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The silent treatment Boycott – it’s a word we’ve been hearing a lot of lately. This curious little term joined the English language in the 1880s, when the tenants of an estate in County Mayo, Ireland, asked the English estate manager, Charles C. Boycott, to lower their rents – a request that he bluntly rejected. In response, the tenants refused to pay any rent at all – and furthermore refused to speak to Boycott or members of his family. According to Merriam-Webster, “During the ‘50s and ‘60s, boycotts were used against businesses that discriminated against blacks, and nowadays labor unions have found them an effective way to gain concessions from employers.” In 1965, Mexican and Filipino grape pickers in Delano, California, walked off the job in protest against low wages and bad living and working conditions. What began as a strike quickly turned into a boycott when the grape pickers’ cause was taken up by the United Farm Workers (UFW), a newly organized union led by Cesar Chavez. After a march to the state capitol failed to move the Schenley Liquor Company, which owned most of the vineyards in the Delano area, the UFW urged the public not to buy grapes. “The consumer boycott,” Chavez said, “is the only open door in the dark corridor of nothingness down which farm workers have had to walk for many years.” Victory didn’t come quick, but public sympathy for the grape pickers grew, and by 1970, the pressure of the long-running boycott forced grape companies all over California to sign contracts guaranteeing rights and benefits for migrant workers. The international campaign against apartheid in South Africa, meanwhile, first arose in the form of student demonstrations, but what really put the squeeze on the offending regime was a boycott directed against companies with investments in South Africa. In recent years, India’s highly organized anti-globalization movement dealt a devastating blow to a brand-new KFC franchise in New Delhi by dropping thousands of leaflets from an airplane over the surrounding neighborhood. According to a Canadian radio journalist, the leaflets carried one simple statement: “Eating KFC products will make men sterile.” The KFC in question shut down within a month of opening. I would definitely, however, file this case under “unethical tactics,” as potential consumers were not given a chance to reflect on the rights or wrongs of globalization. Many boycott efforts have been misguided; others have been silly and self-serving. In Egypt, an e-mail that made the rounds in the last week of March urged mobile-phone users to switch off their handsets for a single day, Friday, April 5, to pressure the mobile-network operators to lower their rates. By the time April 5 came, of course, everyone’s mind was on the street demonstrations in support of the Palestinians, along with attacks against US franchises, as a handy substitute for Israel. Not too many people remembered to switch off their phones that day – although an executive at one of the networks had a fit when the e-mail in question reached his inbox. The still-born mobile-phone boycott bears a superficial resemblance to the Irish renters’ campaign back in the 1880s: both were basically pleas for the lowering of tariffs. But the original Boycott boycott was wrapped up in issues of Irish nationalism – even if that can only be recognized with hindsight. For a boycott to work, its target must be well chosen. Arab consumer boycotts of US restaurant franchises, whose outlets are most often locally owned, will never make the United States budge about supporting Israel. Furthermore, to go back to Charles Boycott and the silent treatment he received, boycotts are supposed to be about disengagement. Smashing windows is a different thing altogether, one in which political motivations tend to get obscured.
NEIL MACDONALD |
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