[With workers and unions beginning to reconsider the
potentialities and pitfalls of boycotts, it makes sense to take a look
back at the famous boycott campaigns led by the United Farm Workers
(UFW) from 1965 through 1975 to demand agricultural compani]
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CAN BOYCOTTS HELP WORKERS WIN?  
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Stephen Lerner and Eric Blanc
August 23, 2023
Labor Politics
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_ With workers and unions beginning to reconsider the potentialities
and pitfalls of boycotts, it makes sense to take a look back at the
famous boycott campaigns led by the United Farm Workers (UFW) from
1965 through 1975 to demand agricultural compani _

Grape / lettuce boycotters picket the Jewel food store. August 1973,
Paul Sequeira

 

_The recent uptick in labor organizing has prompted not only a rise in
strikes, but also the return of an old labor weapon: the boycott. _

_While boycott campaigns generally have a mixed record
[[link removed]] at
best, this tactic was used successfully in the recent unionization and
first contract victories at Burgerville
[[link removed]] in
Oregon as well as Spot Coffee
[[link removed].] in
upstate New York — a campaign that set
[[link removed]] the
stage for the subsequent Starbucks upsurge. Raising the slogan, “No
Contract, No Field Trips,
[[link removed]]”
unionizing workers at Medieval Times in New Jersey and California are
now linking up with K-12 teachers to boycott the company until it
stops its alleged union-busting. And just last week, after months
[[link removed]] of
student organizing and protest, Cornell University agreed to stop
[[link removed]] selling
and serving Starbucks on campus due to the company’s flagrant
violation of federal labor law. This victory is spurring a push to
boycott Starbucks on colleges
[[link removed]] across
the country._

_With workers and unions beginning to reconsider the potentialities
and pitfalls of boycotts, it makes sense to take a look back at the
famous boycott campaigns led by the United Farm Workers (UFW) from
1965 through 1975 to demand agricultural companies recognize and
bargain with their union._

_To discuss the lessons of the victorious UFW boycotts, and the
dynamics of this tactic generally, I sat down with Stephen Lerner,
whose long
[[link removed]] and celebrated
[[link removed]] organizing
history began as a volunteer for the UFW in the early 1970s._

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UFW Boycott Poster

EB: AT THE MOST GENERAL LEVEL, WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE BIG LESSONS OF
THE UFW BOYCOTT?

SL: First of all, you need a favorable context for a national boycott
to work, a moment where lots of people care or could be convinced to
care. In most conditions, boycotts don’t work; they’re usually
called by unions when we know we’ve lost. But the UFW boycott
wasn’t like that at all — it was part of a plan to win.

When an opening _does _exist, then you need to constantly be asking:
How do we maximize disruption, and how do we maximize publicity? To
achieve these two goals, you need a huge amount of on-the-ground
organizing. You can’t just call a boycott and hope somehow customer
pressure will bring companies to the table. 

So you need to seize a favorable context and then need real organizing
on multiple levels, both in terms of mass work to get the word out,
but also directly to disrupt profits.

EB: CAN YOU BRIEFLY DESCRIBE THE CONTEXT OF THE UFW BOYCOTT?

SL: To give you a sense of the moment, I dropped out of high school to
work on the boycott full-time. We really thought radical change was
possible. So the boycott existed at a moment of time where there was a
lot of activism, a lot of excitement — the whole thing was grounded
in a much bigger movement. 

And the farm workers’ struggle really captured people's imagination.
It wasn’t just about one specific struggle, it became a broader
symbol for the rising of immigrants and, in broader ways, about the
revival of labor.

EB: WHAT DID THE MOVEMENT DO TO RAISE PUBLICITY AND DISRUPT THINGS?

SL: A big part of doing mass work is answering the question: How do we
let as many people know as possible?

We’d do a lot of leafleting and picketing in front of grocery
stores. We did an enormous amount of human billboards — we’d have
people at all the big subway stations or on freeway overpasses holding
these giant signs saying “Boycott Lettuce and Grapes.”

We started giving out a leaflet called “God Called a Strike Once”
— it was all about the story of Exodus. I had attended seders my
whole life, but it was from Catholic farm workers that I came to see
the story of Exodus as a strike.

We’d do church meetings, we’d leaflet concerts, we did everything
we could to bring publicity. And it worked: we built a level of
support where some Rabbis declared scab grapes and lettuce to be
non-kosher.

