Boycotts, Consumer

Consumer boycotts have long been a strategy for activists seeking to publicize issues and to promote social change. Boycott campaigns urge sympathizers to reject goods tainted by association with a rejected practice, location, or company, simultaneously demonstrating their support for broad moral and social issues and imposing economic penalties on the producers of those goods. Although it is often suggested that consumer-based campaigns were spawned by new communications technologies like the Internet, boycotts have a much longer history. Today, the tactic is called by a name stemming from an 1880 Irish rent strike, when Irish peasants refused to pay rent to their landlord's agent, Colonel Boycott, and their entire community refused to provide services to Boycott's household—no servants or farmhands, not even mail delivery. As a tactic, however, boycotts are older than their name.

Long before the boycott of the colonel, consumer boycotts had been used as a way to highlight moral objections, to alert wider communities about objectionable practices, and to prompt social change. In 1791, British abolitionists rejected sugar in their tea to highlight the use of slave labor on Caribbean sugar plantation. A century later, Mahatma Gandi urged Indian nationalists to refuse salt on their food rather than pay a tax imposed by British colonial authorities in 1930. From 1960 to 1990, anti-apartheid activists persuaded the world to boycott South African cultural events and sports teams until apartheid was brought to an end.

Labor unions and consumer advocates have long appealed to consumers to boycott employers to support striking workers, or to purchase only goods made under acceptable conditions or in union shops. From the late 1800s, American unionists often asked middle-class allies to avoid goods produced by nonunion workers, while the [Page 41]National Consumers League urged middle-class consumers to shop carefully, using their consumer power to unite with wage earners to “control the conditions under which the things they purchased are produced.” Consumer boycotts have also long been used in support of broader social issues. In the 1950s, civil rights activists in the United States used community boycotts as a weapon in broader struggles, deploying community economic clout to support social change. The famous 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott provided an example for the 1964 shopping boycott in downtown Birmingham, Alabama: Local civil rights leaders asked supporters to boycott downtown stores during the Easter season, highlighting demands for racial equality by adding the local community's economic clout. This approach contributed to a new shareholder movement, especially within religious denominations, as large institutional shareholders sought to link investment decisions to moral stances by selling shares in companies linked to apartheid in South Africa or that sold tobacco products.

At the Coney Island Mermaid Parade on June 19, 2010, an attendee holds up an anti-BP sign to protest BP's handling of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that year. The strategies of “naming and shaming” various acts of corporate malfeasance originated in the late 20th century and were used in an attempt to change the terms of global production. However, usually only major scandals attract enough attention from the public to spark a boycott.

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