No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs by Naomi Klein
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Book Reviews of No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs
Book Review: These corporations sure have some explaining to do!!
Summary: 5 Stars
No Logo takes the reader behind the scenes to the sweatshops of the Philippines and elsewhere, to learn the conditions under which much of our clothing and footwear is made. Author Naomi Klein paints a picture of big brand-oriented corporations from North America and Europe making large profits, while these firms squeeze both the upstream workers -- typically young Asian women putting in 12 hour days at as little as 13 cents an hour - and the downstream clerks at retail, who usually earn little better than minimum wage and, when set up (as they usually are) as part-time staff, are entitled to few if any benefits. Klein alleges that the police and army in many third world countries are co-opted by the multinationals, and are instructed to crush worker dissent and drives for unionization. Free trade zones in China, Mexico, Indonesia and elsewhere are filled with anonymous factories in which workers spend 70 and 90 hours a week sewing designer labels on products that are heavily advertised in the countries whose citizens can afford to buy those products.
Klein, in this well-researched book, describes the growing unrest among activists, consumers, and even city councils and state legislatures in North America and Western Europe, who are increasingly dissatisfied with multinational corporate behavior in respect to poor working conditions and low pay for the factory employees, disregard for the environment in which factories are built, and the pervasive marketing efforts to sell products back home, often to disenfranchised young people in poor urban settings. In particular, Klein relates stories of corporate-citizen clashes that involve Nike, Shell Oil, and McDonald's restaurants. Other companies discussed include Starbucks, Exxon, and Tommy Hilfiger.
In the spirit of Saul Alinsky's landmark book "Rules for Radicals", Klein relates many of the tactics used by anti-corporate movements to shame these firms into behaving more responsibly and, in other cases, to twist the messages that companies deliver for their brands so that the public gets a fuller picture of, say, the poor working conditions suffered by the child labourers in Pakistan making soccer balls for kids in the West.
Persons interested in social justice will want to read this book. The message of No Logo is quite consistent with that of the excellent Canadian documentary "The Corporation", which in turn is based on the book of the same name by Joel Bakan.
Book Review: You are what you eat
Summary: 5 Stars
It took me awhile to get around to reading No Logo, and I have to say I was amply rewarded for the effort. Klein packs a whallop in her narrative as she covers the 80s and 90's corporate world as it switched from a product oriented climate to that of corporate branding with devastating consequences both at home and abroad. She does a great job of covering the terrain, pointing out the greed that permeated the market and the biggest abusers in this high stakes game of branding society.
Probably the most disconcerting chapters are those where she illustrated how deeply these brand names permeated high schools and universities in the 90s, hoping to get to the "ground zero" of their youth market. She notes how schools basically sold their souls to the devil to make up for budget shortfalls brought upon by cuts in education budgets across the country. She also notes how students fought back, as they were sick of being forced to eat this branding in both their cafeterias and the single channel "educational" television programming they got in class.
The book is as much about fighting back as it is about the media onslaught of major corporations to shape the way we think about their brands. She notes various efforts in the US, Britain and Canada to take back the streets, and remaking billboards and Internet ads into trenchant commentaries on the nature of branding.
Perhaps her most searing chapters are those where she ventures into the sweat shops around the world, illustrating the widespread labor abuses of major brands, as they no longer take responsibility for their own products. Instead, a chain of suppliers provide these products at low costs so that the brands can spend more money on branding.
It was an advertiser's heyday in the 90s, especially among 20-somethings as they found themselves to be hot property, with these companies seeking younger markets for their products. She notes the way Nike essentially "branded" Harlem, and how companies like Adidas followed suit when Run DMC's hip hop song about their Adidases became a big hit.
There are holes in her narrative, but not so much that she trips over them as Michael Moore often does. Her research is broad and she tells a compelling story, which is why this book is as relavent today as it was when it was first published in 2000.
