Hundreds of Davids across the globe are linking up in cyberspace to take on giant TNCs
DAVIDS of the world, unite. All you have to do is log on. The Goliaths may not exactly be on the run, but on the World Wide Web, you can at least get your voice heard, as loud and clear as Goliath's. And you may even have the real chance of turning your individual act of dissent into a worldwide movement. Only connect.
What journalists cannot write (most media owners like to please big advertisers), leaders cannot state with conviction (they need the funding from the large corporations), and courts don't always entertain (you are just one poor sod against a pack of superlawyers hired by the megacorp you're fighting), the Internet has been able to do.
Provide a forum for the often lonely voice of dissent against big business. And the beauty of the Internet is, that for every home page that Goliath Corp sets up, the solitary David too can set up one. Because there are any number of websites where you can set up your home page free. And for every visitor that the Goliath Corp home page attracts, David's page too can attract one. Indeed, every time a dedicated Goliath Corp customer uses a search engine—Yahoo!, Infoseek, AltaVista, whatever —to look for information on Goliath Corp on the Web, David's page will also pop up as part of the search results. On the Net, no one is more equal than the others.
The Net also has no geographical barriers. You can link up with like-minded Davids—people who believe that they are being given a raw deal by Goliath Corp—from Indonesia, Senegal, Iceland, El Salvador. On the Net, no one is alone in his rage.
The Internet is humming with fury against the alleged unethical practices of giant TNCs. Just visit www.2street.com, and you can access The Boycott Board's bulletin board service that lists protests registered by the public; and anyone is free to come and write their grievances on a variety of topics. The more, the merrier. There is an automated letter writer, and while visiting the site, a protest can be registered by simply clicking on the envelope and writing a name and return address when prompted to do so.
One company Netizens love to hate appears to be the US-based Nike Inc, the world's largest sports shoe maker. Key in "anti-Nike" in any search engine, and dozens of venom-spewing home pages bob up. "Just do it. Boycott Nike," they urge you. The Official Anti-Nike Home Page asks you: "Are you sick of seeing people pay 100 dollars for shoes that costs a buck to make? Are you sick of slave labour? Are you sick of that stupid swoosh? Are you sick of Michael Jordan? Are you sick of Tiger Woods? Or do you just hate the word NIKE?" Translation: the "swoosh" is the Nike logo, and Jordan and Woods are two international sports stars who endorse Nike. Anyway, if your answer to any of the above questions is yes, you're at the right place. Among other home pages, www.bayimprint.com urges visitors to buy ani-Nike T-shirts while another offers you bumper stickers.
Nike is also one megacorp where Web dissent is beginning to get slightly dangerous. Anti-Nike home pages throb with allegations that it uses Asian sub-contractors who run virtual slave camps to produce Nike shoes. One home page says that in 1994, the company spent $250 million in ads, just one per cent of which would have lifted 10,000 Indonesian workers above the poverty line. Nike's PR department has had to work overtime to play down the "International Day of Protest Against Nike" on April 18. Before the Web happened, Nike only had to deal with isolated protests by a couple of hundred people at a time. On the Web, these people can join forces with thousands of others across the planet, and, if nothing else, send millions of pieces of hate e-mail to the company, and win psychological victories.
More trouble is brewing. On April 20, Marc Kasky filed a suit against the company in San Francisco as a representative of the Californian public. Kasky accuses Nike of violating California's consumer laws by wilfully misleading the public about working conditions in the Vietnamese, Chinese and Indonesian footwear factories. The suit alleges that, contrary to statements by Nike, Asian "sweatshop" workers are regularly subject to physical punishment and sexual abuse, exposed to dangerous chemicals, forced to work overtime, sometimes without pay, and are often unable to earn a "living wage" despite 14-hour-long workdays.
Nike could be in trouble. Many of the lawyers fighting Kasky's case are from the same team that famously managed to force tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds to stop its decades-old Joe Camel ad campaign on the plea that the campaign induced children to smoke.
That's Nike. If you want to get a bunch of supposed baddies at one place, try www.ratical.com/corporations. This is the "Corporate Rap Sheet" of the web version of The Multinational Monitor, a big-business-hater founded by Ralph Nader. Here you have a ready reference on the alleged misdeeds of several giants. Corporate Rap Sheet's pet peeves include General Motors, Pepsi, General Electric and Nike—names very familiar to Indians now.
The allegations are pretty serious. According to the Rap Sheet, a report released by the Washington-based Government Accountability Project found that GE has been caught in 16 instances of fraudulent activity, and was twice convicted of criminal misdeeds. One of the workers at the company's Mexico plant, Fernando Castro Hernandez, was demoted after he refused to falsify the company's safety reports, says the website.
Coke too gets its share of web-hate. At www.freenigeria.org, Coca-Cola Corporation is accused of sponsoring events organised by the military dictatorship led by General Abacha through its franchisee, the Nigerian Bottling Company. The people at freenigeria.org feel the Coca-Cola logo has helped the "illegal military regime" by making people believe that the most famous brand on earth endorses General Abacha's rule over Nigeria. Nigeria is Coca-Cola's largest market in Africa, and its marketshare here has risen from 11 per cent in 1993—the year the dictator took over—to 20 per cent today.
