No Logo

by Naomi Klein

  Many students did just that. As a result, in April 1996 Harvard rejected a proposed $1 million vending deal with Pepsi, citing the company’s Burma holdings. Stanford University cost Pepsi an estimated $800,000 when a petition signed by two thousand students blocked the construction of a PepsiCo-owned Taco Bell restaurant. The stakes were even higher in Britain where campus soft-drink contracts are coordinated centrally through the National Union of Students’ services wing. “Pepsi had just beat out Coke for the contract,” recalls Guy Hughes, a campaigner with the London-based group Third World First. “Pepsi was being sold in eight hundred student unions across the U.K., so we used the consortium as a lever to pressure Pepsi. When [the student union] met with the company, one factor for Pepsi was that the boycott had become international.”1

  Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Burma’s opposition party that was elected to power in 1990, only to be prevented from taking office by the military, has offered encouragement to this nascent movement. In 1997, in a speech read by her husband (who has since died) at the American University in Washington, D.C., she singled out students in the call to put pressure on multinational corporations that are invested in Burma. “Please use your liberty to promote ours,” she said. “Take a principled stand against companies which are doing business with the military regime of Burma.”2

  After the campus boycotts made it into The New York Times, Pepsi sold its shares in a controversial Burmese bottling plant whose owner, Thien Tun, had publicly called for Suu Kyi’s democracy movement to be “ostracized and crushed.” Student activists, however, dismissed the move as a “paper shuffle” because Pepsi products were still being sold and produced in Burma. Finally, facing continued pressure, Pepsi announced its “total disengagement” from Burma on January 24, 1997. When Zar Ni, the coordinator of the American student movement, heard the news, he sent an E-mail out on the Free Burma Coalition listserve: “We finally tied the Pepsi Animal down! We did it!! We all did it!!! … We now KNOW we have the grassroots power to yank one of the most powerful corporations in the world.”

  If there is a moral to this story, it is that Pepsi’s drive to capture the campus market landed the company at the center of a debate in which it had no desire to participate. It wanted university students to be its poster children —its real live Generation Next —but instead, the students turned the tables and made Pepsi the poster corporation for their campus Free Burma movement. Sein Win, a leader in exile of Burma’s elected National League for Democracy, observed that “PepsiCo very much takes care of its image. It wanted to press the drink’s image as ‘the taste of a young generation,’ so when the young generation participates in boycotts, it hurts the effort.”3 Simon Billenness, an ethical investment specialist who spearheaded the Burma campaign, is more blunt: “Pepsi,” he says, “was under siege from its own target market.”4 And Reid Cooper, coordinator of the Carleton University campaign, notes that without Pepsi’s thirst for campus branding, Burma’s plight might never have become an issue on campuses. “Pepsi tried to go into the schools,” he tells me in an interview, “and from there it was spontaneous combustion.”

  Not surprisingly, the Pepsi victory has emboldened the Free Burma campaign on the campuses. The students have adopted the slogan “Burma: South Africa of the Nineties” and claim to be “The largest human rights campaign in cyberspace.”5 Today, more than one hundred colleges and twenty high schools around the world are part of the Free Burma Coalition. The extent to which the country’s liberty has become a student cause célèbre became apparent when, in August 1998, eighteen foreign activists —most of them university students —were arrested in Rangoon for handing out leaflets expressing support for Burma’s democracy movement. Not surprisingly, the event caught the attention of the international media. The court sentenced the activists to five years of hard labor, but at the last minute deported them instead of imprisoning them.

  Other student campaigns have focused on different corporations and different dictators. With Pepsi out of Burma, attention began to shift on campuses to Coca-Cola’s investments in Nigeria. At Kent State University and other schools where Coke won the campus cola war, students argued that Coke’s high-profile presence in Nigeria offered an air of legitimacy to the country’s illegitimate military regime (which, at the time, was still in power). Once again, the issue of Nigerian human rights might never have reached much beyond KSU’s Amnesty International Club, but because Coke and the school had entered into a sponsorship-style arrangement, the campaign took off and students began shouting that their university had blood on its hands.

