No Logo

In Part 3 of No Logo, “No Jobs,” Klein argues that the recent transition in corporate strategy from the production of commodities to the production of brand imaging is predicated upon economic trends facilitated by the course of globalization in the latter half of the 20th century.

By drawing more and more nations into the ambit of global capitalism through logistical and technological advances and free trade agreements, developed economies were able to utilize untapped workforces in the developing world, especially in Asia and Latin America. Corporations in North America and Europe could thereby move production to cheap labor markets abroad in order to lower costs and beat out competitors. The specific mechanism of doing so, free trade zones (FTZs) and export processing zones (EPZs), provide tax- and tariff-free areas in which national labor standards are often unenforced. Subcontractors keep worker wages as low as possible in order to win production contracts from Western brands ranging from Nike and Adidas to Philips and IBM. 

The transformation of countries like China, Thailand, and Mexico into global workshops corresponds to the decline of manufacturing in places like the United States. Skilled, well-paid, unionized jobs have become scarce and have been replaced with lower-paying, occasional work in the growing retail and service sector, embodied by companies like Walmart and McDonald’s. Though written nearly 20 years ago, the global economic trends described in No Logo continue to affect our present economic and political context.

For Klein, workers in both developed and developing economies bear the brunt of the seismic shift in labor relations that have accompanied modern globalization. The free flow of investment capital from North America and Europe to the rest of the world has translated into higher corporate profits and lower dividends for workers. This is the foundation for the anticorporate activism that Klein examines in Part 4. “”

The eponymous fourth part of No Logo is the largest segment of the book and consequently its most important. Klein claims that the political implications of Parts 1-3 of the text are what originally motivated her to write No Logo, so it is no surprise that anticorporate activism is a central theme.

Over the course of seven chapters (Chapters 12-18), Klein introduces the reader to various activist tactics that take aim at modern corporations. What unites these seemingly disparate activities—adbusting, hacking, street parties, local politics, and international boycotts—is a shared recognition that large, multinational companies are the new locus of power at the cusp of the 21st century., Klein argues that although the initiatives have not been equally effective, the various oppositional responses to the labor and environmental practices of groups as different as Nike and Royal Dutch/Shell indicate a rising public awareness about the deleterious consequences of outsized corporate influence. Given the organizational potential of the internet, Klein is optimistic that the diffuse forms of anticorporate sentiment may coalesce into a truly international movement.

This faith in nascent grassroots initiatives corresponds to a palpable skepticism regarding traditional institutions like the nation-state and existing international bodies like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. As Klein rounds out her argument in No Logo, it becomes clear that she sees a radical break with the political status quo as the best means to meaningful anticorporate resistance. Accordingly, she emphasizes developments like the Seattle WTO protests in 1999 and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, in the Afterword to No Logo from 2002. Another pertinent example would be the various Occupy demonstrations that sprung up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. For Klein, these alternative forms of political protest and organization offer hopeful models of struggle from which future activists can draw inspiration.