Book Review: Worth Reading
Summary: 5 Stars
I figured that this book would be essentially a jeremiad -- inveighing against marketing, advertising, the almighty brand, etc. There was a high potential for claptrap. The book is definitely anti-brand, etc., but it also turned out to be a far more thoughtful, thorough, and well-researched one that I would have guessed. Obviously, Naomi Klein's focus is on the rise of brands. One of the points she makes that I find pretty compelling is that while marketers go all out to make their brands a part of the public consciousness (Nike, Disney, etc.), they have a different point of view when an opponent mocks their brand, and suddenly begin to cry copyright violation, etc. I agree with Klein's point that they can't have it both ways: If a brand is in your face, it's either in the public domain or it isn't. It's either up for grabs, or it should be restricted. Another interesting argument is that companies are now so punch-drunk on brand power that they are literally willing to sacrifice workers and factories in order to devote more resources to brand-building & marketing. That may sound silly, but she has good quotes from CEOs themselves making this argument. On the other hand, when she talks about how big media companies cross-sell their properties and so on, she is believing in the power of synergy more than is warranted. It's easy to quote from companies bragging about how they're going to use "integrated strategies" or whatever to make some brand a huge cultural force. But as often as not those boasts are empty, and the campaign flops, no matter how many "synergies" are in place. "If coffee houses, why not publishing, asks Starbucks." Well, Starbucks' attempt at a magazine failed. Like Klein, they overestimated the power of their brand. Finally, there is Klein's surprising optimism. She believes that the rule of brands is seriously challanged by various forms activism that gathered strength through the 1990s. This is interesting, but not entirely convincing. She acts as though Nike is about to go out of business, but in fact its revenues are even higher today than when this book was published. That said, this is not a thinly argued book -- Klein has done a lot of research, and even if you don't agree with all of her conclusions (as I didn't) you should respect what she has to say.Book Review: The Third World has always existed for the comfort of the First
Summary: 5 Stars
Naomi Klein sketches perfectly the major shift in corporate strategy today: transnational companies are not interested in production anymore, only in branding: products are made in factories, brands in the mind. Branding creates big margins, production in home countries meager earnings.
This strategy causes monstrous layoffs in the First World and creates EPZ (Export Processing Zones) in the Third World.
In the First world, corporations transformed themselves in `engines of wealth growth' for their shareholders, instead of `engines of job growth'. `CEO's of the 30 companies with the largest announced layoffs saw their total compensation increase by 67%.'
The jobs they need are predominantly outsourced, or are McJobs (no `adult wages') and temporary stop-jobs.
The First World stirs fierce competition between Third World countries in order to get rock-bottom prices for their `branded' products, creating colossal margins in the home countries.
Wages in EPZs are so low that most of the money is spent on shared dorm rooms and basic food. Workers cannot afford the consumer goods they produce.
Another aspect of our branded world is the sheer size of the (trans)national corporations created by relentless mergers and acquisitions. Their size permits them to decide what items (also magazines, DVDs) should be stocked in a store, in other words, they create a new kind of censorship.
Big mergers in the media landscape allow conglomerates to produce their own news and in this sense jeopardize basic civil liberties.
While Naomi Klein's analysis of our consumer planet is very revealing, the remedies she proposes are rather innocent, epidermic, symptom healing or too general: ad and brand busting, radical ecology (Reclaim the Streets), anti-globalization and anti-corporate mass protests, boycott, building greater critical social consciousness. Individual actions like attacking in court (Shell in Nigeria), revealing Nike's sweatshops or denouncing McDonald's food are ultimately not more than temporary needle pricks in elephant skins.
What the world needs is a global vision, which we can find in the works of Joseph Stiglitz or (for a view from the South) Walden Bello.
Highly recommended.
Book Review: Globalisaster...
Summary: 5 Stars
Globalisation is a very common word down at the street or in the media these days but you'll find very few in either "location" that can fully tell you what it means or, in the case of the media, are willing to.But globalisation is supposedly our "future" if the plans of the money lords go as envisioned. This might not be very likely actually but that's a different story.
Ever wondered why your DVD player costs only $[money] or why your sneakers cost $[money] or why certain brand clothes also cost cheap? How could that be possible and what does it mean that most of such products (and others you might not be suspecting) are made primarily in Asia? "Respected" companies like Nike or Adidas contract out the manufacturing of their products to factories in Asia where workers work under , often, brutally unhuman conditions, 14 hour shifts, no benefits, and with shameful wages like 28 cents an hour..At the same time these and other companies try to pass out an image at home that tries to convince us how much they respect the "ideal of sport" or other such noble causes when in reality they are cynical exploiters of people all over the world and they dont omit to rip off their customers "at home"..
"No logo" is an exhaustive study of all this. Reading this book wont leave you the same person afterwards, especially if you dont have a very clear picture of all this situation. It will also leave you disgusted and wondering how many of these companies have actually suckered you.
But the most important message of this book goes out to those (and they are many) that say "hey, nothing can be done, you cant take these multinational giants on" and so forth. Not only does it show that a lot can be done but that a LOT has already been done and it demonstrates in detail what organisations in America and in the rest of the world are doing to change this predicament which is nothing short of a direct throw-back to medieval conditions for 1000s of workers around the world while CEOs are laughing at us, the customers, and on their way to the bank.
A must-read is an utter understatement for "No logo".