What is a Boycott?

A boycott is a coordinated effort to avoid purchasing goods and services from a particular company or person. Boycotts are designed to exert pressure on companies, forcing them to reform their ways in a way which satisfies the people involved in the boycott. The labor and civil rights movements have both used boycotts extensively as political tools, perhaps most famously in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 in the American South.

The term “boycott” references an actual person, Captain Charles Boycott, an Englishman who was responsible for managing land in Ireland in the 1800s. When his tenants pressured him to lower their rents, he refused to do so, and evicted them. In response, the tenants organized, denying him goods and services. His crops rotted in the fields because he had no farm workers, he was unable to get deliveries of food and supplies, and he found himself neatly cut off from the community. By 1880, the “Boycott Treatment” was being used in other places, and the word quickly spread to other languages and regions of the world as well.

There are a number of reasons to institute a boycott. As a general rule, boycott organizers view a boycott as a last resort, first attempting to pressure the company involved in other ways, such as through petitions and polite letters. If the company still refuses to institute reforms, the leaders declare a boycott, encouraging people to avoid doing business with the boycotted company and mounting an education and media campaign to explain the reasoning behind the boycott in an attempt to get more people involved.

If a boycott is large enough, a company will start to experience economic problems as a result, and it may be forced to change its ways. Boycotts have been used to push for integration, higher wages for farm workers, more worker protections, and better business practices, among many other things. In campaigns similar to boycotts, people have organized “divestments,” asking organizations to withdraw investments from a particular region of the world, perhaps most notably in South Africa. Numerous academic institutions around the world divested from South Africa to protest apartheid, forcing the South African government to rethink its policies or lose large amounts of funding.

Some countries have legal restrictions on boycotts and how they are organized. Many of these laws focus on the difference between a primary boycott, led by employees, and secondary boycotts, which involve asking third parties to refuse to patronize a particular company. Secondary boycotts which involve coercion are illegal in some countries; for example, if workers at an auto-parts manufacturer struck in an attempt to force the manufacturer to boycott a car manufacturer, this could be punishable by law.