other publications
Nanaimo to Duncan Through the Lens of No Logo
Judsen Garside
It’s ten at night, and I’ve drunk too much water.
There’s nothing really stopping me from heading downstairs and calling it a night, except for the burning in the back of my mind. Could it be an afterglow, left as a stimulating residue by the article that I’ve just completed reading? Is it something similar to Klein’s loglo? Like an imprint that I can see only when I’m in the midst of a blink?
Possibly.
The three chapters of Naomi Klein’s book No Logo that will be covered here assess three distinct human feelings: urges to move, glowing numbness, and a feeling of fatalism. I choose fatalism because reading the stories in the third of my chapters is not the greatest motivational material; rather, it conveys a sense of inability because of location. The events that are reported on in the third chapter take place in Europe, Nigeria, and New York. I, personally, do not have the ability to get out to these regions to aid in the battle, but there is one tactic that allows my contribution to be accessed worldwide.
Thankfully, this web paper will allow my fellow classmates to learn material and ideas that Klein discusses in her book as well as in my film No Style: Taking Aim at Presentation.
Bad Mood Rising: The New Anticorporate Activism
Throughout this chapter, Klein talks about a growing resentment not only towards the corporation but also the brand: to simply boycott consumer items is half the battle. As we have seen earlier in the year, some corporations are doing financially better than a host of countries. Politically motivated reorganization of the world's economy by multinational corporations is leading to what Klein refers to as the "bad mood rising." This bad mood is what is giving rise to the protests of Nike Town, the pie that Bill Gates received in his face, and a bottle through the window of a Prague McDonald’s. According to Klein, "The corporate hijacking of political power is as responsible for this mood as the brands’ cultural looting of public and mental space (340)." Klein also theorizes that “it has to do with the arrogance of branding itself: the seeds of discontent are part of its very DNA" (340).
So what events led up to this rising bad mood? Klein separates into two sections a single year that was the turning point for knowledge and awareness in the consumer realm. The year of the sweatshop and brand attack occurs in 1995 and 1996. During this time, there were startling revelations about the economic and labour practices of many well-known brands and companies. Here’s a selection of some notables:
- The Gap: a sweatshop in El Salvador fired 150 people for attempting
to organize a union, and managers there threatened other workers that
"blood will flow" if further attempts at union organization continued.
- Kathy Lee Gifford: kids in Honduras and illegal sweatshops in New York were making her brand of clothing.
- Disney & Mattel: children were kept in slave-like conditions in Indonesia and China so "that children in America can put frilly dresses on America’s favourite doll."
- Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Umbro, Mitre, Brine: for the manufacture of sports equipment and soccer balls, over 10,000 kids were held and traded around various sweatshops like slaves and branded like cattle.
- Target, Sears and Nordstrom: this was a shocker for the American psyche. In August 1995, a sweatshop in L.A. was raided and seventy-two Thai garment workers were found living in a state similar to bonded slavery. Some had been there for seven years.
- Wal-Mart: has been a target for scrutiny because it carries Kathy Lee clothing, Haitian-made Disney pyjamas, various clothes made by kids in Bangladesh, and sports gear made by the same kids throughout Asia.
Klein asks an interesting question: “Why, if Wal-Mart had the power to lower prices, alter CD covers and influence magazine content, did it not also have the power to demand and enforce ethical labour standards from its suppliers?" (329)
The year of the sweatshop served as a twelve-month window through which the inner workings of branded America were exposed to the public of North America. According to Klein:
In a single image, the brand-name sweatshop tells the story of the obscene disparities of the global economy: corporate executives and celebrities raking in salaries so high they defy comprehension, billions of dollars spent on branding and advertising—-all propped up by a system of shanty-towns, squalid factories and the misery and trampled expectations of young women. (329)
I referenced power in the video I presented to the class—No Style: Taking Aim at Presentation; since the year of the sweatshop and brand attack, there has been a greater involvement in protesting and researching the companies that are ignoring human rights. As Klein points out, there is a greater urge to take action against the corporation because the corporation has slowly become a ruling political body. Just as hippies were protesting the war in Vietnam by investigating and researching the government, activists are now confronting the corporation because they seem to be holding more power than the countries they are based in.
The Brand Boomerang: The Tactics of Brand-Based Campaigns
Branding is a balloon economy, says Klein; it inflates with astonishing rapidity but it is full of hot air.
Using the boomerang metaphor, the brands pump up their image and throw it out into the public’s mental space, then the image flies back to the brand. After the brand's image returns, there is what Klein refers to as a loglo—a term she borrows from Neil Stephenson. Klein defines the loglo as "logos that have been burned into our brains by the finest image campaigns money can buy, and lifted a little closer to the sun by their sponsorship of much-loved cultural events, [where they] are perpetually bathed in a glow" (349). This loglo helped brands quell the rising activist movement for a while, although something adhered to the boomerang that the brands didn’t foresee.
The loglo is acting as a beacon for activists, luring them out into the fray. To use the same metaphor as Klein, the loglo instigates a “leech-like” reaction, causing the activists to feed off the loglo that was calling them.
