Compare/Contrast Essay

In the essays A Web of Brands and Live Free and Starve by Naomi Klein and Chitra Divakaruni, both authors express the different aspects and their opinions of globalization. Naomi Klein focuses on the effects of globalization. In A Web of Brands, Klein looks at how the changes of the garment industry in Toronto connect to the factories of Jakarta, Indonesia. Chitra Divakaruni argues that the United States attempts to stop the practices of indentures, would have terrible consequences even though the efforts are well intended. Naomi Klein begins her essay by describing the look of the old garment factories in Toronto and how, "no one has come up with a way to make a profit out of taking a wrecking ball to these boxes of brick, and in this little eight-or nine-block radius, the modern city has been layered hap-hazardly on top of the old." (Klein 440) Klein continues by explaining that many businesses have already closed down and been boarded up. Klein also compares how in the twenties and thirties, Polish and Russian immigrants were found in delis arguing about the leadership of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Now, Portuguese men are seen pushing coat and dress racks down the street. Naomi Klein has realized the transformation of the Industrial Toronto. In the fourth paragraph, Klein talks about Spadina Avenue and the "layers of decades" spent on this street. Klein felt that the City Hall should not have put up art to celebrate the history of Spadina Avenue. She explains how at first, steel figures were placed on the top of lampposts of women at work at sewing machines and workers on strike holding up signs with slogans posted on them. Then, an extremely large thimble was placed on the corner of Klein's street. "Thank goodness Emma Goldman, the famed anarchist and labor organizer who lived on this street in the late nineteen thirties, wasn't around to witness the transformation of the garment workers' struggle into sweatshop kitsch." (Klein 441)