  There have also been a number of food fights, most of them related to McDonald’s expanding presence on college campuses. In 1997, the British National Union of Students entered into an agreement with McDonald’s to distribute “privilege cards” to all undergraduates in the U.K. When students showed the card, they got a free cheeseburger every time they ordered a Big Mac, fries and drink. But campus environmentalists opposed the deal, forcing the student association to bow out of the marketing alliance in March 1998. In providing its reasons for the change of heart, the association cited the company’s “anti-union practices, exploitation of employees, its contribution to the destruction of the environment, animal cruelty and the promotion of unhealthy food products” —all carefully worded references to the McLibel judge’s findings.6

  As the brand backlash spreads, students are beginning to question not only sponsorship arrangements with the likes of McDonald’s and Pepsi, but also the less flashy partnerships that their universities have with the private sector. Whether it’s bankers on the board of governors, corporate-endowed professorships or the naming of campus buildings after benefactors, all are facing scrutiny from a more economically politicized student body. British students have stepped up a campaign to pressure their universities to stop accepting grant money from the oil industry, and in British Columbia, the University of Victoria Senate voted in November 1998 to refuse scholarship money from Shell. This agenda of corporate resistance is gradually becoming more structured, as students from across North America come together at annual conferences such as the 1997 “Democracy Teach-In: Campus Democracy vs. Corporate Control” at the University of Chicago, where they attend seminars like “Research: For People or Profit?” “Investigating Your Campus” and “What Is a Corporation and Why Is There a Problem?” In June 1999, student activists again came together, this time in Toledo, Ohio, in the newly formed Student Alliance to Reform Corporations. The purpose of the gathering was to launch a national campaign to force universities to invest their money only with companies that respect human rights and do not degrade the environment.

  It should come as no surprise that by far the most controversial campus-corporate partnerships have been ones involving that most controversial of companies: Nike. Since the shoe industry’s use of sweatshop labor became common knowledge, the deals that Nike had signed with hundreds of athletic departments in universities have become among the most contentious issues on campuses today, with “Ban the Swoosh” buttons rivaling women’s symbols as the undergraduate accessory of choice. And in what Nike must see as the ultimate slap in the face, college campuses where the company has paid out millions of dollars to sponsor sports teams (University of North Carolina, Duke University, Stanford, Penn State and Arizona State, to name just a few) have become the hottest spots of the international anti-Nike campaign. According to the Campaign for Labor Rights, “These contracts, which are a centerpiece of Nike marketing, have now turned into a public relations nightmare for the company. Nike’s aggressive campus marketing has now been forced into a defensive posture.”7

  At the University of Arizona, students attempted to get their university president to reconsider the school’s endorsement of Nike products by delivering a pile of old Nike shoes to his office (followed by cameras from two local television stations). According to a student organizer, James Tracy, “each pair of shoes had a tale of Nike’s abuse attached to them for the
president to consider.”8 At Stanford University, similar protests greeted the athletic department’s decision to sign a four-year, $5 million contract with Nike. In fact, bashing Nike has become such a popular sport on campus that at Florida State University —a major jock college — a group of students built an anti-Nike float for the 1997 homecoming parade.

  Most of these universities are locked into multiyear sponsorship deals with Nike, but at the University of California at Irvine, students went after the company when its contract with the women’s basketball team was up for renewal. Faced with mounting pressure from the student body, the school’s athletic department decided to switch to Converse. On another campus, soccer coach Kim Keady was unable to persuade his employer, St. John’s University, to stop forcing its team to use Nike gear. So, in the summer of 1998, he quit his job as assistant coach in protest.9

  University of North Carolina student Marion Traub-Werner explains the appeal of this new movement: “Obviously there’s the labor issue. But we’re also concerned about Nike’s intrusion into our campus culture. The swoosh is everywhere —in addition to all the uniforms, it’s on the game schedules, it’s on all the posters and it dominates the clothing section in the campus store.”10 Like no other company, Nike has branded this generation, and so if students now have the chance to brand Nike as an exploiter — well, the chance is too good to pass up.

