48 pages • 1 hour read
Naomi KleinNo Logo
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “No Jobs”
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “The Discarded Factory: Degraded Production in the Age of the Superbrand”
In Chapter 9 Klein begins her examination of the economic side of the age of the superbrand. Her specific focus in this chapter is the increased use of low-paid foreign labor by large multinational corporations.
According to Klein, “brand[s] [. . .] have begun to see their work as something that occurs not in conjunction with factory production but in direct competition with it” (195). What this means is that many major companies have divested themselves of the actual process of making their products in order to concentrate on marketing and branding. By shifting labor to cheaper international markets, brands can re-allocate resources from manufacturing to advertising and promotion. The result is the creation of a new global workforce paid in starvation wages and denied basic rights like adequate healthcare, safe working conditions, and union representation.
Klein calls Nike the “prototype for the product-free brand” in that it chose at an early stage to outsource its manufacturing to foreign subcontractors in Japan (198). A bevy of other companies, from Nike competitors Reebok and Vans to Sara Lee and Levi’s, have since followed suit (198-202). Klein then moves on to examine the central vehicle of this radical change in the corporate world: the so-called free trade zones (FTZs) and export processing zones (EPZs) that superabound in countries like Mexico, China, Vietnam, and the Philippines (202).
As part of an effort to spur international development, FTZs and EPZs were created in the 1960s as tax- and tariff-free areas in which wealthy nations could invest in cheap labor abroad (205). Instead of falling under the purview of local and national governments, special entities and institutions often police and administer these entities, creating “a kind of legal and economic set of brackets, apart from the rest of their countries” (207). Though initially concentrated in a small number of emerging global economies like South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, FTZs and ETZs have expanded to at least 70 nations (205, 208-09). This wider competition among FTZs and ETZs has incentivized subcontractors to hold down wages, working standards, and worker rights in order to keep labor costs as low as possible.
In September 1997, Klein arrived at the Cavite Export Processing Zone in Rosario, Philippines, as part of her research for No Logo (202-10). Klein presents Cavite as a paradigmatic case study in FTZs and EPZs. Cavite employs mostly young women from the countryside of the Philippines who are lured into the FTZ with promises of good, stable jobs (219-21). As Klein reports, this is an illusion. Union organizing is strictly prohibited (212-14), while starvation wages, forced overtime, worker exhaustion to the point of death, and dangerous discrimination against pregnant workers are all commonplace (210-12, 215-17, 222-23). Because multinational corporations can easily sever ties with factory subcontractors and move production to another market, the threat of job loss among workers is pervasive, and all employment is accordingly short-term and precarious (226).
For Klein, the upshot is that a brand can reap huge profits from a disenfranchised global labor force for which it has no genuine responsibility. “If anything,” she writes, “the multinationals have more power over production by not owning the factories” (226). She concludes: “This is not a job-flight story. ““It is a flight-from-jobs story” in which livable employment is evaporating worldwide (229).
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “Threats and Temps: From Working for Nothing to ‘“Free Agent Nation’““
This chapter focuses on recent structural changes to the labor market in advanced economies like the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Although Klein admits that conditions for these workers are not nearly as dire as those described in Chapter 9, she claims that “there is an undeniable pattern at work” that unites the two (238).
As Klein notes, even if large corporations can outsource production to cheap, faraway labor markets like Mexico, China, or southeast Asia, a significant portion of work remains to be done at home. Accordingly, the decline in manufacturing employment in the United States in the decades preceding No Logo corresponded to a sharp increase in the role of the service industry (232). By 1997, service and retail made up the majority of jobs in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada (235).
This shift in employment patterns in developing nations has created new trends in the nature of work. Service and retail jobs at places like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Walmart “are notoriously unstable, low-paying and overwhelmingly part-time” (232). As in the FTZs and EPZs, companies go to great lengths to ensure that the workforce remains underpaid, young, part-time (even if working close to a full-time schedule), and non-unionized (232-45). This allows the big brands to focus their resources on profits, further expansion, and handsome CEO salaries (239-40, 255-57). Even supposedly lucrative positions in the tech industry, at companies like Microsoft, are increasingly temporary and lower paying compared to similar full-time work (249-52).
