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Valerie Schultz: Social activism is born when boycott meets girl
| Thursday, Jul 24 2008 4:33 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Jul 25 2008 1:48 PM
The time-honored practice of the boycott immortalizes an English farm manager who treated his Irish farmer tenants less than kindly.
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When he would not lower the rent during difficult financial times in the 1870s, the farmers not only stopped paying it, they also refused to harvest the crops, both theirs and those of the owner. Newspapers spread the way the tenants used the manager’s last name to describe their course of action. His name was Charles Boycott.
The unfortunate Boycott’s name has become both a noun and a verb. It also translates to other languages as itself, as in the Japanese word pronounced “boikotto.”
The boycott is associated with some powerful movements and people in history, such as Cesar Chavez organizing a boycott of grapes to protest the plight of farmworkers, Rosa Parks’ seat on the bus that led to a boycott of Montgomery’s public transportation system, and Gandhi’s boycott of everything British as a method of nonviolent resistance. The boycott has been employed as a way to raise public awareness of an injustice, and as a means to spur action to end an injustice.
A boycott is only as effective as the number of people who honor it, of course.
One person’s boycott can seem quite futile, but one person’s boycott is every bit as important as one person’s vote: all of them add up. A boycott uses the force of the dollar to make its point: When a product or a service is not purchased in order to protest a company’s policy, the bottom line of the business is adversely affected.
In a democracy, we are free to spend our money as we see fit. We are also free not to spend it in ways that add to the coffers of any business that strikes us as unethical or immoral. One way to make a change for the better is not to reward bad behavior with a good profit.
Over the years I have boycotted companies whose policies included unnecessary testing on animals, unhealthy effects on the environment, or unconscionable uses of child or prison labor.
I have boycotted corporations that actively promote the use of infant formula over breastfeeding in poor countries, and corporations that exploit their underpaid, uninsured workers here in our country. It is not always easy to figure out which company to boycott: I have been unpleasantly surprised on occasion to discover that a company whose product I really like is actually owned by one whose tactics or politics I loathe.
I have not driven anyone out of business, and I know that some people see a comparison to Don Quixote’s absurd endeavors in my list of things I will not buy.
But I believe that even minor boycotts have made some corporations more sensitive to the idea that their economic choices directly affect society. To speak truth to power, to stand up for good, to change even a small part of an unjust world, just say, “Boikotto.”