In May 2007 I visited the Cavite Economic Zone, Rosario in the Philippines. I searched for the people and sites that Naomi Klein described in her book No Logo in the chapter "The unbearable lightness of Cavite", ten years after she was there. I was lucky to meet many people who still remembered Naomi Klein and her research which was a great help, especially the organizers from the Workers Assistance Center (WAC).
Below are quotes from No Logo and the photos that I took during my research.

...If Nike Town and the other superstores are the glittering new gateways to the branded dream worlds, then the Cavite Export Processing Zone, located ninety miles south of Manila in the town of Rosario, is the branding broom closet...
After a month visiting similar industrial areas in Indonesia, I arrived in Rosario in early September 1997...
I'd come to spend a week in Cavite because it is the largest free-trade zone in the Philippines; a 682-acre walled-in industrial area housing 207 factories that produce goods strictly for the export market...

...Rosario's population of 60,000 all seemed to be on the' move; the-town's busy, sweltering streets were packed with army jeeps converted into minibuses and with motorcycle taxis with precarious sidecars...

...its sidewalks lined with stalls selling fried rice, Coke and soap...).

...Most of this commercial activity serves the 50,000 workers who rush through Rosario on their way to and from work in the zone, whose gated entrance is located smack in the middle of town...

...Inside the gates, factory workers assemble the finished products of our branded world: Nike running shoes, Gap pajamas, IBM computer screens, Old Navy jeans...

...Their names and logos aren't splashed on the façades of the factories in the industrial zone. And here, competing labels aren't segregated each in its own superstore; they are often produced side by side in the same factories, glued by the very same workers, stitched and soldered on the very same machines...

...In the rows of virtually identical giant shed-like structures, one factory stood out: the name on the white rectangular building said "Philips," but through its surrounding fence I could see mountains of Nike shoes piled high...
In 1998, 3,072 businesses in the Philippines either closed down or scaled back operation... For its part, Nike has laid off 268 workers at the Philips factory, where I had seen, through the surrounding fence, the shoes lying in great piles... But Phil Knight didn't have to do the dirty work himself he just cut the orders and left the rest to the contractors. Like the factories themselves, these job losses went unswooshed...

...Inside, it's obvious that the row of factories, each with its own gate and guard, has been carefully planned to squeeze the maximum amount of production out of this swath of land...

...Windowless workshops made of cheap plastic and aluminum sidings are crammed in next to each other, only feet apart...

...Racks of time cards bake in the sun, making sure the maximum amount of work is extracted from each worker, the maximum number of working hours extracted from each day...

...The streets in the zone are eerily empty, and open doors - the ventilation system for most factories -reveal lines of young women hunched in silence over clamoring machines...

...All the bustle and color of Rosario abruptly stops at the gates, where workers must show their ID cards to armed guards in order to get inside...

...Buses and taxicabs must drop their speed and silence-their horns when they get into the zone - a marked change from the - boisterous streets of Rosario...

...When I climb up the water tower on the edge of the zone and look down at the hundreds of factories, it seems as if the whole cardboard complex could lift up and blow away, like Dorothy's house in The Wizard of Oz...

...In Cavite, the zone is a kind of futuristic industrial suburbia where everything is ordered; the work- en are-uniformed, the grass manicured, the factories regimented. There are cute signs all around the grounds instructing workers to "Keep Our Zone Clean" and "Promote Peace and Progress of the Philippines."...

...But walk out of the gate and the bubble bursts. Aside from the swarms of workers at the start and end shifts, you'd never know that the town of Rosario is home to more than two hundred factories. The roads are a mess, running water is scarce and garbage is overflowing...

...Many of the workers live in shantytowns on the outskirts of town and in neighboring villages...

...Others, particularly the youngest workers, live in the dormitories, a hodgepodge of concrete bunkers separated from the zone enclave by only a thick wall. The structure is actually a converted farm, and some rooms, the workers tell me, are really pigpens with roofs slapped on them...

