UNITED STATES: The Politics of Product Boycotts

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Sep 18 1996 (IPS) - U.S. consumers are putting their money where their ideals are — often away from the most visible U.S. brands.

From South Africa to Haiti, and from Nigeria to Burma, activists are finding increasing success in fostering selective boycotts against companies that invest in dictatorships, or that indulge in poor labour relations or business practises.

The boycott advocates have learned one major lesson from their victories: U.S. consumers are ready to turn against even the most high-profile and commonplace household names, if they are linked to sweatshops or human rights abuses.

That is a lesson which more than one major firm has learned the hard way. It is also a lesson that activists for democracy in Nigeria and Burma, and for labour rights in Haiti and other nations, seek to build on as they target firms as varied as Shell Oil, Pepsi-Cola, the Walt Disney corporation and The Gap.

“People tend to use targets which relate to their personal lives,” says Richard Knight, a research associate for The Africa Fund, which played a large role in the divestment campaign against apartheid South Africa.

In the South Africa campaign, he notes, his group’s Atlanta branch targeted Coca-Cola, not because it was the most significant investor in South Africa then, but because everyone knew or bought it.

Similarly, Knight adds, some college students led successful boycotts of Kellogg’s cereals and other breakfast foods — again, because “cereal choices were something students could act on and change.”

Now, Knight says, efforts to isolate Sani Abacha’s military regime in Nigeria are focusing on a few other key companies — most notably oil conglomerates Shell and Mobil — as targets.

Oakland, California, has already passed legislation prohibiting the city from investing in any company that does business with Nigeria, and Knight expects New York and other cities to follow suit. But a nationwide drive to boycott Shell, similar to the anti- apartheid Coca-Cola boycott of the 1980s, has yet to develop.

What matters most in such boycott drives, Knight says, are “events on the ground.” The 1976 Soweto massacre’s role in sparking anti-Pretoria boycotts, and increased U.S. attention on Nigeria after last year’s execution of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, both were key turning points in getting U.S. consumers to question the role of companies working in those countries, he says.

Burma is a major beneficiary of such publicity now, notes Thaung Ahtun, an activist with New York’s Burma Support Group. The Rangoon military junta’s poor human rights record, and the high profile of pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has helped push city divestment drives and boycott campaigns against such Burma investors as Pepsi and the oil firm Unocal, he says.

Visible firms are equally useful as symbols of workplace ills, labour activists have found in recent months as they have gone after several of the biggest clothing and shoe manufacturers and retailers.

“The U.S. people really want to hear the other side of the story” when workers abroad protest a major U.S. company, argues Barbara Briggs of the National Labour Committee (NLC), which monitors labour conditions in Central America and the Caribbean.

She notes that, when the NLC last year kicked off a campaign against the retailer The Gap after uncovering poor labour conditions at Mandarin, a factory that produced Gap clothing in El Salvador, consumer response was phenomenal. “Thousands of people in the country got involved,” Briggs says. Within weeks, The Gap and the NLC signed an agreement to allow independent human rights monitoring in El Salvador.

An NLC campaign against Global Fashion, a Honduran firm that employed teenage girls for long hours and low pay, was even more successful, Briggs says — largely because the factory made clothes for the Kathie Lee label, owned by television host Kathie Lee Gifford.

Briggs says she and her NLC colleagues, as “television morons” who did not know about Gifford’s TV fame, were unprepared for the media rush and outcry that followed. But the results were clear: stunned by a rush of bad publicity, Gifford and her retailer, Wal-Mart, agreed to push for better monitoring at Global Fashions and other workplaces making Kathie Lee clothes.

Such victories have prompted a rush of similar campaigns in recent months. In July, a California firm, the Global Exchange, brought Cicih Sukaesih, a fired Indonesian worker at a factory that made Nike shoes, to Nike’s Oregon headquarters, which she was forcibly barred from entering. Nike, too, quickly agreed to improve workplace monitoring of its Indonesia subcontractors.

“The consumers would totally welcome better working conditions, as long as it doesn’t cause a raise in the (retail) prices,” argues Global Exchange Director Medea Benjamin. “They would like assurances that the products they buy are not produced by underpaid, abused workers.”

Attacks on corporate images may get results, but also prompt fierce defences from the companies involved. Most argue their involvement abroad helps bring money overseas — a defence that companies investing in dictatorships have also used.

Donna Gibbs, a Nike spokeswoman, says Global Exchange and its allies “promote closed borders and have a problem that Nike contracts workers outside the United States…They have never attempted to educate themselves about Nike’s production practises.”

“Whether you like Nike or don’t like Nike, good corporations are the ones that lead countries out of poverty,” Phil Knight, the company’s chairman, told The Washington Post in July. Knight argued that, without U.S. firms’ involvement, the countries would remain poor.

Charles Kernaghan, NLC’s director, says he doesn’t want firms to pull out of the developing world, but he wants them to raise wages and improve working conditions. The NLC’s current campaign asks Walt Disney to keep investing in Haiti, but to ensure that Haitian workers making clothes for Disney subcontractors earn a “living wage” of 58 cents an hour, rather than the current level of roughly 28 cents an hour.

But for boycotts against military regimes, Burmese activist Ahtun says, there may not be such benefits from investment. “We’re not against foreign investment,” he argues. But in joint venture deals like that between Unocal and Rangoon, he says, “the profit will flow directly into the pockets of the generals.”

In that case, he says, it is better to follow the lead of firms like Levi-Strauss and Reebok, and pull out of Burma entirely.