Roots of Resistance

Why are there so many boycotts?

Lately it seems like you can't pick up your phone or turn on the news without being inundated with viral calls to stop spending on fast fashion, fast food, even certain movies and video games.

New boycotts seem to pop up every other month, and yet it's not always clear what they accomplish.

But history shows us that under the right circumstances, the boycott can be a powerful political tool.

Boycotts have helped expand civil rights in America and in the apartheid state in South Africa.

One boycott in the 1960s even got millions of people to stop eating grapes for three years.

So what made those boycotts so successful and what can we learn from them today?

[warm energetic music] First, do you know where the word "boycott" even comes from?

Before it was a term for a resistance tactic, Boycott was just one guy.

Charles Boycott was a British land agent who lived in Ireland in the late 1800s.

His job was to supervise land owned by Lord Erne, who was basically never around.

Boycott collected rent from the Irish tenant farmers who lived and worked on the land, and he also evicted them, sometimes violently, if they couldn't pay.

As you can probably imagine, this didn't make him a very popular guy.

The situation only got worse as crop failure and economic crisis devastated Ireland's rural poor.

Not only were they starving, they were frustrated that their low wages and high rents were controlled by the same people.

A resistance movement called the Irish National Land League formed to overturn the tenant farmer system.

And it wasn't long before these activists decided to make an example out of Boycott.

Boycott's tenants banded together to wage a campaign to ostracize him.

Laborers stopped working on his property, shops stopped serving him, and eventually Boycott became so isolated he wrote to a British newspaper about it.

The resistance drove Boycott off the land and captured national attention for the Land League's movement.

And from then on, the name Boycott became synonymous with collective acts of refusal.

Although this incident finally put a name to it, the practice of boycotting is centuries old and dates back even further than Charles Boycott.

In Ancient Athens, citizens could actually vote to ostracize and exile people who were considered dangerous to democracy.

And in ancient Rome, people left the city en masse to protest decisions made by the ruling class.

There are many different types of boycotts, but the one you're probably most familiar with is the consumer boycott.

Consumer boycotts are calls for customers to stop buying a particular product or to stop buying products from a particular company.

They leverage collective action to wield financial power, usually with the intent of getting a person or company or even sometimes a country to change certain policies.

But their efficacy is dependent on four major factors: number one, a clear goal.

When a boycott rallies people around a clear goal, it can be a really effective tool for a larger movement.

Boycotts created a crucial spark for the American Revolution.

One of the colonists' earliest goals in their resistance against Great Britain was a phrase that might sound familiar: "No taxation without representation."

The colonists felt that because they weren't directly represented in British Parliament, it was unfair for Great Britain to collect tax from them.

And since there was a tax collected on British tea, the colonists decided to boycott it.

Instead, they bought teas smuggled from other countries and vowed not to let shipments of British tea even unload in American ports.

But here's the thing-- their tea boycott wasn't a strong enough tool on its own to pressure Britain to change its ways.

And after the Boston Tea Party, Parliament retaliated enacting policies explicitly meant to punish and control the Colonies.

The colonists had a clear goal, but the teas boycott's failure to reach it demonstrated that something about their approach needed to change.

Their movement needed to be bigger.

Which brings us to number two-- awareness and education.

Boycotts are more effective when people are aware that they're happening and understand why they should get involved.

And no consumer boycott in American history has been as widespread as the great grape boycott of the 1960s.

Here's how it happened-- United Farm Workers, a labor union founded by Mexican and Filipino farm workers in Delano, California, wanted grocery shoppers to stop buying grapes grown by companies that wouldn't sign their union contracts-- contracts that would vastly improve their quality of life, and they made sure everybody knew about it.

The UFW picketed grocery stores, bars, and liquor stores where their grape products were sold.

They handed out flyers that detailed their struggles and their goals.

The UFW even put on plays.

Their leaders also held press conferences and gave news interviews that captured international attention.

Educating shoppers about these dangerous labor conditions also meant educating the public about pesticides.

These chemicals posed serious health risks, not just for the workers in the field, but also for the customers taking this food home to eat.

And that's when they really started recruiting shoppers to the boycott.

Soon, millions of Americans stopped eating grapes.

After its first year, the boycott brought nationwide grape sales down by 12%, and by 1969, the growers reported as much as $25 million in losses, which would be around $215 million today.

