Critical Analysis Of Naomi Klein's 'No Logo'

Have you ever wondered what it's like to work in a factory? Imagine dust, lint, smoke, and noise all in one crowded room. This is what Lyddie Worthen in the book, Lyddie, by Katherine Paterson has to face. Lyddie has faced many hardships when working in the factory. Lyddie is a young girl who is sent off to work to pay the debts for her family. Lyddie was fired from her first job and went to Lowell, Massachusetts to be a factory girl. When working, there are poor working conditions. Other workers have started a petition to improve the working conditions. Lyddie should not sign the petition because she is mentally strong and is getting paid well.

Sweatshops have been around for centuries, beginning around the late 1880’s. Sweatshops are classified by three main components, long work hours, very low pay and unsafe and unhealthy working environments. Sweatshops are usually found in manufacturing industries and the most highlighted production is clothing corporations, who take full advantage of the low production costs of their products. Many may think sweatshops are a thing of the past but they are still affecting many lives across the nations. There are many ways sweatshops affect lives, but a recent article titled “New study finds ‘more sweatshops than Starbucks’ in Chicago” explains that there are many low wage industry jobs that are violating labor laws in the United States alone. The article also reports how employees who are working in such conditions won’t speak up in fear of the retaliation employers will implement. Analyzing Sweatshops through the lens of the Sociological perspectives will help us better understand the illegal conditions of workplaces that still exist today.

Throughout the beginning of her speech, Kelley makes use of disturbing anecdotes that appeal to women's emotions. She first illustrates that while they “sleep, several thousand little girls” are “working in textile mills” throughout the night. This use of little girls working highlights that children all around the United States are not sleeping but are operating machines: making clothes for the adults to purchase. She incorporates this factor in order to encourage the concerned mothers to help alter labor laws so that their children are not working twelve-hour shifts. Kelley continues to describe how little girls of “six or seven years,” who are “just tall enough to reach” the machines, will be working eleven hours a day. Kelley’s use of the children's height emphasizes how as soon as children reach a certain height, they are being deprived of their childhood and sent to work in the factories. She continues to repeat the phrase that “while [they] sleep” little girls and boys “will be working” in the mills. Kelley’s continual use of this phrase evokes sympathy in the women so they can help change the lives of children by amending the harsh child labor laws.

Klein, in “The Discarded Factory,” provides many examples to show that corporations are much less concerned about production and much more about their brand name. The statement he uses to help explain the reason behind why they are doing this is, "The difference between products and brands is fundamental. A product is something that is made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by a customer,” (Peter Schweitzer). Many companies believe that while their products and factories are temporary and require upkeep, respectively, their brand will live on for much longer. Because of this, they shift towards outsourcing their production to keep costs as low as possible. The companies then use this extra money to help build their brand using sponsorships and marketing campaigns. In addition to sponsorships and marketing campaigns, companies will also improve their packaging, distribution, and retail channels, and they will expand. A quote once said by Nike’s

Beginning her speech, Kelley applies her credibility by placing statistics regarding the controversy of child labor laws, revealing that she is informed about this topic. Her credibility has a great connection to her purpose, she claims that the number of working girls doubled from census to census and girls from twelve to twenty years are working when they should not have to. Kelley then manifests her concern over these working girls by explaining that, “tonight,” while everybody else is snoozing away in bed, “these several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills,”(16-17). These words make her audience feel pity concerning those young girls and are a great reason to act against the unfair laws and regulations that violate both their human and women's rights, especially when they aren’t even getting paid fairly. By appealing to their emotion Florence Kelley wishes to push the women to act on her proposal of joining together and helping the poor young girls of their nation. Kelley continues to approach and influence the women’s sentiments and- hopefully- their actions by including her scandalized argument that in “Georgia there is no restriction whatever! A girl of six or seven years, just tall enough to reach the bobbins, may work eleven hours by day or by night,” (29-31). She decides to include the ‘bobbins’ of sewing machines in factories to illustrate how short and how young they are to be working in dangerous factories where their rights are ignored, girls at that age should worry more about going to school instead of sacrificing themselves to bring money for bread to their homes. One would understand that many families are living through poverty due to the economy being at a very depressing state and they need the most they can do to increase their financial position to survive in their society, then again, girls should be

Often throughout the book she mentions that it is said that "you're paid what you're worth", saying that little pay results in you not being to good of a person. With that label they were looked down on and viewed kind of as untouchables. They had low pay, long hours, no overtime pay, and no benefits which leads to low socio-economic-status a job that no one wants to pursue. She stressed that poverty wasn’t a sustainable condition, it's a state of emergency. Citizens in the lower classes are left to fend for themselves and the ten, eight, or six dollar jobs are all that's there for them. What she would encourage them to do is to demand to be paid what they're worth because in the end they will be better off.