Interestingly, just what Coke allegedly does in Nigeria, arch-rival Pepsi is accused of doing in Myanmar, at present ruled by a military junta that is under attack from across the world for violation of human rights. Defending his company, Pepsi former CEO John Calloway is quoted as saying: "I don't think corporate CEOs should take foreign policy decisions." Yet, those who maintain the site are clear. "Boycott Pepsi and let Calloway know about it," they say.
Another megacorp at the receiving end is the world's largest baby food company, Switzerland-based Nestle. An UK group, Baby Milk Action (BMA) accuses Nestle of "promoting artificial infant feeding in violation of the WHO's International Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes". "Nestle knows," alleges the BMA home page, "that once a bottle has come between a mother and her child, breast-feeding is more likely to fail and the company has gained a customer. " As evidence that Nestle is violating the WHO code, BMA says it provides information to mothers which promotes bottle feed and discourages breastfeeding; donates free samples to health facilities to encourage bottle feeding; gives inducements to health workers for promoting its products; does not provide clear warnings on labels of the benefits of breastfeeding and dangers of artificial feeding. Sometimes, says BMA, the labels are in a language mothers are unlikely to understand.
Reversing the decline in breastfeeding, says BMA, quoting a UNICEF study, could save the lives of 1.5 million infants every year. This is because in areas where the water is unsafe, a bottle-fed infant is 25 times more likely to die of diarrhoea than a breast-fed one. The BMA home page provides sample letters that you can send Nestle, sample resolutions that you can get your church or community to adopt, and above all, stop drinking Nescafe. "Don't be a mug. Give Nescafe the boot," exhorts the BMA page. There is a boycott pledge that the visitor can sign on the home page.
A similar feeling seem to persist with regard to direct selling giant Amway, now seeking a foothold in India. 'Amway or Scamway', screams one of the pages, as hundreds of them detail the harrowing experiences people say they have had with the company.
Pharmaceutical giants are other serious hate objects. Pfizer has been facing the ire of net surfers since it was accused in 1990 by the US Generic Pharmaceutical Industry of "fraudulent and deceptive practices for its failure to report severe side effects of its Feldene drug before it obtained US approval". Visit www.envirolink.org/ mcspotlight and you will find that Greenpeace named Pfizer among the 10 worst polluters in the South East of England in 1992. The Pfizer plant, Greenpeace alleged, had breached its discharge consent four times since the beginning of 1991 and discharged 10 chemicals for which it did not have a permit.
Not that Pfizer's rivals fare any better. Hoechst's product, Brestan, has been described as a serious health hazard with reports of nails peeling off, headache, nausea, burns and blindness. One enraged home page details how, in 1991, the company was fined by the Federal Drug Administration of the US government for failing to disclose that its anti-depressant drug, Nomifenine, had caused several deaths in Europe. Just to make sure that you are sure what are the products from the company, the page lists out all the products and brand names.
Allegations of environmental irresponsibleness of course make Netizens furious. One hate page aimed at oil giant Shell makes its point simply: "sHELL on Earth," it calls itself. Mitsubishi Corporation gets flak for being "one of the largest corporate destroyers of the world's forests." The Japanese conglomerate "is devastating thousands of square miles of forests and broadly contributing to cultural disintegration," accuse the home page of the Boycott Mitsubishi Campaign (BMC), "a worldwide effort to stop Mitsubushi Corporation's destructive activities in the world's tropical, temperate and boreal forests." BMC calls for a boycott of products and services from Mitsubishi companies, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi (and its subsidiary Union Bank of California), Nikon cameras and Kirin beer.
But nothing, apparently, matches the rage Microsoft Corporation arouses. There are possibly hundreds of home pages on the Web dedicated to hating Bill Gates. Nasty jokes about Microsoft and Gates' riches abound; on some home pages, the tone is hysterical, even accusing Gates of being the anti-Christ predicted in the Bible: a home page claims to calculate Gates' wealth second by second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Microsnot.com is an elaborate parody of Microsoft's own home page. Every icon and line on the Microsoft home page is parodied (Microsoft's sign-off line "Where do you want to go today?" becomes "Where do you want to go, toady?"), and you can link up to other anti-Microsoft home pages through microsnot. And given the fact that Windows 98 crashed during a demonstration in the US last week, more such are certain to come forth and multiply.
Spend a few hours surfing the Net looking for anti-megacorp frenzy, and you could end up with a serious case of befuddlement. How many of the facts mentioned on these pages are true? How many of these home pages are run by cranks with pet phobias and how many by serious activists? How many of these causes are genuine? As individuals, we are naturally inclined to be more suspicious of large faceless corporations than of individuals. Almost all the corporations which are accused and abused on the Net have their own home pages too, but they never attempt to reply to the allegations there, in the belief that taking note of the accusations would be giving some sort of credence or importance to them. However, there are several home pages which accuse the corporations they are fighting, of trying to scare them through legal notices and tough talk. Which tends to bias the web-surfer even more against Goliath Corp.
For, as we said before, David is equal to Goliath Corp on the Net. And if there are 20 David home pages against one Goliath Corp page, the tables are neatly reversed: it becomes 20 to one in David's favour. And in that non-corporeal geography called cyberspace, David achieves something he has little chance of in the real world. He actually wins his small victories every day.