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A boycott is an organized effort to stop purchasing goods or services from a company or person, often used as a last resort after other methods have failed. The term comes from Captain Charles Boycott, who was denied goods and services by his tenants in Ireland. Boycotts have been used for various reasons, including pushing for better business practices and worker protections. Some countries have legal restrictions on boycotts, particularly secondary boycotts involving coercion.
A boycott is a coordinated effort to avoid purchasing goods and services from a particular company or person. Boycotts are designed to put pressure on companies, forcing them to reform their methods so that those involved in the boycott are satisfied. The labor and civil rights movements both used boycotts extensively as political tools, perhaps most famously in the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott in the southern United States.
The term “boycott” refers to a real person, Captain Charles Boycott, an Englishman in charge of land management in Ireland in the 1800s. When his tenants pressured him to lower their rents, he refused to he evicted. In response, the tenants organized themselves, denying him goods and services. His crops were rotting in the fields because he had no farm workers, he was unable to receive deliveries of food and supplies, and he found himself starkly cut off from the community. By the 1880s, “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 for instituting a boycott. As a general rule, boycott organizers view the boycott as a last resort, first attempting to pressure the affected company in other ways, such as through petitions and polite letters. If the company still refuses to initiate reforms, leaders declare a boycott, encouraging people to avoid doing business with the boycotted company and organizing an education and media campaign to explain the reasoning behind the boycott in an effort to involve more people.
If a boycott is big enough, a company will start to run into financial problems as a result and may be forced to change course. Boycotts have been used to push for integration, higher wages for farm workers, better worker protections, and better business practices, among many other things. In boycott-like campaigns, people staged “divestment,” calling for organizations to withdraw investment from a particular region of the world, perhaps particularly South Africa. Numerous academic institutions around the world withdrew from South Africa in protest against apartheid, forcing the South African government to either 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 a secondary boycott, which involves asking third parties to refuse to sponsor a particular company. Secondary boycotts involving coercion are illegal in some countries; for example, if workers at an auto parts manufacturer strike in an effort to force the manufacturer to boycott an automaker, this could be punished by law.
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