  The Real Brand U

  While many campuses are busily taking on the brand-name interlopers, others are realizing that their universities are themselves brand names. Ivy League universities, and colleges with all-star sports teams, have extensive clothing lines, several of which rival the market share of many commercial designers. They also share many of the same labor problems. In 1998, the UNITE garment workers union published a report on the BJ&B factory in an export processing zone in the Dominican Republic. Workers at BJ&B, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of baseball hats, embroider the school logos and crests of at least nine large American universities, including Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard and University of Michigan. The conditions at BJ&B were signature free-trade-zone ones: long hours of forced overtime, fierce union busting (including layoffs of organizers), short-term contracts, paychecks insufficient to feed a family, pregnancy tests, sexual harassment, abusive management, unsafe drinking water and huge markups (while the hats sold, on average, for $19.95, workers saw only 8 cents of that).11 And of course, most of the workers were young women, a fact that was brought home when the union sponsored a trip to the U.S. for two former employees of the factory: nineteen-year-old Kenia Rodriguez and twenty-year-old Roselio Reyes. The two workers visited many of the universities whose logos they used to stitch on caps, speaking to gatherings of students who were exactly their age. “In the name of the 2,050 workers in this factory, and the people in this town, we ask for your support,” Reyes said to an audience of students at the University of Illinois.12

  These revelations about factory conditions were hardly surprising. College licensing is big business, and the players —Fruit of the Loom, Champion, Russell —have all shifted to contract factories with the rest of the garment industry, and make liberal use of free-trade zones around the world. In the U.S., the licensing of college names is a $2.5 billion annual industry, much of it brokered through the Collegiate Licensing Company. Duke University alone sells around $25 million worth of clothing associated with its winning basketball team every year. To meet the demand, it has seven hundred licensees who contract to hundreds of plants in the U.S. and in ten other countries.13

  Because of Duke’s leading role as a campus apparel manufacturer, a group of activists decided to turn the school into a model of ethical manufacturing —not only for other schools, but for the scandal-racked garment industry as a whole. In March 1998, Duke University unveiled a landmark policy requiring that all companies making T-shirts, baseball hats and sweatshirts bearing the “Duke” name agree to a set of clear labor standards. The code required that contractors pay the legal minimum wage, maintain safe working conditions and allow workers to form unions, no matter where the factories were located. What makes the policy more substantial than most other codes in the garment sector is that it requires factories to undergo inspections from independent monitors —a provision that sent Nike and Shell screaming from the negotiating table, despite overwhelming evidence that their stated standards are being disregarded on the ground. Brown University followed two months later with a tough code of its own.

  Tico Almeida, a senior at Duke University, explains that many students have a powerful reaction when they learn about the workers who produce their team clothing in free-trade zones. “You have two groups of people, roughly the same age, who are getting such different experiences out of the same institutions,” he says. And once again, says David Tannenbaum, an undergraduate at Princeton, the logo (this time a school logo) provides the global link. “While the workers are making our clothes thousands of miles away, in other ways we’re close to it —we’re wearing these clothes every day.”14

  The summer after the Duke and Brown codes were passed was filled with activity. In July, anti-sweatshop organizers from campuses across the country gathered in New York and organized themselves into a coalition, United Students Against Sweatshops. In August, a delegation of eight students, including Tico Almeida, went on a fact-finding mission to free-trade zones in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras. Almeida told me he was hoping to find Duke sweatshirts because he had seen the “Made in Honduras” tag on clothing sold on his campus. But he soon discovered what most people do when they visit free-trade zones: that a potent combination of secrecy, deferred responsibility and militarism forms a protective barricade around much of the global garment industry. “It was like taking random stabs in the dark,” he recalls.

