an oldy, but a goody

[Guest guest]

Yes, McLibel is by now probably a well worn story - but any opportunity to

roll it out one more time sounds like a good idea to us cos it's such a

good one! So here for your own delictation is a story of rickety PC's, not

enough chairs and some seriously soiled golden arches as told by a certain

Naomi Klein a one time " dedicated mall rat, fixated on designer labels "

turned " author of a life-changing book on anti-corporatism and the new

politics " ... no less.

 

McSpotlight

(Re)reading this excerpt brought many a tear to many an eye we can tell you.

 

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The Arches: The Fight for Choice

From " No Logo " by Naomi Klein

http://www.nologo.org

http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/books/klein.html

 

 

At the same time that the anti-Shell campaigns broke out, the McLibel

Trial, in the docket for a few years already, was turning into an

international situation. In June 1995 (the same month that Brent Spar

erupted) McLibel was coming up to its first anniversary in court, when the

two defendants, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, whom McDonald's had sued for

libel, held a press conference outside the London courthouse. They

announced that McDonald's had made a settlement offer to them. The company

would donate money to a cause of Steel and Morris's choice; the two

outspoken environmentalists on trial would stop criticizing McDonald's; and

everyone would leave the whole messy nightmare behind them.

 

Steel and Morris defiantly refused the offer. Why should they give in now?

From the perspective of a company trying to stem the flow of negative

publicity, the McLibel Trial æ clearly designed to gag and bankrupt Steel

and Morris æ had been an epic public-relations disaster. But it had done

almost as much for vegetarianism as Mad Cow disease, had certainly done

more to raise the issue of labour conditions in the McJob sector than any

union drive, and had sparked a more profound debate about corporate

censorship than any other free-speech case in recent memory.

 

The pamphlet at the centre of the suit was first published in 1986 by

London Greenpeace, a splinter group of Greenpeace International (which the

hard-core Londoners deemed too centralized and mainstream for their

tastes). It was an early case study in using a single brand name to connect

the dots among every topic on the social agenda: rainforest depletion (to

raise the cattle), Third World poverty (forcing peasants off their farms to

make way for export crops and McDonald's livestock needs), animal cruelty

(in treatment of the livestock), waste production (disposable packaging and

litter), health (fried fatty foods), poor labour conditions (low wages and

union-busting in the McJob sector) and exploitative advertising (in

McDonald's target marketing to children).

 

But the truth is, McLibel was never really about the pamphlet. In many

ways, the case against McDonald's is less compelling than the one against

Nike and Shell, both of which are driven by hard evidence of large-scale

human suffering. With McDonald's the evidence was less direct and, in some

ways, the issues more dated. The concern about litter-producing fast-food

restaurants reached its peak in the late-eighties and London Greenpeace's

campaign against the company clearly came from the standpoint of

meat-is-murder vegetarianism: a valid perspective, but one for which there

is a limited political constituency. What made McLibel take off as a

campaign on par with the ones targeting Nike and Shell was not what the

fast-food chain did to cows, forests or even its own workers. The McLibel

movement took off because of what McDonald's did to Helen Steel and Dave

Morris.

 

Franny Armstong, who produced a documentary about the trial, points out

that Britain's libel law was changed in 1993 " so that governmental bodies

such as local councils are no longer able to sue for libel. This was to

protect people's right to criticize public bodies. Multinationals are fast

becoming more powerful than governments æ and even less accountable æ so

shouldn't the same rules apply? With advertising budgets in the billions,

it's not as though they need to turn to the law to ensure their point of

view is heard. " In other words, for many of its supporters, Steel and

Morris's case was less about the merits of fast food than about the need to

protect freedom of speech in a climate of mounting corporate control. If

Brent Spar was about loss of space, and Nike was about the loss of good

jobs, then McLibel was about loss of choice æ it was about corporate

censorship.

 

When McDonald's issued libel writs against five Greenpeace activists in

1990 over the contents of the now notorious leaflet, three members of the

group did what most people would do when faced with the prospect of going

up against an $11-billion corporation: they apologized. The company had a

long and successful history with this strategy. According to the Guardian:

" Over the past 15 years, McDonald's has threatened legal action against

more than 90 organizations in the U.K., including the BBC, Channel 4, the

Guardian, the Sun, the Scottish TUC, the New Leaf Tea Shop, student

newspapers and a children's theatre group. Even Prince Philip received a

stiff letter. All of them backed down and many formally apologised in court. "

But Helen Steel and Dave Morris made another choice. They used the trial to

launch a seven-year experiment in riding the golden arches around the

global economy. For 313 days in court æ the longest trial in English

history æ an unemployed postal worker (Morris) and a community gardener

(Steel) went to war with chief executives from the largest food chain in

the world.