The most telling examples that Klein gives of the effectiveness of hitching a ride on the boomerang occurs when labour and human rights groups bring sweatshop workers to America to see what happens with the things they make.
- Nike: an Indonesian Nike worker goes to Nike Town to see that the shoes she made for $2 sell for $120.
The same has happened with Gap seamstresses and a Kathy Lee Gifford seamstress. All of these incidents have been followed by major media coverage, which have led to the investigation of sweatshops by 60 Minutes, 20/20, The New York Times, and even Hard Copy.
Here are a few numerical comparisons that Klein cites to show the disparity working behind the brands.
- 50,000 workers at Nike’s Yue Yen factory in China have to work for nineteen years to earn the equivalent to Nike’s yearly advertising budget.
- Disney CEO Michael Eisner earns $9783 an hour while a Haitian worker earns 28 cents an hour; it would take a Haitian worker 16.8 years to earn Eisner’s hourly income; the 181 million in stock options that Eisner exercised in 1996 is enough to take care of his 19,000 Haitian workers and their families for 14 years.
Other contributing factors in getting the word out about these conditions include the ability to interact globally via the Internet. This in turn allows the word to trickle through the corporate net and into the sweatshops and consumers' homes. It is by causing a distraction that the thrower of the boomerang will miss the catch and hopefully be decapitated in the process.
It was fun hearing comments about No Style. In particular there was a lot of intrigue about the reflection of the coupon book. This got me thinking about the idea of the loglo, and another point that Klein raises: “sweatshopping.” Go shopping and pop into those cute boutiques and trendy fashion outlets and look for labels that tell you the garment was produced in a Cavite Zone. Calculate the cost that you pay and compare it to the amount that the workers who made the article were paid.
Every corporation that has chosen to associate its branding campaign with ideas of social identity has been singled out because "the politics they have associated themselves with, which have made them rich—-feminism, ecology, inner-city empowerment—-were not just random pieces of effective ad copy that their brand managers found lying around" (361). It is through the use of socially sensitive branding and advertising that companies get into trouble when the public becomes aware that the soap that they’re using was tested on rabbits, and the jeans that represent femininity were made by young girls in a third world country. “It is when the advertising teams creatively overreach themselves that—-like Icarus—-they fall" (361).
A Tale of Three Logos: The Swoosh, the Shell and the Arches
This chapter catalogues the most famous three incidents between brands and the public. Klein goes into great detail about the injustices of each brand: the swoosh, the shell, and the arches.
The swoosh was brought into disrepute over its treatment of workers in Vietnam. The workers were being paid 1.60 a day, but the cost of three meals a day was 2.20. There’s a problem. People were rightly outraged and Nike began losing school sponsorships, and more importantly brand cleanliness.
The shell received lots of coverage through its dealings in Nigeria. Not only did it want to sink an oil platform into the ocean rather than pay for its removal on land—-their claim was that it was too costly—-but the government greedily accepted loads of oil-soaked dollars for the exploitation of Ogoni oil reserves. These people still do not have sufficient running water or electricity, despite the $10 billion worth of oil that is produced from their land.
- Sinking the platform would have cost 16 million, disposing of it on land: 70 million. Not that much for a company that has a yearly profit of $128 billion.
The man who took the fall for the fight against Shell is Ken Saro-Wiwa. All he did was speak out about the utilisation of the Nigerian military as a private police force, and the lining of the pockets of the Nigerian president by Shell. For this, Ken Saro-Wiwa was one of the intended subjects of the following memo, leaked from a "security force" of the Nigerian army: "Shell operations still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence...Recommendations: Wasting operations during MOSOP [Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People] and other gatherings making constant military presence justifiable. Wasting targets cutting across communities and leadership cadres especially vocal individuals of various groups" (383). Saro-Wiwa and eight other protesters were arrested and executed for protesting against Shell on November 10, 1995.
The backlash against this action, as with Nike and McDonald's has taken place through the use of the Internet. The court system has become a forum for getting inside the belly of corporations, and the Internet is the venue to, as Klein puts it, shine a McSpotlight on the bad guys. Before the Internet, it would take months for a story to get out about human rights abuses in mines in Africa, whereas now the story can be around the world a number of times in a few hours.
This is a series of chilling tales, although in the end each brand balloon is rightfully popped. The actual popping of each of the three balloons came about via two major outlets: the courts and the Internet. The courts allow activists and the public to force transparency on secretive corporations, and the Internet allows information to bypass traditional media outlets that may be in cahoots with the misappropriating corporations.
Winding down the highway on the way to Duncan, there are three Shell stations, two McDonald’s, and numerous shopping centres where Nike products are for sale. Being a passenger on the way home is like being a passenger of culture: bright lights, motion that goes nowhere, melancholia. There’s only one way home at night: behind the headlights. There’s one way to expose the corrupt underpinnings of a corporation: decentralized cooperative decision-making and united court action, all behind the headlights of the internet to bring home corporate transparency and the de-politicising of brands.
© DEKON! Productions 2004.
Fair Dealing Applies.