...Jose Ricafrente has the dubious honor of being mayor of Rosario...

...I met with him in his small office, while a lineup of needy people waited outside...

...A once-modest fishing village, his town today has the highest per capita investment in all of the Philippines- thanks to the Cavite zone - but it lacks even the basic resources to clean up the mess that the factories create in the community. Rosario has all the problems of industrialization - pollution, an exploding population of migrant workers, increased crime, rivers of sewage -without any of the benefits...

...There are rules against talking, and at the Ju Young electronics factory, a rule against smiling...

...One of the reasons I went to Cavite is that I had heard this zone was a hotbed of "trouble making," thanks to a newly formed organization called the Workers' Assistance Center...

...Attached to Rosario's Catholic church only a few blocks from the zone's entrance, the center is trying to break through the wall of fear that surrounds free-trade zones in the Philippines...

...Zernan Toledo is the center's most intense and radical organizer, and though he is only twenty-five and looks like a college student, he runs the center's affairs with all the discipline of a revolutionary cell. "Outside the zone, workers are free to organize a union, but inside they cannot stage pickets or have demonstrations,"...

..."Group discussions in the factories are prohibited and we cannot enter the zone," he said, pointing to a diagram of the zone layout hanging on the wall...

...In Cavite, you can't talk about overtime without the conversation turning to Carmelita Alonzo, who died, according to her co-workers, "of overwork."...

...Raymondo Nagrampa, the zone administrator, acknowledged that it would certainly be better if the factories hired more people for fewer hours, but he told me, "I think I will leave that I think this is more of a management decision?"...

...The group of workers gathered around the table at the Workers' Assistance Center burst out laughing when I asked them about job security or a guaranteed number of working hours. "No work, no pay!" the young men and women exclaim in unison...

...All through the Asian zones, the roads are lined with teenage girls in blue shirts, holding hands with their friends and carrying umbrellas to shield them from the sun...

Cecille Tuico, one of the organizers at the Workers' Assistance Center, was listening in on the conversation. After the workers left to make their way through Rosario's dark streets and back to the dormitories, she pointed out that the alienation the workers so poignantly describe is precisely what the employers look for when they seek out migrants instead of locals to work in the zone...
With the same muted, matter-of-fact anger I have come to recognize in so many Filipino human-rights activists, Tuico said that the factory managers prefer young women who are far from home and have not finished high school, because "they are scared and uneducated about their rights."...

...In fact, I discovered that even finding out which brand names are being produced behind the locked gates of the Cavite zone requires a fair bit of detective work, work that has been embraced by the Workers' Assistant Center outside the zone. One of the center's walls is covered by a bulletin board that looks remarkably like Lora Jo Foo's logo quilt. Clothing labels are pinned all over the board: Liz Claiborne, Eddie Bauer, Izod, Guess, Gap, Ellen Tracey, Sassoon, Old Navy. Beside each label on the board is the name of the factory it came from: V.T. Fashion, All Asia, Du Young...

...The beers at my hotel bar were blissfully cold, and the gang from the Workers' Assistant Center were all getting a little drunk. We were arguing, once again, about whether codes of conduct have any merit whatsoever...

...."Globalization is nothing new. We have always had globalization," said Arnel Salvador, another of the WAC organizers...

...The foreign investors who sing karaoke at the Mountain and Sea Hotel in Rosario are part of a long and bitter history of colonialists in the Philippines: first the Spaniards came and conquered, then the Americans arrived, setting up army bases and turning teenage prostitution into one of the country's largest industries. Now colonialism is dead, the U.S. military has receded and the new imperialists are the Taiwanese and Korean contractors in the export processing zones, sexually harassing the eighteen-year-old Filipinas on the assembly line...

...The day after our night of drinking, I sat with Nida Barcenas in the backyard of the Workers' Assistant Center and asked her what motivates her, night after night, to trudge out to the dorms at 11 p.m. to meet the garment workers when they finally get off work...

A little blackboard stands in the backyard with the chickens, and the organizerstake turns leading seminars...