Tampere, Finland,
August 2001. One hundred and fifty people were gathered at the
Tampere University of Technology for a riveting two-day
seminar entitled ‘Fibres and Textiles for the Future’. The
textile industry delegates were looking forward to a feast of
fibre-related speakers, workshops and discussions, of which
the highlight would be a talk from a representative of the
World Trade Organisation (WTO) on the future of
employee-management relationships. It sounded too good to
miss.
For the textile industry delegates, like
industry delegates everywhere, the WTO mattered. Set up in
1995, the global trade policeman sets the rules under which
international trade must be carried out. It has the power to
open up entire economies, strike down national laws that
‘hinder’ global trade and give the nod to punitive sanctions
on countries which fail to adhere to its free trade gospel. In
its first six years of existence, it had already attracted
more controversy (and protesters) than any other international
body in history. To opponents it was an undemocratic,
ideological vehicle for the extension of Western market values
to everyone on Earth; one that had already been used to do
away with national laws on health, safety and environmental
protection in several of its member countries. To supporters
like the textilians of Tampere, it was a way to ensure
expanding global markets for their products. Whichever way you
looked at it, though, the WTO’s opinions were going to be well
worth hearing.
Hank Hardy Unruh, the WTO’s speaker,
turned out to be American; not surprising, perhaps, for an
advocate of the global free market. He also turned out to have
a large zip running down the back of his business suit, but,
as he took to the podium to deliver his lecture, it seemed
rude to ask why. In any case, the WTO’s take on
labour-management relations soon had all the delegates
engrossed.
In a powerful and well-argued lecture
(accompanied by graphs, slides and statistics), Unruh looked
forward to the efficiently-managed, market-focused workforce
of the future by examining some of the mistakes of the past.
First he argued that the US Civil War – ‘a war in which
unbelievably huge amounts of money went right down the drain’
– need never have happened. Fighting over slavery, of all
things, said Unruh, was absurd. ‘Left to their own devices,’
he explained, ‘markets would have eventually replaced slavery
with "cleaner" sources of labour anyhow’. To prove this, he
embarked on a ‘thought experiment’ in which he compared the
likely current cost of maintaining an ‘involuntarily imported
workforce’ in the US with the cost of leaving the potential
slaves at home in Gabon to labour instead in sweatshops or
fields of export crops. The latter, he concluded, was much
cheaper and demonstrated that ‘by forcing the issue, the North
not only committed a terrible injustice against the freedom of
the South, but also deprived slavery of its natural
development into remote labour’.
While the assembled
textilians were digesting the implications of such a
revolutionary application of market theory, Unruh went on to
look at India. Specifically, Gandhi – ‘a likeable,
well-meaning fellow who wanted to help his fellow workers
along, but did not understand the benefits of open markets and
free trade’. Gandhi’s ideal of village self-sufficiency, Unruh
explained, was just the sort of inefficient protectionist
measure that modern India was rightly doing away with.
Finally, Unruh revealed to the delegates the WTO’s vision
of the worker-management relationship of the future. A
‘central management problem’, he explained, was ‘how to
maintain rapport with distant workers’ – particularly
important as multinational companies shift their production
around the world in pursuit of the cheapest labour and laxest
regulations. The WTO’s solution was to employ the latest
technology. To the sound of a drum roll, Unruh then ripped off
his suit to reveal a golden, spangly, skin-tight leotard.
‘This,’ he explained to the open-mouthed delegates,
‘is the management leisure suit.’ Before his audience had time
to react, a three-foot golden phallus on the front of the suit
began to be inflated by a small gas cannister. ‘This,’
continued Unruh triumphantly, ‘is the employee visualisation
appendage.’ Now fully tumescent, he went on to explain that
the ‘hip-mounted device’ was fitted with a monitor which
allowed managers to check the performance of their employees,
receive data on their productivity (from chips planted under
employees’ skin) and administer electric shocks to the less
hard-working. ‘I’m very excited to be here,’ he concluded –
perhaps unnecessarily. ‘Thank you.’ The audience, it seems,
was impressed. As he stepped down from his podium, the man
from the WTO was given a warm round of applause.