 

Over the course of the trial, Steel and Morris meticulously

elaborated every one of the pamphlet's claims, with the assistance of

nutritional and environment experts and scientific studies. With 180

witnesses called to the stand, the company faced dozens of humiliating

moments as the court heard stories of food poisoning, failure to pay legal

overtime, bogus recycling claims, and corporate spies sent to infiltrate

the ranks of London Greenpeace. In one particularly telling incident,

McDonald's executives were challenged on the company's claim that it serves

" nutritious food " : David Green, senior vice-president of marketing,

expressed his opinion that Coca-Cola is nutritious because it is " providing

water, and I think that is part of a balanced diet. " In another

embarrassing exchange, McDonald's executive Ed Oakley explained to Steel

that the McDonald's garbage stuffed into landfills is " a benefit, otherwise

you will end up with lots of vast empty gravel pits all over the country. "

 

On June 19, 1997 the judge finally handed down the verdict. The courtroom

was packed with an odd assortment of corporate executives, pink-haired

vegan anarchists and rows of journalists. It felt like an eternity to most

of us sitting there, as Judge Rodger Bell read out his 45-page ruling æ a

summary of the actual verdict which was over 1,000 pages long. Although the

judge deemed most of the pamphlet's claims too hyperbolic to be acceptable

(he was particularly unconvinced by its direct linking of McDonald's to

" hunger in the 'Third World' " ), he deemed others to be based on pure fact.

Among the decisions that went in Steel and Morris' favor were: that

McDonald's " exploit(s) children " by " using them, as more susceptible

subjects of advertising; " that its treatment of some animals has been

" cruel; " that it is anti-union and pays " low wages; " that its management

can be " autocratic " and " most unfair; " and that a consistent diet of

McDonald's food contributes to the risk of heart disease. Steel and Morris

were ordered to pay damages to McDonald's in the amount of (U.S.) $95,490.

But in March 1999, an appeals court judge found that Judge Bell had been

overly harsh and sided more forcefully with Steel and Morris on the claims

" concerning nutrition and health risks and on the allegations about pay and

conditions for McDonald's employees. " Still finding that that claims about

food poisoning, cancer and world poverty were unproven, the court

nonetheless lowered the amount of damages to $61,300. McDonald's has never

tried its settlement and has decided not to apply for an injunction to halt

the further dissemination of the leaflet.

 

After the first verdict, McDonald's was quick to declare victory,

but few were convinced. " Not since Pyrrhus has a victor emerged so

bedraggled, " read The Guardian's editorial the next day. " ...As P.R.

fiascos go, this action takes the prize for ill-judged and disproportionate

response to public criticism. " In fact, while all this had been going on,

the original pamphlet had gathered the cachet of a collector's item, with

3-million copies distributed in the U.K alone. John Vidal had published his

critically acclaimed book McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial; 60 Minutes had

produced a lengthy segment about the trial; England's Channel 4 had run a

three-hour dramatization of it; and Franny Armstrong's documentary,

" McLibel: Two Worlds Collide " had made the rounds on the independent film

circuit (having been turned down, ironically, by every major broadcaster

for libel concerns).

 

For Helen Steel, Dave Morris and their active supporters, McLibel was never

about winning in court æ it was about using the courts to win over the

public. And judging by the crowds outside the McDonald's outlets two days

after the verdict came down, they had every the right to be declaring

victory. Standing outside their neighborhood McDonald's outlet in North

London on a Saturday afternoon, Steel and Morris can barely keep up with

the demand for ``What's wrong with McDonald's?,'' the leaflet that started

it all. Passersby are requesting copies, drivers are pulling over to get

their McLibel mementos, and mothers with toddlers are stopping to tell

Helen Steel how difficult it is for a busy parent when her child demands

unhealthy food æ what can a mother do?

 

Across the United Kingdom, a similar scene is playing itself out. More than

500 McDonald's outlets were simultaneously picketed on June 21, 1997, along

with 30 outlets in North America. As with the Nike protests, every event is

different. At one British franchise, the community put on a street

performance featuring an ax-wielding Ronald McDonald, a cow and lots of

ketchup. At another, people passed out free vegetarian food. At all the

McDonald's restaurants, supporters handed out the infamous leaflet: 400,000

copies on that weekend alone. ``They were flying out of their hands,'' says

Dan Mills of the McLibel Support Campaign, amused at the irony: before

McDonald's decided to sue, London Greenpeace's campaign was winding down

and only a few hundred copies of the contentious leaflet had ever been

distributed. It is now translated into 26 languages and is whipping around

cyberspace.

