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no sweat protest at niketown may 12th

xiaozhou | 13.05.2001 14:59

peaceful protest against nike.

On the 12th of may, a small group of anti-sweatshop demonstrators protested outside niketown in Oxford Circus...

We were handing out leaflets and holding placards. Although we didnt have enough members to blockade the store so maybe not as much as posible was achieved. However we have managed to catch Nike offguard as this is the first demonstration of this kind to be held in the UK. There has been large scale protests in Australia which have closed off nike stores for 7 weeks straight. We have certainly made ourselves more well known ther was even a BBC reporter there. Not bad for a 6 month old organisation.
bye comrades

xiaozhou
- e-mail: chowch666@hotmail.com

Comments

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Nice one

13.05.2001 15:27

Nice one. I hadn't heard about this protest, otherwise I may well have been tempted to turn up myself.

I'm sure that there must be many other people why would have considered protesting as well but didn't know about it.
How about making it a regular thing? By all means have a permanant/semi-pemanant protest there if there are any hardy and dedicated souls out there, but also why not have a special day - say the first Saturday of every month set aside for others to turn up and protest.

Saturday is usually the busiest trading day, so why not?

Mr Swoosh.


first of its kind?

13.05.2001 17:31

first of its kind? see:
 http://uk.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=1133
for one last year and there have been many sine...

direct action?
- Homepage: http://www.freespeech.org/direct_action


Continue the NO Sweat action!

13.05.2001 18:29

Yesterday was good, we got a response from the public including a half-sympathetic Nike guard, a buissiness man and a bloke plastered with the Nike tick.

Unfortunately ED got plastered and threatened by the police with arrest, BAD thing that!

But overall it was a success and look out for the Camden Gap opening!

Tom
mail e-mail: ordinarybloke@hotmail.com


Agit prop

14.05.2001 10:54

Hey, this is something fun to do to annoy Nike, and other sweatshop assholes. Print out small pieces of paper describing the conditions of the sweatshops that the shoes are made in, Then go shopping, well while you are looking at shoes place the little bits of paper into the shoes.
Also the Animal Rights movement has been highly succesful in targeting businesses that fund, or practice animal testing. I would suggest that these tactics would also be effective against sweatshop selling merchants. Go to www.shac.net for more info on their tactics.

pedskfgj


What's a sweatshop?

14.05.2001 12:21

Has any one has seen the forward going around at the moment about the guy who recently asked Nike to print "sweatshop" on a pair of trainers.
On the Nike website you can request Nike to personlise your trainers for you with your name or nick name. This guy requested the word "sweatshop" be printed on his trainers. Nike refused claiming that the word "sweatshop" didn't exist in the English language (explains why they don't know what we're talking about), and their policy was not to print slang on the trainers in case it reflrcted negativly on the brand (but jumpman 3000 is ok).
Not to be discouraged our hero picked up his Websters dictionary (he was American), and found that "sweatshop" was indeed covered as being "a place employing sweated labour" (work withlow pay, and bad conditions). Excited by the prospect of acquiring his designer labeled "sweatshop" trainer our hero immediately informed Nike of his dicovery; also explaining how the reason he wanted the trainers to have "sweatshop" on them was so that the people making them would know that he was thinking of them; when he was wearing them, and to truly reflect the quality of hardwork that had gone in to make these trainers.
Nike has not replied yet, and so with no one else left to turn to our now despairing hero, and potenial Nike customer has turned to the web community to for help. He has done this by forwarding the entire correspondence with Nike to everyone he knows encouraging them to pass it on and so forth. It makes for both humorous and revealing reading. Keep your eye out for it!

TOM


Hypocrisy, hypocrisy

14.05.2001 22:15

I'm not going to become very popular for saying this, but isn't us going out to (try to) force people to stop going to 'Niketown' (I've never actualy been there myself, by the way, as I don't live in London, but that's beside the point) a little, well, repressive, right-wing, fascist and everything we are supposed to be against? Okay, you're probably in the right, but they all say that, and they all believe it as much as we do. At the end of the day you are still forcing your opinions on people who, for all you know, could well have perfectly good reasons for not caring about the 'sweatshop' thing. We might not be able to understand how they possibly could without being PURE EVIL(!!!!!!!), but remember ol' A. Hitler (that famous Austrian liberal) wouldn't have been able to understand why some people didn't care about the Jewish conspiricay he saw, which is EXACTLY the same; except of course it's Them and Us, and we are always right, aren't we?
Apart from that though, a jolly good show, old chaps. Leaflets = good, notes in shoes = good (try to keep things factual and unemotional though, otherwise we are coercing rather than educating) and caring about this enough to do somehting about it = good. Just remember, there is no one right and wrong, no matter how much it makes sense to us. We are not above our own philosophy.

-
mail e-mail: alanomaly@hotmail.com


No no no...

12.03.2002 00:37

Your calling for consideration for people who think that they are worthy of slaves to make thier trendy clothes? I dont think it's even thier place to decide, no one should have that choice, no one should have that right. No one's grabbing them and beating them up, no one phisically stopping them going in these scummy shops... telling them how fucked up these companies are is just fine.

Bud