No Logo

by Naomi Klein

  There is no doubt that anticorporate activism walks a precarious line between self-satisfied consumer rights and engaged political action. Campaigners can exploit the profile that brand names bring to human-rights and environmental issues, but they have to be careful that their campaigns don’t degenerate into glorified ethical shopping guides: how-to’s on saving the world through boycotts and personal lifestyle choices. Are your sneakers “No Sweat”? Your rugs “Rugmark”? Your soccerballs “Child Free”? Is your moisturizer “Cruelty-Free”? Your coffee “Fair Trade”? Some of these initiatives have genuine merit, but the challenges of a global labor market are too vast to be defined — or limited —by our interests as consumers.

  It took almost no time, for instance, for the White House Task Force on Sweatshops, set up in response to the Kathie Lee Gifford scandal, to become just another shopping exercise. Any substantial demands for labor-law reform were immediately hijacked by a new agenda: what provisions would U.S. companies have to meet before they could sew a “No Sweat” label on their garments? The immediate priority was finding a quick and easy way to protect the right of Westerners to buy branded goods without guilt. Tellingly, Bill Clinton’s “No Sweat” labeling initiative is modeled after the “Dolphin Safe” stamp on cans of tuna, which reassures buyers that the much-loved dolphin was not killed in the canning of the fish. What this proposal fails to grasp is that the rights of garment workers, unlike dolphins, cannot be assured by a symbol on a label, the equivalent of a best-before date; and that trying to do so represents nothing less than the wholesale privatization of their (and our) political rights. The whole charade reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon that shows a Norman Rockwell— esque family un wrapping gifts under a Christmas tree. The parents are pulling out a new pair of sneakers, as the mother asks: “How are the human rights on these?”

  There is another problem with the consumer-based approach. We are living, as Susan Sontag said, in the “Age of Shopping” and any movement that is primarily rooted in making people feel guilty about going to the mall is a backlash waiting to happen. Besides, the activists who are leading this movement aren’t austere Luddites who are against shopping on principle. Many of them are creative twenty-somethings designing ad jams on their Mac laptops who happen to believe that there should be some space left over that isn’t trying to sell them something or cluttered with the debris of our consumer culture. They are young men and women in Hong Kong and Jakarta who wear Nikes and eat at McDonald’s, and tell me they are too busy organizing factory workers to bother with Western lifestyle politics. And while Westerners sweat over what kinds of shoes and shirts are most ethical to buy, the people sweating in the factories line their dorm rooms with McDonald’s advertisements, paint “NBA Homeboy” murals on their doors and love anything with “Meeckey.” The organizers in the Cavite zone often dress for work in ersatz Disney or Tommy T-shirts —cheap knockoffs from the local market. How do they reconcile the contradiction between their clothes and their anger at these multinationals? They told me they had never really thought about it like that; politics in Cavite is about fighting for concrete improvements in workers’ lives —not about what name happens to be on a T-shirt you happen to have on your back.

  Corporate codes of conduct are in many ways the most controversial byproduct of brand-based activism. The moment multinational companies like Nike, Shell, Mattel and the Gap stopped denying the existence of abuses at their sites of production and resource extraction, they began drafting statements of principles, codes of ethics, memorandums of understanding and other non-legally-binding documents of good intentions. These pieces of paper espoused high standards of business ethics: nondiscrimination, respect for the environment and for the rule of law. If any busybody customer wanted to know how their products were made, the public-relations department simply mailed them a copy of the code, as if it were the list of nutritional information on the side of a box of Lean Cuisine.

  When you read the codes, it’s difficult not to get swept up in the starry-eyed idealism of it all. These documents stare back at their readers with a look of perfect ahistorical innocence as if to ask, Why are you surprised? We have been like this all along…. And the reader would be forgiven for wondering, at least for a moment, if perhaps it is just as the companies say: one big misunderstanding, a “communication breakdown” with a rogue contractor, some thing lost in the translation.

  Codes of conduct are awfully slippery. Unlike laws, they are not enforceable. And unlike union contracts, they were not drafted in cooperation with factory managers in response to the demands and needs of employees. Without exception, they were drafted by public-relations departments in cities like New York and San Francisco in the immediate aftermath of an embarrassing media investigation: Wal-Mart’s code arrived after reports surfaced that its supplier factories in Bangladesh were using child labor; Disney’s code was born of the Haitian revelation; Levi’s wrote its policy as an answer to prison labor scandals. Their original purpose was not reform but to “muzzle the offshore watchdog” groups, as Alan Rolnick, lawyer for the American Apparel Manufacturers Association, advised his clients.16

  But the companies who rushed to adopt these codes made a serious miscalculation: they underestimated, once again, the amount of information flowing between workers and villagers in Africa, Central America and Asia and campaigns in Europe and North America —and so rather than “muzzling” anyone, the documents have only raised more questions. Why did Shell fail to translate its manifesto, Profits and Principles, into any language other than English and Dutch? Why, until two years ago, were Nike and the Gap’s codes available only in English? Why weren’t they distributed to workers in the factories? Why was there such a great discrepancy between the intentions espoused in the codes and the firsthand reports coming out of the zones and the oil fields? Who is supposed to monitor these codes through all the layers of contracting and subcontracting? Who will enforce them? What is the penalty of failure?

