Short texts will, most likely, be more effective for awareness-raising
purposes than extensive reports. By short we mean texts that fit on a
poster or a postcard, urgent action appeals that only have a few
paragraphs or brochures with equal amounts of pictures as texts. The
essential information will be integrated into newsgroups or magazines of
the specific target groups. with the right logo and font, people will
recognize the information as their own. E-mail makes distribution easier,
but now we're battling the subject line, trying to get attention in four
words.

Next to specific groups, there is the general press campaign. On a regular
basis it seems necessary to have articles and photos in the mainstream
press. National publicity provides the campaign with a legitimate face so
that small, local groups can feel that their efforts on behalf of the
campaign are legitimized. We do too. Reports in the mass media are indeed
reaching large numbers of people, though for a very short time. People
will thereby "store" tiny bits of information in their subconsciousness.
Later on they vaguely might have heard of "bad working circumstances" or
"C&A being bad".

There is a whole variety of classical methods to get into the newspapers
and onto television: prepare a press release, organize a press conference,
fly over some Asian specialists and witnesses, edit video material, and
the obligatory "action" on the street, in front of a shop, department
store or factory gates. Collecting old running shoes from concerned
consumers and dumping them in front of the Adidas office was good for
national coverage in Belgium. A portable shop window visualized production
conditions and protests, and traveled from country to country. Acting in
different countries at the same time helps. As part of the international
Nike campaign a giant "Odor Eater" was made in Australia to try to get rid
of the "stink" of bad labour conditions in the sports shoe industry. Among
actions aimed at individuals was the Spanish CCC's postcard campaign
targetting seven football players on the Spanish National team--the
players were inundated with 50,000 cards from consumers concerned with
working conditions.

The CCC focuses primarily on clothing to tell the story of multinational
companies, working conditions and human rights. The campaigns then tend to
focus on a few specific firms. This concentrates resources, and is good
publicity wise. (Another reason for this is that small firms also have
less power for change.) Examples are C&A (the Netherlands), Hennes &
Mauritz (Sweden) and Nike (everywhere). This approach has clearly had good
results, but there is a negative side as well. People might think that
only one firm is violating workers rights and in need of condemnation. As
a result people are encouraged to overlook others who are equally in the
wrong. Or, when the firm changes policy, as C&A and H&M both did, people
think the problem has been solved. The danger exists also that stories of
the workers are becoming stereotypes (Olga from Ukraine, age 20, paid a
low wage, has two children, etc.).

It is fun to "hijack" the slogans and logos of big firms, and in most of
the cases this does not have any legal consequences. Reusing and
de-contextualizing "their" signs is useful to tamper with the image of the
companies, the most valuable asset they have. It means taking into account
the identity that the company tries to project, and using it. A company
that uses a hyped, arrogant marketing campaign, which tries to shock its
audience -- Benneton, for example with it's "true color of money" is a
prime target for "adbusters" (as in Canada, by a group of the same name)
and also ensures that any information on their bad working conditions (the
use of child labour at a Turkish subcontractor tin Benneton's case) is
immediately news. The slogan "Just Do It!" worked well for a while, but
then people got tired of Nike's "hipness" and brutal forms of
appropriation of youth and underground culture. Their call for unity and
attempts to mobilize the young consumer masses in the end turned against
them. It is fairly simple and effective to turn the Nike logo upside down,
drowned in blood.The international Nike campaign detourned the tagline,
initiating a "Just Stop It" campaign, calling on the company to "do it
just." In some cases the Adidas goal was altered to reflect reality,
announcing the possibility to "work for a pittance to reinvent soccer."

At the same time, we have to be careful not to get stuck in the
image-battle. Companies confronted with campaigns these days see
themselves as only having a "communication problem," and try to come up
with solutions in that sphere. Campaigns usually have a problem with the
way production is organized, and the debate and action should focus on
this.

This target-group oriented approach, making many different translations
and versions of the same information, is to this day limited to the old
media. The internet, most of all, is a storage medium, which can be used
as an on-line archive. Access to all the available information and
databases has to be created. Archives as such are chaotic and have to be
put in order before they go on-line. What to do with unuseful piles of
paper and computer files? The campaign, so far, has not yet managed to
solve the question of the information architectures of its website. The
question remains how to navigate through all the reports, e-mails,
affiliated organizations, urls, databases, etc. the website is being
looked at by many visitors so it would make sense to quickly act and come
open with a new, open structure of for site. It can in theory enormously
broaden the distribution of our info to a consumer audience in the same
medium where corporate agents display there marketing, brand identity,
annual reports, etc. normally, we are forced to operate in a different
space, for example we can never compete with them on TV.

This is primarily a question of human resources. So far there is no
capacity to do this job. Designers and programmers are hereby invited to
contact the Clean Clothes Campaign. It would be ideal to have weekly, or
even daily updates, constant inputs from outside and continuous
maintainance. The internet still has to be discovered for its potential to
do on-line updates and internet-specific campaigning. A nice example is a
technical error somewere on the Nike site which causes consumer questions
and suggestions to nike to somehow end up in our mailbox, which means we
can answer them. People suggesting new product lines or advertising
possibilities for Nike thus receive info on working conditions instead.

More and more, the internet is used these days not only to provide
information but also to do research. It is a general tendency that data
are being privitized, locked in corporate intranets or commercial
databases. The disadvantage of buying information on-line is the lack of
context. We can no longer browse through the hardcopy of a certain report.
Instead, we only get the specific information we asked for (for example
through a search engine). creating a database ourselves that does not have
this same disadvantage presents a real challenge. How can we prevent
information from getting "buried"? How do we deal with the obsession with
"new" info, where people only read or access the latest bit of information
about a certain company? Often disputes about a certain violation of
workers' rights drag on, and it is precisely the older cases that do not
get solved that in fact are the most urgent.

Another question we have to ask ourselves is to what extent information,
which is being put on-line (on the web, or in a database), should be
centralized and unified. Will groups in other cities and countries use the
same standards? To what extent is it desirable to have workgroup software,
with a shared interface and tools? So far, e-mail has proven to be a very
effective and cheap medium for internal communication and coordination.
But this seems obvious by now. The question really is about the
architecture of our own database, archives and websites.

For the future we think about net.radio projects, a database that is easy
to use and expand by the different campaign organisations, linking Clean
Clothes communities to digital cities, creating action opportunities using
the companies very own websites, targetting on-line shoppers, intercepting
them in their virtual space just as we used to target consumers entering
stores in city centers...

The Clean Clothes Campaign PO BOX 11584 1001 GN Amsterdam +31-20-4122785
+31-20-4122786 ccc@xs4all.nl www.cleanclothes.org