Carleton University in 1993. Since marketing on campus was still somewhat jarring back then, many students were immediately resentful at being forced into this tacit product endorsement, and were determined not to give their official drink a warm welcome. Members of the university’s chapter of the Public Interest and Research Group — a network of campus social-justice organizations stretching across North America known as PIRGs —discovered that PepsiCo was producing and selling its soft drinks in Burma, the brutal dictatorship now called Myanmar. The Carleton students weren’t sure how to deal with the information, so they posted a notice about Pepsi’s involvement in Burma on a few on-line bulletin boards that covered student issues. Gradually, other universities where Pepsi was the official drink started requesting more information. Pretty soon, the Ottawa group had developed and distributed hundreds of “campus action kits,” with pamphlets, petitions, and “Gotta Boycott” and “Pepsi, Stuff It” stickers. “How can you help free Burma?” one pamphlet asks. “Pressure schools to terminate food or beverage contracts selling PepsiCo products until it leaves Burma.”