Boycott

“ Another most grave aspect of the boycott agitation has been the constant attempt to excite disaffection against Government by public meetings, speeches, propagandist tours, newspapers, pamphlets, songs, flaunting and noisy processions, and dramatic performances. Every effort has been made to try and persuade the people that the Government is hostile, callous, and neglectful and that boycott, and its kindred measures, are the means by which to bring it to a better course. ”

“ I urge, therefore, upon every knight in the State to boycott this road that is the enemy of labor. Do not ride in its cars. Drive your stock to some competing line, and do not sell your grain where it will be shipped by them. Let the boycott be absolute and complete so far as your patronage goes. Have nothing to do with those who are in business and employ this road in any capacity. Spend your dollars with those who are the friends of organized labor. Persuade your friends to adopt the same course. ”

“ In later usage, the word "boycott" has been applied almost exclusively to the refusal of economic cooperation. Organized labor in America used the boycott against the goods of manufacturers who refused to deal with unions, and it is still used in appeals to the public not to patronize stores or manufacturers who deal unfairly with labor. ”

“ According to the evidence the chief boycotts had been aimed at bakers, brewers, cigar-makers, starch-makers, flour millers, and newspapers. Most of these were claimed by the union as successes.
At this time the boycott had become an established institution in labour quarrels, and had its press organ in the New York Boycotter. As then understood the industrial boycott was, perhaps, best defined in a labour organ known as John Swinton's Paper: 'To boycott a concern simply means to refrain from having anything to do with it. You boycott a dry goods firm by refusing to deal with it ”

“ A boycott is a mass refusal to patronize a certain business with the effort to persuade others to join in the refusal. Historically it has been used by labor to gain support from the public against an employer or by elements of the public itself to protest some evil practice of a business establishment, e.g., Legion of Decency boycotts of indecent pictures, NODL boycotts of literature, etc. In itself, a boycott is not immoral, since no one is obliged to trade in one place in preference to another and may refuse to trade with persons who are unjust or otherwise immoral. ”

“ The boycott.—The boycott is a comparatively recent device for enlarging the field of combat to include not only the employés of an establishment but the consumers of its products. This is especially applicable to those industries the products of which are largely consumed by wage-earners, whose sympathies can be depended upon to carry it out. It asks all sympathizers to refuse to purchase products from the employer or firm attacked. A great bakery, for instance, can easily be ruined by a boycott, if its customers are chiefly wage-earners. ”

“ But the Court errs in concluding that the product boycott conducted by the Union in these cases was protected primary activity. As the Court points out, a typical form of secondary boycott is the visitation of sanctions on Employer A, with whom the union has no dispute, in order to force him to cease doing business with Employer B, with whom the union does have a dispute. ”

“ A less conspicuous but none the less effective weapon in the hands of labor is the boycott, 1 which is carried by some of the unions to a terrible 178 perfection. It reached its greatest power in the decade between 1881 and 1891. Though it was aimed at a great variety of industries, it seemed to be peculiarly effective in the theater, hotel, restaurant, and publishing business, and in the clothing and cigar trades. For sheer arbitrary coerciveness, nothing in the armory of the union is so effective as the boycott. A flourishing business finds its trade gone overnight. ”

“ There is a strike on down there, and I spoke against arbitrating labor grievances, and against the ghastly sham of getting the rights of the poor from a picked judge and a packed jury. Bombs and boycott make the best mill for grinding out justice to starving, over-worked men and women. ”

“ Some of the American trade unions define boycotting as 'simply leaving an employer alone.' 'When,' they say, 'we boycott a thing, we leave it alone—we won't have it.' It will, however, be seen presently that in some of the most extreme cases this neutral line has been much exceeded. ”

“ To read Shaw or Wells or Gilbert or Cecil Chesterton or Quiller Couch or any one of twenty others in the "New Witness" is to be in another world from the sludge and grind of the official weekly. But the boycott is rigid and therefore the supply is intermittent. It is not only a boycott of advertisement: it is a boycott of quotation. Most of the governing class know the Free Press. The vast lower middle class does not yet know that it exists. ”

“ Their names are enrolled on the books of the haters of free labor for a boycott in the future, but they are also enrolled in the deepest recesses of the memory of every good and true citizen, and their manly efforts for the establishment of the principle of individual liberty will never be forgotten. ”

“ If the cause of the boycott is some disagreement between the maker of the raw material and his workmen, the measure amounts to the threat of a sympathetic strike in aid of the aggrieved workers. If the cause is the fact that the materials were made in a non-union shop, the men who thus made them have no grievance, but the union in the trade to which these men belong has one. It consists in the mere fact that the non-union men are working at the trade at all and that their employer is finding a market for their product. ”

“ The masters of the Labor Trust, not to be outdone in bidding for unholy notoriety, had the insolence to invite this blasphemous charlatan to their riot of revolutionary ranting called a 'protest meeting.' He and other creatures of his ilk, summoning the forces which are organizing red ruin in our city, proceed to rave at the police and the courts for denying to mobs of strikers the right to throw brickbats at honest workers looking for jobs, and to hold the pistol of the boycott at the heads of employers who dare to stand for American liberty and democracy! ”

“ Such a proposition is at variance with the American instinct, and will find no support, in my judgment, when submitted to the American people. The secondary boycott is an instrument of tyranny, and ought not to be made legitimate. ”

“ Puck said of Trades-Union tyranny on April 28th, 1886: “The boycott business is bad. But it is an extravagant, monstrous, impossible thing, that the laws of a free country must crush out, sooner or later. This other evil flourishes in secret and strikes at the laborer’s self-respect. ”