 

It's a good bet that many brand-name giants besides McDonald's have paid

close attention to the goings on in that British courtroom. In 1996, Guess

dropped a libel suit against the L.A. women's group, Common Threads, which

the company had launched in response to a poetry reading about the plight

of garment workers sewing Guess jeans. Similarly, though Nike consistently

accuses its critics of fabrication, it has stayed away from trying to clear

its name in court. And no wonder: the courtroom is the only place where

private corporations are forced to pry open shuttered windows and let the

public gaze shine in.

 

As Helen Steel and Dave Morris, write:

If companies do choose to use oppressive laws against their critics then

court cases do not have to only be about legal procedures and verdicts.

They can be turned into a public forum and focus for protest, and for the

wider dissemination of the truth. This is what happened with McLibel...

Maybe for the first time in history, a powerful institution (it just

happened to be a fast-food chain, but in some ways could've been any

financial organization or state department) was subject to lengthy,

detailed and critical public scrutiny. That can only be a good thing!

 

The message has not been lost on Steel and Morris' fellow activists around

the world; everyone who followed McLibel saw how effective a long, dramatic

trial could be at building up a body of evidence and stoking sentiment

against a corporate opponent. Some campaigners are even too impatient to

wait to be sued themselves and are taking their corporate opponents to

court instead. For instance, in January 1999, when U.S. labour activists

decided they wanted to draw attention to the ongoing sweatshop violations

in the U.S. territory of Saipan, they launched an unconventional lawsuit in

California court against 17 American retailers, including the Gap and Tommy

Hilfiger. The suit, filed on behalf of thousands of Saipan garment workers,

accuses the brand-name retailers and manufacturers of participating in a

" racketeering conspiracy " in which young women from South East Asia are

lured to Saipan with promises of well paying jobs in the United States.

What they get instead is wage cheating and " America's worst sweatshop, " in

the words of Al Meyerhoff, lead attorney on the case. A companion lawsuit

further alleges that by labeling goods from Saipan " Made in the U.S.A " or

" Made in the Northern Marianas, U.S.A., " the companies are engaging in

false advertising, leaving customers with the impression that the

manufacturers were subject to U.S. labour laws, when they were not.

 

Meanwhile, the Center for Constitutional Rights has taken a similar tack

with Royal Dutch/Shell, filing a federal lawsuit against the company in a

New York court on the first anniversary on Ken Saro-Wiwa's death. According

to the Center's David A. Love, " The suit æ filed on behalf of Ken Saro Wiwa

and the other Ogoni activists who were executed by Nigeria's military

regime in November 1995 æ alleges that the executions were carried out with

'the knowledge, consent, and/or support' of Shell Oil. " It further alleges

that the hangings were part of a conspiracy " to violently and ruthlessly

suppress any opposition to Royal Dutch/Shell's conduct in its exploitation

of oil and natural gas resources in Ogoni and in the Niger Delta. " Shell

denies the charges and is challenging the legitimacy of the suit. At the

time of writing, neither the Saipan case not the Shell case had been settled.

 

If the courts are becoming a popular tool to pry open closed corporations,

it is the Internet that has rapidly become the tool of choice for spreading

information about multinationals around the world. All three of the

campaigns described in this chapter have distinguished themselves by a

pioneering use of information technologies, a fact which continues to

rattle their corporate targets.

 

Each day, information about Nike flows freely via e-mail between the U.S.

National Labor Committee and The Campaign for Labor Rights; the Dutch-based

Clean Clothes Campaign; the Australian Fairwear Campaign; the Hong

Kong-based Asian Monitoring and Resource Centre; the British Labour Behind

the Label Coalition and Christian Aide; the French Agir Ici and Artisans du

Monde; the German Werkstatt Okonomie; the Belgian Les Magasins de Monde;

and the Canadian Maquila Solidarity Network æ to name but a few of the

players. In a September 1997 press release, Nike attacked its critics as

" fringe groups, which are again using the Internet and fax modems to

promote mistruths and distortions for their own purposes. " But by March

1998, Nike was ready to treat its online critics with a little more

respect. In explaining why it had just introduced yet another package of

labour reforms, company spokesman Vada Manager said, " You make changes

because it's the right thing to do. But obviously our actions have clearly

been accelerated because of the World Wide Web. "

 

Shell was similarly humbled by the mobility of both the Brent Spar

campaign and the Ogoni support movement. Natural resource companies had

grown accustomed to dealing with activists who could not escape the

confines of their nationhood: a pipeline or mine could spark a peasants'

revolt in the Philippines or the Congo, but it would remain contained,

reported only by the local media as a local story. But today, every time

Shell sneezes, a report goes out on the hyper-active " shell-nigeria-action "

listserve, bouncing into the in-boxes of all the far-flung organizers

involved in the campaign, from Nigerian leaders living in exile to student

activists around the world. And when a group of activists occupied part of

Shell's U.K. headquarters in January 1999, they made sure to bring a

digital camera with a cellular link-up, allowing them to broadcast their

sit-in on the Web, even after Shell officials turned off the electricity

and phones.