  In short, these hybrids of advertising copy and the Communist Manifesto backfired. The offshore watchdogs kept on barking —and no wonder. Anticorporate campaigns are fueled, at least in part, by people’s deep sense of marketing overload —and for this reason, the last thing likely to mollify them is more marketing. A group of anti-Shell campaigners made that point dramatically in March 1999 after Shell launched a $32 million marketing campaign that flawlessly absorbed the rhetoric of both the Brent Spar and the Ogoni campaigns. “Exploit or Explore?” asks the glossy Shell ad.

  Every business wants to make its mark. However, in the sensitive regions of the world, like our tropical rainforests and our oceans, the scars of industrialisation are all too apparent. Our shared climate and finite natural resources concern us as never before, and there’s no room for an attitude of “It’s in the middle of nowhere, so who’s to know?” Time and again at Shell, we’re discovering the rewards of respecting the environment when doing business. If we’re exploring for oil and gas reserves in sensitive areas of the world, we consult widely with the different local and global interest groups. Working together, our aim is to ensure that bio-diversity in each location is preserved. We also try to encourage these groups to monitor our progress so that we can review and improve the ways in which we work.17

  But rather than stemming the flow of criticism, Shell’s extravagant spending on public relations —with the Ogoni’s grievances left unresolved and demands for outside monitoring repeatedly rejected —sparked its own kind of backlash: a backlash against “greenwash.” Essential Action, the hub of the Shell boycott, launched a postcard campaign urging Shell’s executives to “Spend the money cleaning up your mess, not your image!” And, in April 1999, activists in London threw green and red paint on the doors of the company’s international headquarters. The green paint, said the anonymous perpetrators, was an attempt to give Shell “a taste of its own greenwash.”18

  Throwing paint is one approach. Another, and one that has become increasingly popular, is thro
wing the promises in the codes of conduct back in the face of the corporations who drafted them. Once again, it’s the Saul Alinsky theory of political jujitsu: “No organization … can live up to the letter of its own book. You can club them to death with their ‘book’ of rules and regulations.”19 Bama Athreya of the U.S.-based International Labor Rights Fund explains how this strategy can work with relation to Nike’s high-minded code of conduct: “Let’s face it, hypocrites are far more interesting than mere wrongdoers, and it’s been much easier to sensitize press and public to Nike’s failure to implement its own code of conduct than to its failure to comply with Indonesian labor law.”20

  As it became clear that these flimsy codes of conduct had failed to quiet dissent (and may have exacerbated it), several multinationals moved on to a more advanced brand of corporate code. These codes, while still not legally binding and still implemented on a voluntary basis with little monitoring, are nonetheless more substantial than a simple statement of good intentions. And by 1998, there were so many different models of these codes floating around that even the most committed anti-sweatshop campaigners had to admit that they had lost track. Some were drafted in cooperation with human-rights groups or ethical investment specialists in the West. Others, like Bill Clinton’s Apparel Industry Partnership’s code, were organized according to where the multinationals were headquartered. The Gap has a code that applies to one factory in El Salvador, allowing it to be monitored by local human-rights activists; a code adopted by Levi’s, Mattel and Reebok refers specifically to doing business in China. A code on child labor drafted by Unicef, the International Labour Organization and an association of Pakistani manufacturers was signed by all the major soccer-ball manufacturers; it provides for outside monitoring as well as education and rehabilitation for the child laborers. Following the wave of anti-sweatshop student activism in 1998 and 1999, dozens of universities adopted their own codes, only to decide subsequently to sign on to the Clinton Apparel Industry Partnership’s code en masse —a totally different text. Meanwhile, the Collegiate Licensing Company proposed its own anti-sweatshop code, to apply to all 160 American schools it represents —meaning that some schools were looking at three tiers of codes. And unlike the tough codes adopted by universities like Duke, the CLC code has no provision for disclosure and does not require contractors to pay a living wage, only the minimum wage.

  Layered on top of these stacks of codes was one drafted by the Council on Economic Priorities, a consumer watchdog group in New York, along with several large corporations. The CEP plan would inspect factories for adherence to a set of standards covering key issues such as health, safety, overtime, child labor and the like. Under this model, brand-name multi nationals like Avon and Toys ‘R’ Us, rather than trying to enforce their own codes around the world, simply place their orders with factories that have been found to be in compliance with the code. Then, the factories are monitored by a private auditing company, which certifies factories that meet the code as “SA8000” (SA stands for “Social Accountability”). For many multinationals, this plan was far too demanding; the American Apparel Manufacturers Association, for instance, launched its own, less stringent, voluntary code, which would also certify factories “sweatshop free.”

