No Logo 10th Anniversary Edition by Naomi Klein

Author:Naomi Klein [Klein, Naomi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36631-3
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2000-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

The Shoppers Take Flight

The fear that the flighty multinationals will once again pull their orders and migrate to more favorable conditions underlies everything that takes place in the zones. It makes for an odd dissonance: despite the fact that they have no local physical holdings —they don’t own the buildings, land or equipment —brands like Nike, the Gap and IBM are omnipresent, invisibly pulling all the strings. They are so powerful as buyers that the hands-on involvement owning the factories would entail has come to look, from their perspective, like needless micromanagement. And because the actual owners and factory managers are completely dependent on their large contracts to make the machines run, workers are left in a uniquely weak bargaining position: you can’t sit down and bargain with an order form. So even the classic Marxist division between workers and owners doesn’t quite work in the zone, since the brand-name multinationals have divested the “means of production,” to use Marx’s phrase, unwilling to encumber themselves with the responsibilities of actually owning and managing the factories, and employing a labor force.

If anything, the multinationals have more power over production by not owning the factories. Like most committed shoppers, they see no need to concern themselves with how their bargains were produced —they simply pounce on them, keeping the suppliers on their toes by taking bids from slews of other contractors. One contractor, Young Il Kim of Guatemala, whose Sam Lucas factory produces clothing for Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney, says of his big-brand clients, “They’re interested in a high-quality garment, fast delivery, and cheap sewing charges —and that’s all.”55 In this cutthroat context, each contractor swears he could deliver the goods cheaper if the brands would only start producing in Africa, Vietnam or Bangladesh, or if they would shift to homeworkers.

More blatantly, the power of the brands may occasionally be invoked to affect public policy in the countries where export zones are located. Companies or their emissaries may make public statements about how a raise in the legal minimum wage could price a certain Asian country “out of the market,” as Nike’s and Reebok’s contractors have been quick to tell the Indonesian government whenever strikes get out of hand.56 Calling a strike at a Nike factory “intolerable,” Anton Supit, chairman of the Indonesian Footwear Association, which represents contractors for Nike, Reebok and Adidas, called on the Indonesian military to intervene. “If the authorities don’t handle strikes, especially ones leading to violence and brutality, we will lose our foreign buyers. The government’s income from exports will decrease and unemployment will worsen.”57 The corporate shoppers may also help draft international trade agreements to reduce quotas and tariffs, or even lobby a government directly to loosen regulations. In describing the conditions under which Nike decided to begin “sourcing” its shoes in China, for instance, company vice president David Chang explained that “one of the first things we told the Chinese was that their prices had to be more competitive with our other Far East sources because the cost of doing business in China was so enormous….

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