In an
ex-council flat in north London, the man who co-wrote Hank
Hardy Unruh’s speech can’t stop laughing. He may or may not be
called Mike, and he may or may not be from New York. He’s a
hard man to pin down; I’ve been trying to get hold of him for
months, and he has corresponded with me under at least two
different names.
Mike is one of the ‘Yes Men’ – the
funniest, oddest, most mysterious and most brazen political
activists around – and he has some explaining to do. Hank
Hardy Unruh’s talk, of course, was a daring spoof. The next
day, one of Finland’s leading newspapers, Aamulehti, ran a
serious and lengthy piece on the conference (‘intelligent
clothes and innovative fibres are part of everyday life of the
future’), illustrated with a large photo of Hank’s, erm,
appendage. In colour.
Hank Hardy Unruh was not an
official representative of the WTO but Mike’s co-conspirator,
Andy, who lives in Paris. Mike has a shock of curly brown
hair, a loud Hawaiian shirt and a dose of jet lag – he’s on
his way to see Andy, and has stopped in London to explain to
me what the Yes Men are up to, and why.
‘The Yes Men
started by accident,’ he says. ‘We set up a website –
www.gatt.org – around the time of the Seattle protests [in
1999]. We thought of it as just a satire site about the WTO,
and we hoped people would accidentally end up there instead of
at the WTO site.’
Gatt.org continues to be such an
effective parody of the official WTO site that you have to
read it very carefully to see that it’s a spoof. It works by
taking the WTO’s real, live aims and actions to their logical
extremes – thus demonstrating their absurdity. The WTO sent
its lawyers snapping ineffectively at the Yes Men’s heels and
posted a warning about them on the (real) WTO website. Mike
and Andy thought all this was quite fun, but not much else.
Until, that is, they started to receive emails from people who
hadn’t been paying close enough attention.
‘People
started emailing us, asking if Mike Moore [then head of the
real WTO] would come and give a talk at their conference or
meeting,’ says Mike. ‘The first few we sent on to Michael
Moore [the US anti-establishment comedian]. We thought it
might be funny if he went along instead, but he didn’t reply.
But then we thought, "wait a minute, we can go ourselves". So,
the next one that came in, which was to a law conference in
Salzburg, off we went.’
The Salzburg lawyers’
conference was where the Yes Men were born. ‘Dr Andreas
Bichlbauer’ arrived in Salzburg in October 2000 as an official
representative of the WTO, and delivered a PowerPoint
presentation about the obstacles that still had to be overcome
if the process of globalisation was to fully succeed. The
obstacles included the Italian siesta (an unfair barrier to
trade, since few other nations indulged in it) and the US’s
one-person-one-vote system of democracy.
Bichlbauer
explained that the US’s campaign finance system – under which
corporations pay politicians to persuade voters to put them in
office to pursue the corporations’ agenda – was ‘grotesquely
inefficient’. He explained to the assembled lawyers, says
Mike, ‘that the solution was just to open voting to the
markets and allow companies to pay people directly for votes’.
Bichlbauer, like Hank Hardy Unruh, was actually Andy
(who, Mike explains, ‘actually becomes these characters – it’s
a little scary’). And Bichlbauer, like Unruh, was warmly
applauded. No one objected to his speech, and no one
questioned his identity.
‘It was unreal,’ says Mike.
‘We couldn’t believe that the lawyers didn’t realise what was
going on. We expected to be kicked out, thrown off the stage
or something. We were so shocked that they didn’t realise it
that we kept trying to get something more out of them. So we
went to lunch with them, and Andy just kept pushing them –
trying to get them to realise what was happening, trying to
get this glimmer of realisation. So he was saying that
Hitler’s economic model had a lot to be said for it. People
were a bit sceptical, but he explained he wasn’t talking about
the social problems, just the economics. Then they came
round.’