 

Shell has responded to the rise of Net activism with an aggressive

Internet strategy of its own: in 1996, it hired Simon May, a 29-year-old

" Internet Manager. " According to May, " There has been a shift in the

balance of power, activists are no longer entirely dependent on the

existing media. Shell learned it the hard way with the Brent Spar, when a

lot of information was disseminated outside the regular channels. " But if

the power balance has shifted, it is May's job to shift it back in Shell's

favour: he oversees the monitoring of all on-line mentions of the company,

responds to email queries about social issues, and has helped to establish

Shell's on-line " social concerns " discussion forum on the company web site.

 

The Internet played a similar role during the McLibel Trial,

catapulting London's grassroots anti-McDonald's movement into an arena as

global as the one in which its multi-national opponent operates. " We had so

much information about McDonald's, we thought we should start a library, "

Dave Morris explains, and with this in mind, a group of Internet activists

launched the McSpotlight website. The site not only has the controversial

pamphlet on-line, it contains the complete 20,000-page transcript of the

trial, and offers a debating room where McDonald's workers can exchange

horror stories about McWork under the Golden Arches. The site, one of the

most popular destinations on the web, has been accessed approximately

65-million times.

 

Ben, one of the studiously low-profile programmers for McSpotlight told me

that, " this is a medium that doesn't require campaigners to jump through

hoops doing publicity stunts, or depend on the good will of an editor to

get their message across. " It's also less vulnerable to libel suits than

more traditional media. Ben explains that while McSpotlight's server is

located in the Netherlands, it has " mirror sites " in Finland, the U.S., New

Zealand and Australia. That means that if a server in one country is

targeted by McDonald's lawyers, the site will still be available around the

world from the other mirrors. In the meantime, everyone visiting the site

is invited to vote on whether or not McSpotlight will get sued. " Is

McSpotlight next in court? " Click on " yes " or " no. "

 

Once again, the broader corporate world is scrambling to learn the lessons

of these campaigns. Speaking in Brussels at a June 1998 conference on the

growing power of anti-corporate groups, Peter Verhille of the P.R. firm

Entente International, noted that " One of the major strengths of pressure

groups æ in fact the leveling factor in their confrontation with powerful

companies æ is their ability to exploit the instruments of the

telecommunication revolution. Their agile use of global tools such the

Internet reduces the advantage that corporate budgets once

provided. " Indeed the beauty of the Net for activists is that it allows

coordinated international actions with minimal resources and bureaucracy.

For instance, for the International Nike Days of Action, local activists

simply download information pamphlets from the Campaign for Labor Rights

web site to hand out at their protests, then file detailed e-mail reports

from Sweden, Australia, the U.S. and Canada, which are then forwarded to

all participating groups.

 

A similar electronic clearinghouse model has been used to co-ordinate

Reclaim the Streets' global street parties and the picketing outside

McDonald's outlets after the McLibel Verdict. The McSpotlight programmers

posted a list of all 793 McDonald's franchises in Britain and in the weeks

before the verdict came down, local activists signed up to " adopt a store

(and teach it some repect) " on the day of protest. More than half were

adopted. I had been following all of this closely from Canada, but when I

finally got a chance to see the London headquarters of the McLibel Support

Campaign æ the hub from which hundreds of political actions had been

launched around the world, linking up thousands of protesters and becoming

a living archive for all things anti-McDonald's æ I was shocked. In my

mind, I had pictured an office crammed with people tapping away on

high-tech equipment. I should have known better: McLibel's head office is

nothing more than a tiny room at the back of a London flat with graffiti in

the stairwells. The office walls are papered in subvertisements and

anarchist agit-prop. Helen Steel, Dave Morris, Dan Mills and a few dozen

volunteers had gone head to head with McDonald's for seven years with a

rickety P.C., an old modem, one telephone and a fax machine. Dan Mills

apologized to me for the absence of an extra chair.

 

Tony Juniper of Britain's environmental group, Friends of the

Earth, calls the Web " the most potent weapon in the toolbox of

resistance. " That may well be so but the Net is more than an organizing

tool æ it has become an organizing model. The Web is a blueprint for

decentralized but co-operative decision-making. It facilitates the process

of information sharing to such a degree that many groups can work in

concert with one another without the need to achieve monolithic consensus

(often impossible given the nature of activist organizations). And because

it is so decentralized, these movements are still in the process of forging

links with their various wings around the world, continually surprising

themselves with how far unreported little victories have traveled, how

thoroughly bits of research have been recycled and absorbed. These

movements are only now starting to feel their own reach and, as the

students and local communities profiled in the next chapter will show,

their own power.

 

-END-

Reprinted with permission from Flamingo, copyright 2000.

 

Cheers