The grape industry lost so much money that the owners were forced to come to the negotiating table, and as a result, the UFW secured union contracts that won higher wages, healthcare, and safety protections for hundreds of poor migrant farm workers.

They demanded that those contracts banned the use of toxic pesticides like DDT on grape crops, which eventually inspired bans of harmful pesticides at the state and national levels too.

Change doesn't happen overnight, and boycotts don't work if participants decide that it's too difficult to hold out until the goal is reached, which is why number three, consistent mobilization, is so crucial.

The Farm Worker's grape boycott went on for three years, partially because it was relatively easy for consumers to eat something other than grapes or drink something other than wine.

But for the famous Montgomery bus boycott, long-term participation was more difficult.

In the 1950s, the Black citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, challenged the city's segregationist policies with a mass boycott of public transit after several Black women-- Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, Rosa Parks, Jeanetta Reese, and Mary Louise Smith-- were mistreated or arrested for not giving up their bus seats to white passengers.

That meant anyone who relied on the bus to get around to work, to school, to church, had to find another way to get there.

To help keep the boycott going, a mutual aid network developed.

Black taxi drivers lowered their prices to match the price of the bus.

Volunteers organized carpools and sent along new or slightly-used shoes for anyone who wore theirs out by walking.

These efforts were able to sustain the boycott long enough for the U.S. District Court in Montgomery to hear the Browder v Gayle case, a class-action lawsuit filed over the constitutionality of bus segregation.

And the boycott kept going after that, not only until bus segregation was ruled unconstitutional, but until integration actually happened in Alabama.

The Montgomery bus boycott lasted one full year, and its efficacy made it a foundational event of the Civil Rights Movement.

Which brings us to number four: economic impact.

The point of a consumer boycott is to apply financial pressure usually on one specific company, but if a company has different streams of revenue or franchises, boycotting might not make as much of an impact.

For example, in 1989, after an Exxon tanker spilled 11 million gallons of oil off the coast of Alaska, environmental groups called for a one-day nationwide boycott of Exxon stations.

Thousands of people participated, but ultimately the boycott had little effect on sales because most of the stations were independently owned.

This meant that the small business owner and not Exxon actually suffered most of those losses.

Another example happened in 2018 after news broke that the political data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested private information from over 50 million Facebook users to influence the 2016 presidential election.

People tried to boycott Facebook by deleting their profiles or refusing to sign on, but the boycott never impacted the bottom line, in part because some users didn't realize that the alternatives they were using, Instagram and WhatsApp, were also owned by Facebook.

Boycotts can be a great resistant strategy, but they're really only a good vehicle if you can actually make a dent in a company's profits.

It's also important to remember that because boycotts can be an effective way to apply financial pressure, they can also be used to discriminate and inflict harm on marginalized communities.

Like in the 1870s, when racist groups in California organized boycotts of Chinese businesses and workers out of a xenophobic fear of immigrant labor, a familiar tactic that was used to boycott Chinese goods at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Today, there are new challenges to executing a successful boycott.

Social media has made it so much easier for people to learn about and engage with boycotts, but it also means that there's a higher volume of boycotts competing for consumer attention.

It's more complicated today because of the multiple ways in which we get information.

So you get a lot of people retweeting or "liking" on social media, but do they actually walk the click or walk the the tweet?

And so that's really the challenge.

You can easily be a social media warrior, but will you actually participate in the boycott is the question.

(Felecia) Unionizing workers at Starbucks, Trader Joe's, and "The Washington Post" have made calls for short-term targeted boycotts, asking that customers only boycott in coordination with a worker strike.

The hope is that customer boycotts paired with union strikes, send a stronger message of solidarity and thus would be a more plausible financial threat to large corporations.

The truth is, the boycott is a strategy that will continue to evolve over time just as it has for hundreds of years.

Successful boycotts launch with clear goals, plans for building awareness, have consistent mobilization, as well as strategies that maximize economic impact, and they enable the longest-lasting change when they're used along with other resistance tactics like worker strikes or legal cases.

Boycotts work best when they're fuel for the cause, not the whole movement.

Have you ever taken part in a boycott?

Let us know in the comments, and thanks for watching "Roots of Resistance" on PBS.

I'm Felecia For The Win, and I'll catch you on the next episode.

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