Shoes – followthethings.com

“Mark Thomas Comedy Product S5 E4 ‘Pester Power’“
An episode of a satirical TV series starring comedian-activist Mark Thomas broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4.
Full episode embedded above.

Mark Thomas is a British activist-comedian who has a long-running stand-up comedy / satire show on TV. He’s filming an episode in a North London secondary school with a geography teacher called Noel Jenkins and his students. It starts off being about government cutbacks which mean that schools are relying on free books from publishers like Jazzy Books which contain advertising. When the Jazzy Books CEO refuses to talk to them on the phone, he asks the students if they would like to talk to one of the advertisers: adidas. Mr Jenkins has been teaching them about sweatshop production Indonesia, so they are primed. Mark Thomas says he has the phone number of David Husselbee, adidas’ ‘Global Director of Social and Environmental Affairs’. He calls him, and his crew film what happens. Husselbee is out of office. So Thomas asks the students to leave him a message. What questions do they want to ask him? They’re all about adidas sweatshops. Everyone at the school goes go to lunch and, when they get back to class, Husselbee – surprisingly – returns the call. He spends an hour on the phone answering the student’s sweatshop questions. It’s all filmed. Thomas asks the students if they’re happy with Husselbee’s answers. Nobody is. Husselbee says it would be different if he was there in person. So Mark Thomas and Mr Jenkins invite him to visit. He does so a few weeks later. Thomas also invites Richard Howitt, an MEP who has been trying and failing to get adidas to turn up to an EU hearing about sweatshop labour. Also present are two women from Indonesia, one who works for a mission supporting factory workers like those who make adidas shoes, and the other her translator. Thomas’ crew films the discussion, which Thomas talks about in the stand-up comedy show that’s made about it. This classroom is the site of an extraordinary get-together of supply chain actors, and an extraordinary discussion unfolds that is rooted in the direct, heartfelt and cheeky style of questioning from the young people present. This is ‘pester power’ (the episode’s title): showing what young people can do to get adults to change their behaviour. It’s common knowledge in trade justice activism that different actors in supply chains have different experiences of, and roles in, keeping the flow of commodities going. And it’s common knowledge that different priorities, ethics and value systems are more or less at home in different roles. But, when you bring these together in a discussion like the one in this classroom, with people they don’t normally talk to each other as equals, they can clash horribly. That’s what’s so revealing about this example and why it has to feature on our site. This example of trade justice activism comes from an time when corporate executives were less guarded, when they might turn up to explain on camera the way that the economy works from their perspective (see also our page on the BBC documentary Mangetout here), and before they started using corporate PR firms to protect themselves from such scrutiny (when they didn’t come out of this very well). Putting corporate executives under the spotlight this can have an impact. Husselbee says to Howitt at the end of the discussion that adidas will turn up to the next EU hearing. Would that have happened without this ‘pester power’ show? The students are inspired by the power they find they have.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Mark Thomas Comedy Product S5 E4 ‘Pester Power’. followthethings.com/mark-thomas-comedy-product-s5-e4-pester-power.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 40 minutes.

Posted on December 17, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Sim*Sweatshop

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Sport & Fitness

2006

UNBRANDED

SPORTS SHOES

MADE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

REACH NEW AUDIENCES

CHANGE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

ENCOURAGE EMPATHY

EMBODY EXPLOITATION

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

“Sim*Sweatshop“
An online video game by Jonny Norridge (concept and game programming) & Gavin Courtney (back end development) for NOW Nottingham and The Arts Council UK.
Gameplay video by WahWahQueenMew embedded above. Available to play free of charge on the Sim*Sweatshop website here (Adobe Flash needed).