  Not surprisingly, by mid-1999 the entire sweatshop issue had degenerated into a maze of warring codes. Unions and religious groups who had been participating in the Clinton Apparel Industry Partnership walked out in protest at its weak enforcement and monitoring measures, and accused the human-rights groups that stayed in the Partnership of “selling out.” The student anti-sweatshop activists launched an offensive against their own universities’ participation in the Clinton Partnership, insisting that no code drafted or monitored by the corporations themselves —even at arm’s length —could possibly have any merit. Monitoring had to be done by unions or by human-rights groups.

  Confusing matters still further was a strange conflation of several large human-rights groups and the corporate sector. In 1999, some of the most maligned multinationals on the planet —Dow Chemical, Nestlé, Rio Tinto, Unocal —rushed into partnership with human-rights groups and the United Nations Development Programme. Together they formed brand-new umbrella organizations with names like the Business Humanitarian Forum, Partners in Development and the Global Sustainable Development Facility, which promised to “improve communications and cooperation between global corporations and humanitarian organizations.”21 Multinationals and human-rights groups, they claimed, actually have the same goals; human rights are good for business —they are the “third bottom line.”

  It’s tempting to take this dramatic shift in direction on the part of so many multinationals as a massive victory for the campaigners who have battled the Nikes and the Shells all these years. Maybe corporations really have seen the light, and we’re all on the same page now…. Harvard business professor Debora L. Spar is among those hailing the dawn of this new age. She argues that the rise of brand-based activism has been so successful in shaming corporations, it is no longer in the financial interest of brand-name multinationals to allow abuses to occur. She calls this theory the “spotlight phenomenon.” There is no need for outside regulations because “firms will cut off abusive suppliers or make them clean up because it is now in their financial interest to do so,” she writes. “The spotlight does not change the morality of U.S. managers. It changes their bottom line.”22

  There is no doubt that companies like Nike have learned that labor-rights abuses can cost them. But the spotlight being shined on these companies is both roving and random: it is able to shine down on a few corners of the global production line, but darkness still shrouds the rest. Human rights, far from being protected by this process, are selectively respected: reforms seem to be implemented solely on the basis of where the spotlight’s beam was last directed. There is absolutely no evidence that any of this reform activity is coalescing into a universal standard of ethical corporate behavior that will be applied around the world; and no system of universal enforcement is on the horizon.

  Instead, what we have with the proliferation of voluntary codes of conduct and ethical business initiatives is a haphazard and piecemeal mess of crisis management. In mid-1999, for instance, when Nike was coming off as a savior in Indonesia for increasing wages, it was also cutting its ties with higher-waged workers in the Philippines and rushing into China, where workers’ rights are least protected, monitoring is next to impossible and wages are lowest. Levi’s pulled out of Burma, because its conscience simply would not allow it to stay, only to go back to China, which it had abandoned a few years earlier for the same reason. It then drafted a breakthrough code of conduct for China, but at the same moment it was laying off thousands of workers in Europe and North America. The Gap, meanwhile, was being held up as a model of openness and reform in El Salvador, while protestors outside its stores in New York and San Francisco shouted about the abhorrent conditions at its factories in Saipan and Russia. In addition, there were wildly diverging reports about whether even the toughest codes were actually being implemented in the factories, and whether the vast majority of workers around the world had even heard of them. And, of course, there is still no monitoring system in place to get an accurate picture of what’s really happening in the factories. Without question, some imaginative and effective initiatives have come out of these PR scrambles, but the fact remains that this patchwork approach is no way to draft a sustainable labor or environmental policy for the global economy.

  If the way multinationals like Nike and Shell have handled their respective scandals seems uncharacteristically chaotic for such streamlined operators, that chaos could well be deliberate. Even when the codes fail to stamp out abuses, what they do manage to do, rather effectively, is obscure the fact that multinationals and citizens do not actually share the same goals when it comes to deciding how to regulate against labor and environmental abuses. Even when there is genuine agreement on the need to address a problem (child labor, for in
stance), beneath the talk of ethics and partnerships the two parties are still engaged in a classic power struggle.

  Ever since key multinationals stopped denying the existence of any human-rights abuses in their global production operations, the struggle has not been over whether controls need to be put in place, but rather over who will get to place those controls. Will it be the people and their democratically elected representatives? Or will it be the global corporations themselves? It’s clear from the privatized codes which direction the corporations want to go. The question is, What will citizens do in response?

  The subtext of the codes of conduct is a settled hostility toward the idea that citizens can —through unions, laws and international treaties —take control of their own labor conditions and of the ecological impact of industrialization. In the twenties and thirties, when the crises of sweatshops, child labor and workers’ health were at the forefront of the political agenda in the West, these problems were tackled with mass unionization, direct bargaining between workers and employers and governments enacting tough new laws. That type of response could be marshaled again, only this time on a global scale, through the enforcement of existing International Labor Organization treaties, if compliance with those treaties were observed with the same commitment that the World Trade Organization now shows in its enforcement of the rules of global trade.