We were attempting to do mass work, and lots and lots of
people _did _get involved. We’d take volunteers through a
progression of steps. Beyond leafleting and picketing and having
people work on raising funds, there were all sorts of next steps they
could take.

The key analysis was: Where do people get their food and Gallo Wine?
They get it from grocery stores and liquor stores. And then how do you
put pressure directly on these businesses to stop buying products made
in companies that were refusing to recognize the union?

One of the things that we did was have our people go into stores and
fill their shopping carts with food. And we’d put a picket line up,
and then all the folks in line would say, “Oh, there's a picket
line, I need to respect it” — and they would just leave their full
carts.

In addition to the famous hunger strikes Cesar Chavez led, we mirrored
shorter hunger strikes in front of grocery stores. We also did big
mass demonstrations at Hunts Point Market [in the Bronx], where grapes
and lettuce were sold wholesale. In California people picketed the
ports where longshoremen would honor the picket lines for as long as
they legally could, delaying shipments of grapes and lettuce.

EB: WHAT KIND OF ORGANIZING DID IT TAKE TO DRIVE ALL THIS FORWARD?

SL: It’d be a big mistake to underestimate how much work it takes to
make a boycott succeed. To pull this off at scale, you have to do real
organizing on the ground, that’s the only way you can do sustained
and escalating activity.

Support for the farm workers was intensely organized in city after
city, neighborhood after neighborhood, churches and synagogues. It
wasn’t just a general call for a boycott. We focused on building
self-sustaining committees of supporters that could drive the work
locally — the pickets, the actions, all that. It was a massive
operation around the country, with thousands of active supporters and
hundreds of full-time volunteers working on this. We got five bucks a
week to get by, and we lived in group houses, so we could spend all
our time on organizing.

A big part of the effort was that striking farm workers from
California moved all around the country, to directly spread and lead
the boycott. That was the first part of my introduction as a
volunteer: I lived with a farm worker family that moved to New York
City from White River Ranch [in California] where they had been on
strike. They moved their family to NYC, and I lived with them and
learned about their experiences as farm workers and strikers, and why
strikers faced with violence, jail and injunctions needed the added
leverage offered by the boycott.

We were all trained in how to organize consumers to support the
boycott. I was trained by a series of incredible organizers including
Fred Ross Sr. We built out the boycott significantly through a house
meeting approach where we’d build committees in cities and
neighborhoods through house meetings in which we were all trained to
tell the story of how farm workers were treated. We’d recruit people
and have them invite their friends to their homes, each house meeting
would lead to more house meetings. We were trying to appeal for
solidarity not just from other unions, but also from broader liberal
and progressive layers, and to religious denominations — we got a
lot of support there — to make them understand that this was a moral
battle that they should care about.

EB: ONE LIMITATION YOU ALREADY MENTIONED IS THAT BOYCOTTS DON’T WORK
IN MOST CONTEXTS. ARE THERE OTHER LIMITATIONS WORTH HIGHLIGHTING HERE?

SL: The other thing that has to be said, and lots of others have made
this point too, is that as the boycott eventually
became _the_ central focus in the UFW, there ended up being much
less work on organizing workers in the fields. The balance got thrown
way off. So one big lesson is that if a boycott is seen as a
substitute for worker activity, it's a death knell.

And part of that has to do with the fact that the company will always
say that a boycott is hurting the very people it’s claiming to help.
And people _would_ ask us: “Well, doesn't a boycott mean that farm
workers will lose their jobs?” Companies will always say that a
boycott will destroy the company and require mass layoffs. (They said
the same thing later during the divestment movement to end apartheid
in South Africa.) So you need a very strong worker core at the center
of things to challenge that narrative. And that’s one of the reasons
it was so important that farm workers from California ended up
traveling all across the country, giving the UFW campaign its moral
center. Successful boycotts require a combination of workers
organizing and taking action that is then supported by a broader
public campaign.

EB: IT’S EXCITING TO SEE THAT MEDIEVAL TIMES WORKERS ARE LINKING UP
WITH K-12 TEACHERS AND THAT CORNELL STUDENTS RECENTLY KICKED STARBUCKS
OFF CAMPUS. CAN YOU SPEAK ABOUT THE STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF SCHOOLS
AND UNIVERSITIES IN BOYCOTT CAMPAIGNS?

SL: I’m not in any position to comment on the advisability of this
tactic for particular campaigns today, but speaking more generally,
schools and universities in particular are a very promising site of
struggle. On the one hand, it may not be a major driver of profits for
a giant corporation like Starbucks. But it's also where a whole
generation of both potential workers and coffee drinkers are getting
introduced to the company. And even if universities aren’t
the_ _central source of profits, a movement on campus _can _do a
lot of damage to their brand, while training a new generation of young
organizers and activists.