  When classes resumed in September 1998 and the student travelers were back on campus, the issue of sweatshop labor exploded into what The New York Times described as “the biggest surge in campus activism in nearly two decades.”15 At Duke, Georgetown, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, Brown, Cornell and University of California at Berkeley there were conferences, teach-ins, protests and sit-ins —some lasting three and four days. At Yale University, students held a “knit-in.” All the demonstrations led to agreements from school administrators to demand higher labor standards from the companies that manufacture their wares.

  This fast-growing movement has a somewhat unlikely rallying cry: “Corporate disclosure.” The central demand is for the companies that produce college-affiliated clothing to hand over the names and addresses of all their factories around the world and open themselves up to monitoring. Who makes your school clothing, the students say, should not be a mystery. They argue that with the garment industry being the global, contracted-out maze that it is, the onus must be on companies to prove their goods aren’t made in sweatshops —not on investigative activists to prove that they are. The students are also pushing for their schools to demand that contractors pay a “living wage,” as opposed to the legal minimum wage. By May 1999, at least four administrations had agreed in principle to push their suppliers on the living-wage issue. As we will see in the next chapter, there is no agreement about how to turn those well-meaning commitments into real changes in the export factories. Everyone involved in the anti-sweatshop movement does agree, however, that even getting issues like disclosure and a living wage on the negotiating table with manufacturers represents a major victory, one that has eluded campaigners for many years.

  In a smaller but equally precedent-setting initiative, Archbishop Theodore McCarrick announced in October 1997 that his Newark, New Jersey, archdiocese would become a “no sweat” zone. The initiative includes introducing an anti-sweatshop curriculum into all 185 Catholic schools in the area, identifying the manufacturers of all their school uniforms and monitoring them to make sure the clothes are being produced under fair labor conditions — just as the students at St. Mary’s in Picke
ring, Ontario, decided to do.

  All in all, students have picked up the gauntlet on the sweatshop issue with an enthusiasm that has taken the aging labor movement by storm. United Students Against Sweatshops, after only one year in existence, claimed chapters on a hundred U.S. campuses and a sister network in Canada. Free the Children, young Craig Kielburger’s Toronto-based anti-child-labor organization (he was the thirteen-year-old who challenged the Canadian prime minister to review child-labor practices in India) has meanwhile gained strength in high schools and grade schools around the world. Charles Kernaghan, with his “outing” of Kathie Lee Gifford and Mickey Mouse, may have started this wave of labor organizing, but by the end of the 1998–99 academic year, he knew he was no longer driving it. In a letter to the United Students Against Sweatshops, he wrote: “Right now it is your student movement which is leading the way and carrying the heaviest weight in the struggle to end sweatshop abuses and child labor. Your effectiveness is forcing the companies to respond.”16

  Times have changed. As William Cahn writes in his history of the Lawrence Mill sweatshop strike of 1912, “Nearby Harvard University allowed students credit for their midterm examinations if they agreed to serve in the militia against the strikers. ‘Insolent, well-fed Harvard men,’ the New York Call reported, ‘parade up and down, their rifles loaded … their bayonets glittering.’”17 Today, students are squarely on the other side of sweatshop labor disputes: as the target market for everything from Guess jeans to Nike soccer balls and Duke-embossed baseball hats, young people are taking the sweatshop issue personally.

  Community Action: Pulling the Selective Purchasing Lever

  Since federal governments in North America and Europe have been largely unwilling to impose meaningful sanctions on such documented human-rights violators as Burma, Nigeria, Indonesia and China, preferring instead to “constructively engage” these nations with trade, there has been a move for more local levels of government to step in where the feds have stepped aside. In the U.S., town councils, city councils, school boards and even some individual state governments have been quietly doing an end run around the trade-mission cheerleading that now passes for foreign policy, and drafting their own, local, foreign policy.