No Logo

The scene of a modern sweatshop—young, mostly female workers performing repetitive factory labor in cramped, dirty hovels over egregiously long hours and for low pay—looms large in No Logo. This motif comes into focus in Chapter 9, “The Discarded Factory,” Klein’s main account of life for workers in the EPZs and FTZs of the developing world, but it remains a fixture throughout the book. As she argues in Chapter 14, the link between sweatshop labor and certain major brands that emerged in the 1990s helped to catalyze anticorporate activism and bring the issue to a newfound prominence in the public eye.

As Klein points out, what we now think of as sweatshops have a long history in developed economies like the United States. The 1993 Kader Toy Factory fire in Thailand that claimed the lives of 188 workers is an echo of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company incident in New York that killed 146 people (332). While we may think that abysmal workplaces like Triangle have been eradicated by social and economic reforms, one of Klein’s main arguments in No Logo is that sweatshops have simply been removed from our sight, to Latin America and Asia, where many of our most familiar consumer products continue to be made. The sweatshop is thus a powerful rhetorical image for illustrating the unseemly economic underbelly of modern globalization.    

The sweatshop into another important aspect of No Logo: worker organization. Klein puts a lot of emphasis on the Worker’s Assistance Center (WAC) in Rosario, Philippines—a small but dedicated unit of labor activists working to improve conditions in the nearby Cavite Export Processing Zone. Klein argues that with the rise of the internet as an educational and communications tool, it is easier than ever to become informed about places like Cavite and initiatives like the WAC. Coordination between consumers and producers facilitates the efforts of the latter at autonomous organizing. There is thus an important practical upshot to the focus on labor conditions emblematized by the motif of the sweatshop in No Logo.   

A key symbol of Chapter 7, “Mergers and Synergy,” is the flagship store for companies like Nike, Sony, and Barnes & Noble. Klein argues that these palatial retail locations, pioneered by the introduction of the Disney Store in the 1980s, operate as a new kind of experiential advertisement. Rather than merely physical spaces for the purchase of a product, flagship stores function as “privatized public utopias” that further reinforce the emotional and psychological power of a brand over its customers (158).

Although the 2009 closure of one of Klein’s main examples of the superstore phenomenon, the Virgin Megastore located in Times Square in New York City, was widely heralded as evidence of the death of traditional retail, these spaces have not entirely disappeared (150). The best current example is probably the Apple Store, which has become a sort of temple to the technology company and its unique, minimalist aesthetic. While so-called brick-and-mortar locations are slowly dying out in the 21st century, flagship stores and elaborate in-person shopping experiences continue to proliferate.

For Klein, the extension of a corporation into a luxurious, branded dreamscape serves to solidify its colonization of mental and physical space. This also applies to other examples of experiential branding mentioned in Chapter 7, such as Disney theme parks and the Roots Lodge. These manifestations of corporate wealth and messaging dramatically underscore the outsized role of major companies in our society.