Designer Jonny Norridge creates a game to simulate the experience of the shoe factory work that he’s been reading about. You slide shoe panels into place with your mouse. It ‘pings’ when one’s made. Then you make the next one. The clock ticks. Your energy levels fall. Your pay is terrible. It’s not enough to buy the food that you and your family need. You are interrupted by your boss talking about targets. He doesn’t like it when you want to join a union. It’s a simple, repetitive game that you – as a factory worker – can’t win. The idea is to put gamers in the shoes of the people who make the things that they buy. For them, there’s a familiar task sequence and reward structure. But this is real. It’s kind of fun to play, but also sucks. It’s the kind of game that’s given to school students as a quick and vivid way to explain sweatshop production. If they hate it, the lesson has worked. For those who want to know more, its website suggests further reading. There are other examples of trade justice activism in which consumers go to work in the factories and farms where their things are made (see, for example, the TV series Blood, Sweat & Takeaways on our site here). With these, you’re invited to empathise with someone supposedly like you – the contestants are often pitched ‘as typical’ consumers – trying to do that work. In this game, you’re all doing it yourself. So how effectively can a game-based simulation of factory work can be? What can it convey of the poverty and working conditions of show factory workers? It turn out that the answer is ‘a lot’. Sim*Sweatshop catches on. German and Hungarian versions are created, and it becomes part of other mainstream anti-sweatshop campaigns. But are young consumers the ones responsible for these sweatshop conditions? Should company executives, investors and politicians be playing this game too?

Page reference: Declan Coakley, Jack Johnson, Josh Li, Georgie Mitchell, Jack Saxton & Tom Weake (2024) Pipe Trouble. followthethings.com/sim-sweatshop.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 25 minutes.

Posted on December 16, 2024January 8, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Nike Email Exchange (NEE)

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Sport & Fitness

2001

NIKE

PERSONALISED ‘ID’ SHOES

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

PLAY WITH BRANDING

RE-DESIGN THE COMMODITY

MAKE IT PROVOCATIVE

MAKE IT META

INCLUDE SUFFERING KIDS

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

“The Nike Email Exchange (NEE)“
An email exchange between student Jonah Peretti and the Nike Corporation.
The full email exchange was posted online on shey.net. Screengrab above. Read the whole exchange here.

Student Jonah Peretti experiments with Nike’s offer to customise its shoes with words you type into its ID website. Most people would add their name or their team’s name but he wants to add the word ‘sweatshop’ to a pair of running shoes. He wants to do this so that he can ‘remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes’. Nike say no. Peretti replies, arguing it’s OK. They say no. He replies again, saying he hasn’t breached their ID guidelines. They say no again. They just won’t let him do it. So he forwards the conversation to friends by email. They forward it to friends, who forward it to their friends, who …. It’s posted on a website called shey.net (above) and, within six weeks, millions have read it. Next, he’s invited onto national US TV to debate sweatshops with a Nike executive. This is one of the most iconic examples of viral online trade justice activism that happens 3 years before facebook is founded. It’s also an iconic example of the activist tactic of ‘culture jamming’ – turning a brand’s values and identity against itself. Peretti didn’t consider himself (or what he did) to be ‘activist’, he was just messing around with the opportunity that Nike gave its customer to personalise their shoes. What he did became known as the ‘Nike Email Exchange’ (or NEE) and was a important part of a swarm of public criticisms of Nike’s record on labour rights – including Indonesian Nike factory worker Cicih Sukaesih’s North American speaking tour [see our page here] – that cemented its sweatshop reputation in the late 1990s and 2000s. It’s also an iconic example in trade justice activism research. Peretti gave researchers Dietlind Stolle and Michele Micheletti the email addresses of everyone to whom he sent the email string, and everyone who replied to it. They got in touch to ask them about the impacts that it had had on them as citizens and consumers. The publications that emerged from this helped establish a significant body of scholarship on what’s called ‘political consumerism’. After becoming a public figure through the NEE, Peretti continued to experiment with viral online media before setting up Buzzfeed in 2006.

Page reference: Edward Jennings, Alex Hargreaves, Matt Goddard, Amy Joslin, Millie Whittington & Charles Bell (2024) The Nike Email Exchange (NEE). followthethings.com/the-nike-email-exchange-nee.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 73 minutes.

Posted on October 23, 2024February 11, 2025 by Ian Cook

Fight The Heist

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Sport & Fitness | Fashion

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

CHANGE CORPORATE BEHAVIOUR

IMPROVE PAY & CONDITIONS

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

FIND THE UNIONS

FLIP THE SCRIPT

WORKERS TAKE THE MIC!

