If you feel a small pin prick in your conscience every time you see "made in China" on a toy or "made in Indonesia" on your trainers, then according to Naomi Klein you are part of a growing global awareness that the shiny goods made by multinationals are often produced on the backs of low paid, grossly exploited workers.
Klein is an anti-corporate activist and a journalist and her engaging and lively book, No Logo, explores the way multinationals work, particularly in the garment and sportswear sectors, and how activists are forcing companies to be more transparent and fair in their dealings with their mostly Asian suppliers. The strength of her book lies in her research and in the countless examples she details of the disparity between brand image and the manufacturing process. Toys made by workers that are no more than children themselves, and well-known designer clothes made in sweatshop conditions by workers who could work for a full month and still not be able to afford the Tshirt they have just made.
She looks particularly closely at the sportswear giant, Nike, who throughout the 1980s and 1990s built up one of the world's biggest brand names only to see it seriously undermined, thanks to several exposes of its manufacturing processes. In 1998, Nike's charismatic CEO, Phil Knight, finally admitted that his shoes "have become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse". It was a shocking admission. After all, Nike is held up as the great example of successful marketing, the brand builder that companies all around the world strive to emulate. Through advertising and sponsorship it took the humble running shoe off the track and brought it onto the streets, creating a brand image that was so cool and covetable that kids were literally willing to kill for them. From the number crunchers' point of view the beauty for the company is that it isn't weighed down with all the cost and responsibility of traditional manufacturing techniques simply because Nike doesn't own any factories.
Every single product is out-sourced in countries where wages are low by US standards and workers' rights are limited. At the time of Knight's public admission, workers in one Indonesian factory producing $100 trainers were being paid 80 cents an hour. Activists pressed Nike to double the wages at a cost to the company of $20 million, exactly what Michael Jordan is paid per year to promote Nike. Instead the workers got a small raise and the company bowed its corporate head and vowed to develop "an aggressive corporate responsibility".
Nike is not alone. Klein paints a grim image of profit-motivated multinationals treating the world as a giant shopping mall, going from country to country looking for the best labour bargains without any sense of social or environmental responsibility. She describes a world where everything is branded or sponsored, from water to universities and rightly points out that we have reached such a point of corporate dependency that we can't imagine any event taking place without a corporate sponsor.
Books by activists can so easily become leaden polemics but Klein is engaging as well as informative, while giving a broad cultural perspective. With her tongue firmly in her cheek she admits that anti-multinational activism is now so fashionable that it was to the 1990s what saving the whale was to the 1980s, and she acknowledges the irony of an anti-corporate book being published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollins - itself part of a multinational. She has written an admittedly one-sided book that's as persuasive as any advertisement, which will cause readers to feel more than a little uncomfortable about our logo-driven world.
Bernice Harrison is a journalist and writes the Advertising and Marketing column for The Irish Times