“ For instance, the days of the Land League in Ireland originated the word boycott, which was the name of a very unpopular landlord, Captain Boycott. The people refused to work for him, and his crops rotted on the ground. From this time any one who came into disfavor and whom his neighbors refused to assist in any way was said to be boycotted. Therefore to boycott means to punish by abandoning or depriving a person of the assistance of others. At first it was a notoriously slang word, but now it is standard in the English dictionaries.
Politics add to our slang words and phrases. ”

“ The boycott is lawful if the employer agrees to abide by this collective bargaining agreement. It is unlawful if the employer reneges.
The hostile attitude of labor against patronizing or handling 'unfair' goods goes deep into our history. ”

“ They may thus boycott the mantels of a dwelling house and refuse to put them in position, or, in case they have been put in position by other workmen, they may, as an extreme measure, refuse to do further work on the house until they are taken out. A producers' boycott, such as this, falls in quite a different category from the direct consumers' boycott, or the refusal to use a completed article. When a raw material is put under the ban, workers strike if an employer insists on using it. ”

“ The boycotters then demanded $2500 for paying their boycott expenses. When news of this attempt at extortion was made public, it heightened the tide of sympathy, the courts took up the matter, and the boycott failed. The New York Boycotter, a journal devoted to this form of coercion, declared: “In boycotting we believe it to be legitimate to strike a man financially, socially, or politically. We believe in hitting him where it will hurt the most; we believe in remorselessly crowding him to the wall ”

“ It is chiefly, however, as an accessory to the labour conflict that the boycott is called into requisition, and in this way its application as a branch of industrial warfare has, in the United States, been brought to a pitch of perfection not attained, or, indeed, attempted elsewhere. Sometimes it is directed to stop the supplies of a manufacturer's raw material—the stoppage of his supplies of labour can hardly strictly be termed a result of the boycott, as it is simply an incident of the ordinary strike. ”

“ We do not read the words 'other person' in the phrase 'forcing or requiring * * * any employer or other person' to extend protection from the effects of a secondary boycott to such other person when the secondary employer himself, the employer of the employees involved, consents to the boycott. When he does consent it cannot appropriately be said that there is a strike or concerted refusal to handle goods on the part of the employees. ”

“ The boycott is a conspiracy to injure another person, and as such indictable at common law. A strike, if a conspiracy only to raise wages or to reduce hours of labor, may not be indictable, if its object cannot be shown to be the injury of another, though that may be incidentally its effect. But in its incidents, such as violence, intimidation, and in some cases injury to the public welfare, it often becomes an indictable offense. ”

“ All the resources of the more conservative 180 unions and of the American Federation of Labor have been enlisted to make it effective in extreme instances where the strike has failed. This application of the method can best be illustrated by the two most important cases of boycott in our history, the Buck’s Stove and Range case and the Danbury Hatters’ case. Both were fought through the Federal courts, with the defendants backed by the American Federation and opposed by the Anti-Boycott Association, a federation of employers. ”

“ This is the “secondary boycott,” the legality of which is vigorously denied by the English courts, the federal courts, and by the courts of many of the states of this nation. Without presenting the authorities, which are multitudinous, suffice it to state the other view in language of the President of the United States but recently uttered: “A body of workmen are dissatisfied with the terms of their employment. They seek to compel their employer to come to their terms by striking. They may legally do so. The loss and inconvenience he suffers he cannot complain of. ”

“ The industrial boycott almost invariably, but not always or necessarily, is a phase of the strike or lock-out, but it sometimes exists apart from either. It is generally used against an employer who refuses to concede the demands of his workpeople or of a trade union, but it is sometimes applied by one organization of workmen against another. It may accompany, or supplement and follow, an unsuccessful strike, or it may be wielded against an employer having no dispute with his employés, simply because they do not belong to any trade union. ”

“ A boycott voluntarily engaged in by a secondary employer for his own business reasons, perhaps because the unionization of other employers will protect his competitive position or because he identifies his own interests with those of his employees and their union, is not covered by the statute. Likewise, a union is free to approach an employer to persuade him to engage in a boycott, so long as it refrains from the specifically prohibited means of coercion through inducement of employees. ”

“ The boycott in the conflicts of capital and labour is one of the links in the chain of retaliatory warfare which generally draws the combatants from one measure of offence to another. Its place in the policy of labour revolt may be said to come after the more neutral stages of an industrial struggle have been gone through. First we have the strike or lock-out. Then as its almost inevitable accompaniments, the blockade of the works by the pickets of the men, and the blacklisting of the strikers by the employers in order to prevent them obtaining work elsewhere. ”

“ While nearly everywhere else the unions may strike, picket, and boycott, in America there [333] are laws to prevent both picketing and boycotting, and even some forms of strikes. The most extraordinary despotic judicial powers are exercised to crush the unions, to break strikes, and to imprison union men. And, if paid professional armies of detectives deal with the unions, so paid professional armies of politicians deal with the socialists. ”

“ But apart from the presumption that the corporation was acting only within its powers and from the burden resting on the doer of a prima facie illegal act, the boycott, to justify it, we agree with the Government that it would be absurd to suppose that a cooperative society organized for the special purpose of aiding its members should confine its business to the illegal sale of the products of non-members. ”

“ The same power was to be brought to bear upon the workmen, who assumed the right to be independent, by seeking to "compel" them to "obey laws of the organizations to which they should properly belong." Not content with boycotting the employer, they must arrange a boycott upon a fellow-workman, because he might decline to join one of their unions. ”