No Logo

I didn't read No Logo when it first came out because I was already a no logo kind of girl. It was worth reading though because she fleshed out the whole sweatshop situation for me. After spending the first few chapters describing how companies have gone from making products to advertising them to branding and now focus only on creating an image, she describes how the whole sweatshop issue is a result of companies getting rid of their own factories and searching for the cheapest labor to assemble their products.

Contractors compete with each other to get those everyday low prices for them. This created what were basically indoor work camps, all over Asia, enclosed in walled compounds that were protected from local taxes in an effort to lure the big name "investors". These "export processing zones" or "free trade zones" are impenetrable to outsiders and short on inspectors. The labor, usually teenage girls and young women, are kept intimidated to discourage labor unions from forming. So what we're talking about here is a structural component of globalization. Countries compete with each other for the big brand name investors so they grant the foreign investor immunity from their own laws regarding minimum wage and conditions, while inspectors turned a blind eye to violations of safety and overtime claiming those to be a management problem. Brand name companies don't have to face the conditions they have created until activists force them to.

Klein asked the same question posed by Travels Of A T-shirt in which the author claims that such factory work is preferable to working on the farm. This was also a statement made by one of the factory owners. The girls are outraged by this assumption and point out that it is just a justification given by those who employ them. One said she missed her family and wished she was at home with them because at least when she was sick there would be someone to take care of her. And they only make enough money to cover expenses so they have little opportunity to either help their family or improve their own lives. Klein gained access to the factories by sneaking into one of the compounds. The author of the t-shirt book was invited into a factory by the owner, so there are factories and there are factories. As I learned from the Green Festival, activists have now established fair trade guidelines and factories that comply to their guidelines can register as a fair trade factory.

Klein also gave me insight into what happened to activism when it got mired in identity politics. She herself was in college fighting for women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, etc. as was I. The problem was that the politics became all about equal representation in the media and equal opportunity for jobs. The equal representation part was co-opted by advertisers looking for niche markets while the equal opportunity for jobs became all about access for middle class women and minorities. Everyone forgot all about the poor and the class system that made sure the poor would remain poor. My complaint was that gay rights had become all about rights for gay people who could present as nearly identical to straight white married upper middle-class people. And women's rights had become all about getting women into the CEO's office while neglecting them at the welfare mom level.

She points out how activists narrowed down their focus, but that there's been a come back as students came to understand that the shirt on their backs was made by their peers in sweatshop conditions and began to protest globalization. Her book predates the WTO protest in Seattle, so she was on the pulse. In the end she acknowledges that there is a limit to activism focused on brand names, while the bigger damage is being done by companies that extract resources and aren't household names.