Book review of Nick Nichols'
Rules for Corporate
Warriors
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BOOKNOTES
[Anonymous review of:]
The Death of a Thousand Cuts:
Corporate Campaigns and the Attack on the Corporation By Jarol
B. Manheim, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000 272 pages; $39.95
Rules for Corporate Warriors
By Nick Nichols, Bellevue, Washington: Free Enterprise Press,
2001 372 pages; $25
[The review of Rules for Corporate Warriors is shown in boldface type.]
Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy: A Book of History and Strategy
By Dean Ritz (ed.), Croton-On-Hudson, New York: Apex Press, 2001 352 pages; $17.95
OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, corporate campaigns - multi-pronged organized attacks on the economic, legal, political and community standing of a company - have evolved into a media-savvy game of psychological warfare where the goal is to redefine the image and undermine the reputation of the target company in order to force it to respond to pressure from key stakeholders, including shareholders, customers, employees and regulators.
The corporate campaign concept emerged in the 1960s through a combination of influences, including New Left politics and hardball community organizing tactics developed by Saul Alinsky and others. The National Council of Churches and the leadership of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were instrumental in the development of the corporate campaign, as was a new generation of impatient young labor activists who were casting about for some alternative means of reversing the decline of organized labor. The first successful corporate campaigns were led by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union against textile giants Farah and J.P. Stevens, Inc. After the Stevens victory, the corporate campaign was quickly adopted by the labor movement and developed into a "finely tuned instrument of conflict." Ray Rogers, one of the organizers of the Stevens campaign, went on to form Corporate Campaigns, Inc., a consulting business that works with union locals and other groups who want to "disorganize the power structure." Rogers has since worked on a number of well-known corporate campaigns against Hormel, Campbell's Soups, A. E. Staley, International Paper, Eastern Airlines and other companies.
Meanwhile, the corporate campaign concept has been adopted by environmentalists (Home Depot, Staples and Citigroup), consumer groups (Nestle, Microsoft), human rights advocates (Pepsi, Nike, Unocal) and others, each of whom have used different strategies and tactics. Nearly 200 corporate campaigns are listed in the index in Jarol Manheim's Death of a Thousand Cuts, which is the definitive exploration of the history, strategies and tactics used in corporate campaigns.
The corporate campaign concept is now fully developed and fully institutionalized (some unions, for instance, even have their own corporate campaign department). Corporate campaigns are now refined so that they can deliver a thousand different sorts of cuts; whether they threaten corporations with "death" is another story.
Although corporate campaigns have succeeded at forcing many corporations to alter their behavior, an equal number have failed due to a lack of resources, shallow analysis of a corporation's vulnerabilities, poor organizing or stale messaging that fails to galvanize public and media attention. Corporations have also become more adept at responding to corporate campaigns, often following the advice of public relations specialists.
Rules for Corporate Warriors offers some insight into how such consultants coach corporations into responding aggressively to "attack group shakedowns."
Described as "one of [corporate] America's leading crisis management experts," Nick Nichols has spent 15 years waging trench warfare over environmental, food, drug and product safety issues on behalf of multinationals. Although most of what he discusses are public relations campaigns rather than actual corporate campaigns, this book helpfully explains the tactics corporations use to respond when targeted by a corporate campaign.
Nichols' obvious intent is to pose as a kind of corporate Saul Alinsky (the title refers to Rules for Radicals, Alinksy's own book), advising corporations under siege to avoid making the common mistake of becoming appeasers ("Nevilles") who give in willingly to their attackers. The way to do that is to first convince his main audience - corporate executives - that if they have a problem, it's not because the corporation has tread upon the public interest, but because they have become victimized by the "extremists" who have taken over the environmental and consumer movements. According to Nichols, activists are just as greedy as the next person, so appeasement only encourages them to demand further concessions. He goes on to offer advice on how to put campaigners on the defensive by attacking their credibility, ridiculing them and making them believe they've been infiltrated. "Flash your brass knuckles," he urges the desk-bound executive. Use the tactics of the movement against itself.
A lot of this is pure fantasy. For instance, he urges activists to set up the following publicity stunt at a WTO protest to make the point that the critics of free trade do not represent the best interests of the poor: "A girl dressed in rags and carrying a single crust of bread could remind the protesters and media that what U.S. companies pay their workers is typically two or three times the average wage in those countries ... A little girl dressed like a hooker could emphasize that prostitution (not school or a cushy $8-an-hour job in Bloomies) is often the alternative for children who must still support families that otherwise would be destitute and starving." Anyone who regularly reads publications like PR Watch will recognize a lot of the tactics he suggests from the activities of front groups and other PR conduits.
Much of what Nichols proposes is best countered directly by community and mass movement-based organizing. But campaigns that lose touch with their constituency base or ability to connect with mainstream culture will become more susceptible to the tactics suggested here.
And as more and more corporations take up this kind of playbook, movements for economic and environmental justice will need to remember also to seek deeper challenges to the legitimacy of corporations.
Some important ideas for how activists and other corporate campaigners should begin to campaign against corporations have been suggested in a book put together by members of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD), a group of activists that, more than any other, has deconstructed the myth of corporate personhood and other judicial doctrines which have underpinned the growth of corporate power.
Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy is an important collection of visionary essays and discussion documents which combine legal analysis, historical scholarship and provocative movement critiques that point to a new direction in corporate campaigning.
Although corporate campaigns are rare enough to begin with, it's even more rare that people question a corporations' very right to exist. As Richard Grossman, co-director of POCLAD points out, "challenging the legitimacy of the corporation and organizing to limit its rights and powers under law are not regarded as obvious or logical. Such ideas are often dismissed as unrealistic, utopian and counter-productive."
Attempts have been made. Activists have filed petitions to revoke the charters of companies like Unocal, Waste Management and Weyerhaeuser. But many of POCLAD's ideas have yet to be buttressed by mass actions and other tactics deployed in corporate campaigns.
Nevertheless, a functioning democracy requires citizens to begin to restrict the rights of corporations by fundamentally redefining their limits and questioning their very "right" to exist.
With corporations increasingly able to deflect or survive traditional issue-based corporate campaigns, anyone concerned about how corporations have eroded our democracy, will find inspiration here for pursuing bold new strategic approaches to corporate campaigning.
Wasn't that great? Doesn't that clarify a lot of things
that were murky before?
Who are these guys? Multinational Monitor is a magazine project of Essential Information, Inc., a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization founded by Ralph Nader in 1983 and now run by Beltway denizen Russell Mokhiber (editor of Corporate Crime Reporter) with a $1,266,966 budget (1999) funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Turner Foundation, Packard Foundation and two dozen other usual suspects.
Amusing sidelight: Multinational Monitor compiles an annual list of the Ten Baddest of the Bad Corporations. 2001's Ten Worst Corporations were Abbott Laboratories, Argenbright, Bayer, Coca-Cola, Enron, ExxonMobil, Philip Morris, Sara Lee, Southern Co., and Wal-Mart.
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One of their Ten Worst Corporations of 2001 is Sara Lee.
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