“Women sewing NBA jerseys make 24 cents per garment – an item that will eventually sell for $140 or more”(Brandon Gaille). Our most popular American sports uniforms are mainly produced by Nike, who possess a market cap of $ 90 billion. The question, therefore, becomes, why do immigrant workers from developing countries migrate to the United States to work for brand-name companies, when they don’t receive equitable wages and perform in inhumane working conditions? In,”Who Makes the Clothes We Wear”, Jesse Jackson discusses these conditions and unjust treatment of immigrants. Jackson highlights the extreme manual labor hours, inequitable pay, and rash mistreatment of immigrant workers inside name brand sweatshops. He also provides nationwide examples of unjust labor environments in order to think about the disturbing ethics behind name brand clothing production. When examining why workers endure such horrific environments, it is clear that most originate from developing countries. Due to immigrants attempt to obtain a better quality of life, receive any type of wage that they can acquire in the United States, and their constant struggle with the language barrier which affects job opportunities and daily interactions; immigrant workers endure the mistreatment of name brand companies because they seek the American Dream.

Naomi Klein begins her essay by describing the look of the old garment factories in Toronto and how, "no one has come up with a way to make a profit out of taking a wrecking ball to these boxes of brick, and in this

In this paper, I chose to apply the works of Marx to the Nike Sweatshop situation that has been going on for decades. The Nike corporation has been criticized for a long time, ever since there has been evidence linking them to sweatshops that exist in factories all around the world where they have outsourced jobs to for cheaper labor. Individuals who want a job with one of the clothing factories are forced to sign a contract that binds them to work for a certain length of time and forces them to live in the arrangements provided by the factory. In some cases, the workers don’t even know the conditions of their employment as the contracts are written in a different language. The name “sweatshop” has come from the extremely high temperatures that have been reported from inside of the factories that workers are forced to endure every day.

The workers are under so much pressure and are expected to work and give so much that they don’t even want to skip a day of work because they don’t want to be seen “slacking” and be behind and earn nothing, as Lyddie once thought, because she used to fear going out sick and falling behind in her production and having her pay drop (stated on page 100). They are given breaks that are not nearly as long as they should be, and they are so void of energy that they can’t do things that are actually enjoyable for them (such as Lyddie not reading her book). The factories are too worried about getting more work done and profiting that they don’t pay attention to the workers’ needs. Plus, for the amount of time that they work and how much stuff they get done, they don’t get paid nearly as much as they

1. The female factory worker compared her conditions with those of slaves because she felt like they were being treated like slaves by not being allowed to speak for themselves. She felt that they were awed into silence by wealth and power and was under tyranny and cruel oppression

This onslaught of capitalism directly revolutionized modern industrialism as well as the industrial city. Machines morphed the predominately agricultural nation to a herd of factory and corporate workers. Swarms of people, both native and immigrant, flocked to major cities. “The present century has been marked by a prodigious increase in wealth-producing power. The utilization of steam and electricity, the introduction of improved processes and labor saving machinery, the greater subdivision and grander scale of production, the wonderful facilitation of exchanges, have multiplied enormously the effectiveness of labor.”(George, p.20) The major problem with this newfound industrialism was the way in which the workforce was treated. Capitalism was supposed to provide a way out, a way ascend the financial and social staircase, if you worked hard enough. This however was not the case, if you were a loyal, hardworking employee you simply got to keep your job, and if you were in any way injured or incompetent you were fired.

She explains Marx’s argument that capital penetrates and transforms every aspect of life (Brown, 2003, p. 19). Capital remakes everything in its image and reduces every value and activity to its cold rationale (Brown, 2003, p. 19). Essentially all is subject to the relentless submission of the state and the individual, the church and the university, morality, sex, marriage, and leisure practices to this rationale (Brown, 2003, p. 19). Thus liberal democracy especially for women has been compromised and undermined. Within the film, several women who were interviewed mentioned about the rise of union activism. Once you were unionized you were guaranteed benefits and more pay. However to ensure this cold rationale of capital as Marx stated, governmentality was achieved as one African American women, Margaret Wright, described she had gotten increased work hours making it harder for her and many other women to participate in union meetings. In the government’s eyes, unionism was equated with freedom and therefore seen as unpatriotic.

Obviously, her allusions to an industrial capitalist system are somewhat outdated, but I would argue that they can still be applied to a service economy. Though most people in the United States no longer work in industrial manufacturing, service jobs can still exploit and control the wills of individuals. Though workers may no longer be alienated from the material products of their labor, it is entirely possible that within a service economy workers can become alienated from their own emotions, as it is often their job to serve the emotional needs of others (think, for example, of a store clerk

The use of child labor and other illegal labor practices, and selling the products that the company copied to other brands and designer without their consent as a means of increasing sales and costumers is bad. However, through Forever 21’s means, the result seemed to have favored Forever 21’s corporate interest for it rendered them great profit and increased number of their customers. In the end, even if Forever 21 is able to have a good ends by its capability to submit to the economic aspect of its corporate responsibility, how they take care of their workers through their labor practices as a means to achieve that end is still