But seriously! Everything the Yes Men’s
‘WTO’ says, while hardly likely to be put about by
representatives of the real thing, is perfectly consistent
with free market economics. In the reductionist, neo-liberal
trade-uber-alles ideology of the times, everything that
Bichlbauer and Unruh said in Salzburg and Tampere actually
makes perfect economic sense. Cultural differences are a
barrier to a single global market; Third World sweatshops are
cheaper than importing slaves; Gandhi’s homespun village
economy would be firmly illegal under WTO rules, which ban
countries from subsidising, protecting or promoting their own
industries in the face of foreign competition. Everything that
the Yes Men say to their audiences is merely market logic
taken to its most extreme. That, says Mike, is the point of
the exercise. ‘The whole premise is that you’re
exaggerating and mirroring what the people you’re talking to
are already saying,’ he explains. ‘I suppose the point of the
Yes Men is to try and demonstrate how problematic liberal
economics are, and where the trajectory that we’re following
is leading. Saying, "let’s follow the ideas that most of the
world is tied up in in one way or another to their logical
extreme, and see where they get us". The idea is that at some
stage among your audience there’ll be some moment of
realisation.
Trouble is, there isn’t always. That’s
what we’re realising – how much crap people will take if it
comes from a person in a suit representing something official
like the WTO. The stuff people will believe in the name of
free trade. These people in our audiences weren’t stupid –
they’ve all got PhDs and law degrees and all the rest. And we
can stand there wearing a giant gold member and say that
abolitionism was a waste of time and money – and these guys
don’t even murmur.’ Over the last few months, the Yes Men
have been as busy as ever, responding to more invitations to
talk. (‘I guess at some stage, people are going to rumble us,’
says Mike. ‘You’d think it would have a short shelf life, but
the invitations to talk just keep coming.’) Andy has also done
a live television interview, as a WTO representative,
naturally, in which he announced the WTO’s plans to introduce
‘justice vouchers’ that would discourage torture by oppressive
regimes. Operating on the same basis as carbon-trading schemes
intended to tackle climate change, justice vouchers would
‘give countries an economic incentive to give up torture’. The
interviewer was surprised, but since the suggestion made
economic sense he didn’t push the matter.
What happens
next is anybody’s guess – it seems unlikely that the Yes Men
themselves know. Since I met Mike, though, the stakes have
been upped. At his latest speaking engagement, in Sydney,
Australia, in May, ‘Kinnithrung Sprat’ announced to a group of
accountants the official winding-up of the WTO and its
replacement with a ‘Trade Regulation Organisation’ based on
the UN Charter of Human Rights. ‘There are countless signs in
the world today showing us the problems with our approach to
trade,’ he told his audience. ‘We at the WTO are reacting to
these signs by refounding our work upon new principles – human
rather than corporate ones.’
Unfortunately, the real
WTO has failed to follow the Yes Men’s lead. Instead of
dissolving itself, it has just appointed a new director
general, Supachai Panitchpakdi, and is currently mulling over
the corporate triumph that was the recent Earth Summit in
Johannesburg. There, to the horror of environmentalists, the
WTO was handed the task of deciding how to ‘resolve’ the legal
conflicts between international agreements to prevent climate
change, protect biological diversity and clean up the
environment, and the WTO’s own rules promoting unhindered
global trade at any cost. No prizes for guessing which
interest will come out ahead. The Yes Men, it seems, have
enough ammunition to keep them going for a long while yet.
Find out more about the Yes Men at
www.theyesmen.org Enjoy their spoof WTO site at
www.gatt.org. Author Paul Kingsnorth is writing a book
about the worldwide anti-globalisation movement, to be
published by Simon and Schuster in spring 2003.
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