Although some people, like Klein herself, are employed in specialized industries (i.e., journalism) in which temporary and freelance work can be advantageous, for the vast majority of workers, part-time status translates to lower salaries and minimal job security (252-55).
Klein closes the chapter by raising the notion that such cutthroat employment tactics on the part of major corporations have given rise to formidable opposition, the focus of the Chapter 11.
Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary: “Breeding Disloyalty: What Goes Around, Comes Around”
In Chapter 11 Klein brings together the economic analyses of the previous two chapters in order to explain the rise of the “new kind of anticorporate politics” that she details in Part 4 of the book“”.
For Klein, the nature of work has fundamentally changed since the economic recession of the early 1990s. While large, multinational corporations once presented themselves as “engines of job growth,” these businesses are now comfortable describing themselves as engines of economic growth (261). In other words, the pursuit of wealth and profit has been uncoupled from the creation of jobs, so that “labor is increasingly treated by the corporate sector as an unavoidable burden, like paying income tax” (262). The result is that major companies, such as Microsoft, seek to reduce their obligations to full-time employees by increasing their reliance on lower-paid, temporary workers (270-71). Even though the unemployment rate in the United States fell sharply during the economic recovery of the mid-to-late 1990s, the number of workers with permanent jobs decreased (264-65, 273-74).
According to Klein, the rise in part-time and casual labor has meant greater returns for corporations but deeper economic inequality overall (262-64). The “silver lining” in this situation is that an entire generation of young workers sees long-term employment at a major corporation as either unrealistic or undesirable (271, 274-75). Klein argues that this anticorporate attitude, fostered by the broad economic decisions of corporations worldwide, provides the seeds for a new political movement.
Part 3 Analysis
As Klein notes in the Introduction to No Logo, the aim of Part 3 “”is to analyze “the labor market trends that are creating increasingly tenuous relationships to employment for many workers, including self-employment, McJobs and outsourcing, as well as part-time and temp labor” (xxiii). This “assault on [. . .] employment,” she says, is at the foundation of the growing anticorporate reaction that she will examine in the fourth and final segment of the book“”.
Klein divides the economic argument of “No Jobs” into international (Chapter 9) and domestic (Chapter 10) analyses. At the same time, her primary thesis in this section is that employment all over the world is in the process of being radically reshaped by the forces of modern globalization.
In terms of international labor, Klein outlines the pattern of outsourcing, in which major corporations are increasingly reliant on cheap workers in developing nations to buttress their profits. The central cells of this re-organization of the global workforce, free trade zones (FTZs) and export processing zones (EPZs), are designed to encourage foreign investment in poorer countries through generous tax breaks and lax enforcement of national labor standards. As Klein recounts, FTZs and EPZs are typically made up of an assortment of independent factories that accept production contracts from labor subcontractors on behalf of faraway multinational businesses. The result is that workers in anonymous, unbranded factories assemble goods for a variety of familiar global brands, from Nike sneakers and Old Navy Jeans to IBM computers (203). This complete separation of the corporation from the actual creation of its products allows for the largest possible profits alongside the least possible responsibility to workers.
As more production and manufacturing migrates overseas, jobs in the wealthy home nations of the biggest brands and businesses are becoming less stable and lower paying. “”In the developed world, manufacturing jobs are being replaced by the retail and service sectors. These jobs, Klein argues, are more likely to be part-time or temporary, non-unionized, and underpaying. The employer/employee relation is no longer the classic 20th-century model embodied by Henry Ford, who professed to pay his workers well enough that they could afford to buy the very vehicles that they made. Instead, a large segment of the workforce in wealthy nations like the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada are stuck in low-wage positions with minimal job security and little hope of advancement. As Richard L. Flanagan, president of the now-defunct Borders Books chain wrote in 1997 in the middle of a labor dispute, the notion of increasing the hourly wage of his employees “is romantically appealing,” but “it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment” (239).
Klein notes that a rising number of people all over the world are growing discontented with the trajectory of corporate globalization. The rest of No Logo looks at their efforts to fight back.
Related Titles
By Naomi Klein
