Bargaining With Boycotts : Special-interest groups are using pocketbook power to achieve social change.

Timber interests at odds with environmentalists threaten to boycott Stroh’s beer unless the brewer withdraws funding for an Audubon Society television program.

Environmentalists say they will boycott Hawaiian-grown macadamia nuts, pineapples, coffee and sugar unless a geothermal project in a rain forest on the Big Island is scrapped.

Moralists prod advertisers to withdraw support for prime-time TV shows deemed overly violent, profane or sexy.

The economic boycott, traditionally a tool of labor unions wrestling for parity with recalcitrant employers, is increasingly becoming a vehicle for special-interest groups trying to bring about social change. Their concerns range from the use of pesticides to the availability of abortions.

Ultimately, however, a boycott’s success depends upon broad support for its goals, and in at least a couple of well-publicized recent cases--including the Stroh’s one--organizers have claimed victory.

Just this month, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor credited its three-year boycott against donating funds to City of Hope as having played a “decisive” role in settling a contract dispute at the Duarte medical facility.

“Again we’ve witnessed what a unified labor movement can do,” said Bill Robertson, federation executive secretary. “The nonprofit sector, especially that segment with a history of support from union members, should take note.”

Boycotts have been a common bargaining tool in the 109 years since a retired British army captain named Charles Cunningham Boycott met social ostracism and eventually fled Ireland after trying to evict impoverished farmers from his English lord’s estate in County Mayo.

“They can be very effective,” said Benjamin Aaron, emeritus professor at the UCLA School of Law and an expert on boycotts. “The most obvious test is if the primary employer capitulates.”

Aaron defined a boycott as “a refusal to deal, to have anything to do, with a product, a person or a company.” It was developed in the labor-management arena, he explained, by union leaders seeking to counter the generally superior bargaining position enjoyed by employers.

Labor unions regularly post lists of establishments that their members are urged not to patronize. The Los Angeles County federation, for example, lists six hotels and restaurants, a manufacturer, a printer and half a dozen miscellaneous firms on its current “Do Not Patronize List.”

In addition, the California Labor Federation has sanctioned boycotts of about a dozen other places of business. And the AFL-CIO Executive Council in Washington identifies 29 national boycott targets, said Susan Dunlop, assistant to the president.

Dunlop said the number of boycotts has remained fairly steady over the years and extends to the 19th Century, even before Capt. Boycott unwittingly gave his name to the activity.

“Unions don’t take this lightly,” she said. “After all, they don’t want to put people out of business. They just want to get bargaining going or get the company to change its stance. It should be one of a number of tools and part of an overall strategy.”

The broadest recent expansion in the use of boycotts has come in the social arena, inspired by the success of nonviolent protests and local boycotts waged throughout the South by civil-rights groups in the 1950s and 1960s, said Irving Bernstein, an emeritus professor of political science at UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations.

“This has become very common,” Bernstein said.

The target might be a foreign-made product, he said, or books and entertainments that one finds offensive. Last February, for example, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini invoked a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses.” The novel, deemed blasphemous, was banned in Islam and provoked bombings and book burnings elsewhere.

In the United States, a group of religious fundamentalists, Christian Leaders for Responsible Television, organized a boycott against products made by Mennen and Clorox because of their sponsorship of programs that it depicted as containing “high incidence of sex, violence, profanity and anti-Christian stereotyping.” (Both companies replied that they follow their own codes of suitability, and Mennen observed in a statement that “it seems that opinions differ in our great country with regard to what is appropriate viewing.”)

Last week, abortion rights groups targeted the Carl’s Jr. chain of fast-food restaurants because of founder Carl Karcher’s support for anti-abortion activities.

Stroh Withdraws

This week’s warning by Pacific Northwest timber interests to Stroh Brewery not to support a film by the Audubon Society on “Ancient Forests: Rage Over Trees” represents “a classic example” of a primary boycott, one limited to the enterprise creating the cause of grievance, whatever its merits, Aaron said.

Stroh on Wednesday confirmed that it withdrew its $600,000 contribution for the program (matched by Turner Broadcasting, which plans to televise it Sept. 24). While the Detroit-based brewer maintained that budgetary needs and not the boycott threat triggered its reconsideration of support, the effect for the loggers’ cause remains the same. (The Audubon Society is one of many environmental groups seeking to have logging halted in the ancient forests, a prime habitat of the Northern spotted owl, on the basis of the bird’s being a threatened or endangered species.)

Boycotts that reach beyond the primary target--for example, against a supermarket that carries a particular product--are generally illegal, Aaron added, but labor laws nowhere define such “secondary” boycotts.

“Certain kinds of boycotts are defined as illegal,” he said, “but (the law) eschews the term secondary because it is difficult to encompass a whole range of human behavior in just one word.”

The United Farm Workers’ longstanding boycott of California table grapes, ostensibly protesting use of certain pesticides, is not illegal in form, he said, because when the union posts pickets at a market, it targets not patronage of the store itself but only purchase of a given product for sale there.

“That’s primarily a consumer boycott,” Aaron said. “That is an accepted form of free expression. You can urge shoppers at Safeway not to buy Washington State apples, if you have a dispute with Washington growers, but you can’t urge them to forsake Safeway stores. And you can’t urge Safeway employees not to work.”

On the other hand, “confrontational” boycotts such as anti-abortion activists waged last summer in barring access to health clinics where abortions are performed are, he said, “clearly illegal.”