Naomi
Klein, born in Canada in 1970, is a Toronto-based journalist and regular
television commentator. She is one of the most prominent opponents of
globalization, which she views as a disastrous process for the individual,
especially in developing countries. For her, multinational corporations are to
be blamed for worldwide exploitation and degradation, child labour and work in
sweat shops (underpaid jobs under primitive conditions). She voices her
opinions in a weekly column in Canada's leading newspaper, The Toronto Globe
& Mail. Her column has recently been syndicated worldwide in the
British newspaper The Guardian. Her book No Logo has been
translated into many languages, and its title has become a veritable slogan for
all those attacking the power of multinational corporations. The London Times
recently declared her to be one of the most influential persons below the
age of 35 years. The following passage from No Logo first describes her
general attitude towards the multinationals; the second part (from line 35)
gives an instance of exploitation of workers in the industrial zone of Cavite
near Rosaria on the Philippines. - Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York:
Picador, 20Q0). xvii, 203f.
Usually, reports about this global web of logos and products are couched
in the euphoric marketing rhetoric of the global village, an incredible place,
where tribespeople in remotest rain forests tap away on laptop computers,
Sicilian grandmothers conduct E-business, and "global teens" share,
to borrow a phrase from a Levi's Web site, "a world-wide style
culture". Everyone from Coke to McDonald's to Motorola has tailored their
marketing strategy around this post-national vision, but it is IBM's
long-running "Solutions for a Small Planet" campaign that most
eloquently captures the equalizing promise of the logo-linked globe.
This is a village where some multinationals, far from leveling the
global playing field with jobs and technology for all, are in the process of
mining the planet's poorest back country for unimaginable profits. This is the
village where Bill Gates lives, amassing a fortune of $ 55 billion while a
third of his workforce is classified as temporary workers, and where
competitors are either incorporated into the Microsoft monolith or made
obsolete by the latest feat in software bundling. This is the village where we
are indeed connected to one another through a web of brands, but the underside
of that web reveals designer slums like the one I visited outside Jakarta. IBM
claims that its technology spans the globe, and so it does, but often its
international presence takes the form of cheap Third World labor producing the
computer chips and power sources that drive our machines. On the outskirts of
Manila, for instance, I met a seventeen-year old girl who assembles CD-ROM
drives for IBM. I told her I was impressed that someone so young could do such
high-tech work. "We make computers," she told me, "but we don't
know how to operate computers." Ours, it would seem, is not such a small
planet after all.
Windowless workshops made of cheap plastic and aluminium siding are
crammed in next to each other, only feet apart. Racks of time cards bake in the
sun, making sure the maximum amount of work is extracted from each worker, the
maximum number of working hours extracted from each day. The streets in the
zone are eerily empty, and open doors - the ventilation system for most
factories - reveal lines of young women hunched in silence over clamoring
machines.
In other parts of the world, workers live inside the economic zones, but
not in Cavite: this is a place of pure work. All the bustle and color of Rosano
abruptly stops at the gates, where workers must show their ID cards to armed
guards in order to get inside. Visitors are rarely permitted.
Inside the gates, factory workers assemble the finished products of our
branded world: Nike running shoes, Gap pajamas, IBM computer screens, Old Navy
jeans. But their names and logos aren't splashed on the facades of the
factories in the industrial zone.
Logo (n.): a small design that is the official sign of a company or
organization - couch (v.):
(formal) to be expressed in a particular way -
euphoric marketing rhetoric: very optimistic usage of language in
favour of the market - remotest (adj.): very remote, far away - conduct
(v.): do, perform - eloquently
(adv.): expressing ideas and plans well -
capture (v.): catch - equalize
(v.): to make two or more things the same in size, value, amount etc. - mine (v.): (here) search and remove
- classify (v.): to regard
people or things as belonging to a particular group because they have similar
qualities - competitor (n.): rival -
incorporate (v.): make part of - monolith (n.): a large, powerful organization that cannot
change quickly - obsolete
(adj.): no longer useful - feat in software bundling: progress or trick
in providing computer software and sometimes other equipment or services that
are included with a new computer at no extra cost - span (v.): to include the whole of it - Manila:
capital of the Philippines - assemble
(v.): put together - workshop
(n.): a room or building where tools and machines are used for making or
repairing things - siding (n.):
(AE) long, narrow pieces of wood, metal, or plastic, used for covering the
outside walls of houses - crammed
in (v.): squeezed in - rack (n.): a frame or shelf that has bars or
hooks on which you can put things - time card: a piece of card on which
the hours you have worked are recorded by a special machine - extract (v.): to remove from, get
from - eerie (adj.): strange and
frightening - hunched: bent over
- clamor (v.): make a loud noise
- branded (adj.): (ambivalent
usage) belonging to a brand, (past participle) burn a mark onto something - splash
(v.): to make someone or something wet with a lot of small drops of water or
other liquid.