HUMANISE THINGS

ENCOURAGE FEMINIST SOLIDARITIES

JOIN WITH OTHERS

HOLD ‘EM ACCOUNTABLE

BLAME, SHAME & GUILT

“Fight the Heist“
An NGO campaign by Global Labour Justice & the Asia Floor Wage Alliance.
Campaign videos embedded in playlist above. Campaign webpage here. Campaign report here. Campaign X feed here.

Summary paragraph to be added.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Fight The Heist. followthethings.com/fight-the-heist.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 40 minutes.

Posted on October 23, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Cicih Sukaesih’s North America Nike Tour

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Sport & Fitness | Fashion

CHANGE CORPORATE BEHAVIOUR

IMPROVE PAY & CONDITIONS

FIND THE UNIONS

FIND A CHARACTER

HUMANISE THINGS

WORKERS TAKE THE MIC!

ADD TO THE MIX

PUT YOUR BODIES IN THE WAY

BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER

CULTIVATE RELATIONSHIPS

“Cicih Sukaesih’s North America Nike tour“
A speaker tour of North America by sacked Indonesia Nike factory worker Cicih Sukaesih, sponsored by Global Exchange, Working Group on Nike, Press 4 Change, Campaign for Labor Rights, Canadian Auto Workers, Operation PUSH, Jobs for Justice, Amnesty International, Frontlash (a branch of the AFL-CIO) and the Alberta Federation of Labour.
Newspaper report reproduced above. Search for a 2017 BBC interview with Cicih Sukaesih about this tour here.

Indonesian Nike factory worker Cicih Sukaesih is sacked for organising a successful strike action for minimum wages and better conditions. So North American anti-sweatshop organisations recruit her to front a multi-city tour with stops in New York City. Chicago, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto … She wants Nike CEO Phil Knight and basketball star Michael Jordan to explain the price of the shoes she has made, their astronomical pay and her colleagues’ extraordinarily bad pay and conditions. She visits Nike’s HQ, leads protests at its Nike Town stores, describes the working conditions she has experienced, urges supporters to write to Jordan to persuade him to use his celebrity power to help factory workers and urges Nike to reinstate her and her sacked colleagues. She sometimes tries on a pair of Nike shoes in store. Wearing them makes her feel distinguished. But their price tag would eat up two or three months of her salary. Where does all that money go? Her removal from a store by Nike security staff after trying on the Nike shoes she makes is quite a spectacle. A perfect scene for media coverage that can make Nike’s sweatshop problem a public concern. We love this example of trade justice activism. Conventionally it’s a Western consumer who travels to the Global South to meet their makers. Sukaesih goes in the opposite direction. She’s looking to connect with others in the worlds of retail and consumption who care about trade justice, to act together in solidarity. She’s doing this by working with campaigning NGOs and public relations, media-savvy activists, working together on a new kind of trade justice activism. But what should the protestors who join them do? Put pressure on the company by boycotting it? Sukaesih say no. Don’t do that! That’s going to harm her friends and former colleagues back home. Let them keep their jobs, but with much better pay and conditions, paid for by Nike. The company can afford it. There’s lots of Nike sweatshop activism taking place at this time. And the company does act. Or gives the impression that it’s acting. You decide.

Page reference:Alex Fanshawe, Lorian Douglas Dufresne, Frances Nicholson, Josh Perkins, Oscar Cator & Charlie Beere (2024) Cicih Sukaesih’s North America Nike tour. followthethings.com/cicih-sukaesihs-north-america-nike-tour.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 68 minutes.

Posted on September 11, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

My Fancy High Heels

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Fashion

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

“My Fancy High Heels“
A documentary film directed by Ho, Chao-ti for Conjunction Films, broadcast on Public Television Service, Taiwan.
Embedded in full above. Mandarin & English, with Mandarin subtitles.