In most universities you have a large, sympathetic grouping of
students capable of winning clear demands through escalating campaigns
and dramatic actions. You can start with people wearing the same color
shirt one day to support the effort, and over time escalate to things
like occupying admin buildings, doing encampments, shutting down
campus by blocking the main entrances, you name it. There’s just so
much fun, creative disruption that’s possible on campus.

So obviously in the universities that have a company you’re
targeting, or that provide their product in dining halls or campus
stores, you can demand to get rid of them. But folks can also find all
the universities that don't have that company, and they can demand the
university pledge not to hire or buy from them until they start
bargaining in good faith with the union. 

And calling for kicking a company off campus could also become a
bargaining issue for campus unions — when you can get both campus
students and workers working together on demanding the university dump
law breaking companies, that’s a sweet spot. And you don’t need to
call it a boycott, you are calling on the university to throw
union-busting law breakers off campus. 

The other thing about universities is the generally overlapping
relationship between trustees and broader power structures — people
on university boards are often business and political leaders. Those
are great targets. A lot of times you have universities and pension
funds investing directly into companies, so another potential tactic
is to demand divestment of pension plans from the corporation. And you
can campaign for the university to not only divest from union busters
but also bring in union companies, which creates additional pressure
as well.

EB: CAMPUS BOYCOTTS ARE ALSO A STRUCTURE TEST, RIGHT? IF YOU CAN'T GET
A BOYCOTT TO CATCH ON UNIVERSITIES, THERE'S PROBABLY NO WORLD IN WHICH
YOU CAN GET IT TO CATCH BEYOND. AND CONVERSELY, IF IT _DOES_ CATCH
ON UNIVERSITIES, THEN YOU HAVE A DEMONSTRATION EFFECT AND IT COULD
SPREAD.

SL: I’ve seen over and over again how university organizing can
build and sustain momentum for broader struggles. Many key victories
in the Justice for Janitors
[[link removed]] campaign,
like the months-long University of Miami strike, were won at
universities through strong student support.

Part of that is raising publicity through dramatic actions, as well as
making whatever financial impact you can have. But in universities
there is also the potential to build an army of people who are willing
to get arrested to support the union. For example, every time a
unionizing worker is fired, do we have hundreds, then thousands of
volunteers we can tap to respond? Say Mary Smith gets fired for
unionizing — can we get 500 students sitting in at these four stores
and blocking the doors to bring Mary Smith back? What’s the
escalating civil disobedience in response to the company’s most
egregious union busting? Building a volunteer army can be a direct way
to disrupt the company, to keep the public aware of their misdeeds,
and to raise the cost on them for breaking the law.

Secondary boycott laws, injunctions and other potential litigation
limit what actions unions can call for and support. So it's all about
unleashing people’s militancy and creativity. Movements need to get
to the crisis point where things are so out of control that companies
wake up everyday worrying what and where they will be hit next.

The story becomes: more and more people are getting involved, more and
more places are directly confronting what the company is doing. And
when you get that dynamic going you can unleash the creativity of a
mass movement, especially one led by young people.

If you can set that dynamic off, folks will have a ball and they will
think of more and more creative things to do to maximize disruption
and publicity. And that’s what you need to win.

_STEPHEN LERNER is an American
[[link removed]] labor and community
organizer. He has organized janitors, farm workers, garment workers,
and other low-wage workers into unions._

_ERIC BLANC is Assistant Professor of Labor Studies, Rutgers
University. _

_Author of the books Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave
and Working-Class Politics
[[link removed]] (Verso
2019) and Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics
Across the Russian Empire, 1882-1917 
[[link removed]](Brill
2021), Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at
Rutgers University, researching strikes, new workplace organizing,
digital labor activism, and working-class politics._

_You can receive a newsletter of his research
here: laborpolitics.substack.com
[[link removed]]_

_His writings have appeared in journals such as Politics & Society,
New Labor Forum, and Labor Studies Journal as well as publications
such as The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin._

_A longtime labor activist, Blanc is an organizer trainer in
the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee
[[link removed]]._

_He can be reached at eric.blanc [at] rutgers.edu_

_LABOR POLITICS offers analyses of strikes, working-class politics and
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* Labor
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* Boycott
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* United Farm Workers
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