Consumer Protest

In a global economy, consumer protest is also global. Even before the global economic era, moreover, international orgnizations were formed to foster consumer rights and give an international voice to their concerns.

Consumer protest refers to the campaigns, tactics, and organizations of consumers that are designed to promote the interests of either the consumers themselves or any other group in society for which the consumers feel an affinity or allegiance. Since we have an infinite number of relationships with goods and services, and since almost any political point can be made through consumption, the range of consumer protests is seemingly endless. Although many might be familiar with consumer protests such as the boycott of South African products during the era of apartheid, the concept must include too those far less progressive causes of consumers that have been motivated by feelings of nationalism and racial prejudice.

For all this diversity, however, consumer protest can be divided into three broad types. The first is that associated with the 19th century and includes those moral and political campaigns to protect the interests of groups other than those doing the actual consuming. The classic example here is that of the antislavery movement. Women in Britain and America purchased brooches, badges, ribbons, pins, buttons, and jewelry bearing the legend, “Am I not a man and a brother,” to protest against the slave trade around the turn of the 19th century. Later, they boycotted slave-grown sugar, inspiring many other forms of consumer protest: from the bazaars held by supporters of the Anti-Corn Law League to the exclusive dealing campaigns of the Chartists who put pressure on shopkeepers to vote for radical candidates.

In Britain, in 1887, Clementina Black of the British Women's Trade Union Association set up a Consumers’ League. This was an antisweating campaign modeled on the efforts of the Knights of Labour in the United States, and although it proved short-lived, it was taken up again across the Atlantic where a Consumers’ League was formed by the Women's Trade Union League in New York in 1890. Other chapters soon appeared across the United States until a National Consumers’ League was formed in 1898. This then inspired the Ligue Social d'Acheteurs in France, the Käuferbund Deutschland in Germany, and similar organizations in Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. As organizations of mainly middle-class women, the consumers’ leagues proved popular with philanthropically minded sympathizers of labor. They would be followed by a whole variety of consumer protest groups, including the League of Women Shoppers (1935) in the United States, but also by an expanding number of women's organizations around Europe concerned with domestic issues.

The second type of consumer protest is one that seeks to defend the interests of consumers themselves and that evolves into a general consumer movement. Two examples stand out: the cooperative movement and the comparative testing movement. Beginning in the north of England in the [Page 279]1840s, the dividend-on-purchase, consumer cooperative ethos of the “Rochdale Pioneers” spread throughout Europe as an alternative to the capitalist marketplace. By the outbreak of World War I, there were literally thousands of local societies across all of Europe. Cooperation was subsequently weakened through its own institutional and parochial failings, the interference of totalitarian regimes, and the competition of more dynamic capitalist firms, but it was still a vociferous presence in Europe and Japan after World War II. Even today, some estimates claim that, worldwide, cooperation still attracts around 900 million members.

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