Everyone has challenges, dreams and sources of sorrow and happiness in their lives. Wealthy young women in New York city. Impoverished slaughterhouse, tannery and factory workers in China. Maybe even baby calves. And their lives can be connected by following things. Like a pair of sculpture-like Bally, Prada, Gucci, Fendi high heel shoes that sell for $300 to $1,000 a pair. Each person connected by these shoes is worth knowing, spending time with, walking in their shoes for a while. The calves – and the people who kill, bleed and skin them – too, because their hide makes the softest leather. There’s empathy here for everyone, but connecting these lives, sorrows, happiness through these shoes is jarring for its audiences. The extremes of wealth and poverty, glamour and horror, are so extreme. Exploited workers don’t only make clothes for high street brands and retailers. The most exclusive brands, with the biggest profit margins, are just as tainted. This is a Chinese language film, and it’s difficult to find or buy a DVD with English subtitles. So a lot of the discussion below has been Google translated. The audience, for a change, is not English-speaking and not in the Global North.

Page reference: Jenny Hart & Ian Cook (2024) My Fancy High Heels (taster). followthethings.com/my-fancy-high-heels.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Behind The Leather

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Fashion | My Shopping Bag

“Behind The Leather“
An activist stunt by Ogilvy and Mather Advertising, Bangkok for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Asia.
YouTube video embedded above.

A new luxury store called ‘Leather Works’ opens at the high end CentralWorld mall in Bangkok selling coats, ties, gloves and bags. Shoppers come in to browse. As they touch and try them on, they see flesh, bones, muscles and sinews inside. As they open the handbags, there are beating hearts too. Shoppers get blood on their hands. This leather was clearly ripped from the bodies of crocodiles, snakes, lizards and other ‘exotic’ animals. It’s like a scene from a horror film. Shoppers recoil in shock. These luxury leather goods are disgusting. The video goes viral. Behind this shopping prank is an NGO called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather who made it all for them. PETA’s Asia office wants to draw attention to the cruel conditions under which ‘exotic’ animals are farmed and butchered for luxury leather fashion. But how genuine, how ethical, can a ‘hidden camera’ stunt like this be? What can these shock tactics do?

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Behind The Leather (taster). followthethings.com/behind-the-leather.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Dream Crazy

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Fashion | Sport & Fitness

“Dream Crazy“
An advertising campaign for Nike by the Wieden+Kennedy agency.
Video ad embedded ABOVE. Full campaign materials here.

It’s the 30th anniversary of Nike’s ‘Just Do it’ campaign. So the advertising agency hired by the brand most associated with sweatshops hires an African American football player called Colin Kaepernick to front it. He’s the quarterback who became famous in 2016 for taking the knee during the national anthem before games because, he said, ‘I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color’. After George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in 2020, taking the knee became associated with support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Condemned as unpatriotic by many, including President Trump, Nike was courting controversy by making Kaepernick the figurehead of its campaign. But he could show that by ‘dreaming crazy’, marginalised people like himself could excel. And Nike could be part of this. But strange things happened. People who did’t like Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement started burning their Nike gear, criticising its production overseas by sweatshop workers and boycotting the brand. Others normally critical of Nike said they’d buy more from them because of their support for BLM. Others asked why the lives of Nike’s Black consumers and consumers of color mattered more than the lives of their Black producers and producers of color. What did Kaepernick know and think about these marginalised people and their dreams before he took Nike’s money? This kind of advertising – where, for example, civil rights are used to mask labour rights – is called woke-washing. Nike seems to be running this campaign to stir controversy, by launching it on Labor Day bang into the US’s toxic ‘culture war’ around BLM. This campaign itself isn’t trade justice activism. But the responses to it are. The debates that it can take you into are around ‘systemic racism’ and ‘racial capitalism’. Why is it that the workers trade justice activists are concerned about tend to live in the Global South and be people of colour while the consumers they address tend to live on the Global North and seem by default to be white? How did that happen? Can trade justice / follow the thing activism be decolonised? Who would do this work? What commodities would they trace from where to where? What would they make for what kinds of audiences to act upon? And you might be wondering if this controversial campaign does Nike any harm. No. Its impact was much more about the uncomfortable, progressive, ‘mind-f$@k’ conversations that it sparked. Thank you Colin…

Page reference: Louise Mason, Maddy Shackley, Izzie Jeffrey, Megan Holden, Sophia Stainer, Emily Taylor, Andrew Gamble & Monty Leaman (2018) Dream Crazy. followthethings.com/dream-crazy.shtml (last accessed <add date here>)

Estimated reading time: 101 minutes.