PRACTICAL VIEW / ON STAGING BOYCOTTS : The Power of Pulling Purse Strings

The 1992 edition of Todd Putnam’s National Boycott News is just off the press, bombarding readers with a dizzying chronicle of the nation’s boycott players, including:

* Traditional adversaries like the United Farm Workers versus the Grape Growers Coalition.

* Non-traditional adversaries like Queer Nation versus Boy Scouts of America and United Way.

* Corporations of every stripe. Some are boycotted for their products (Trade West, by Media Watch for producing video games suggestive of gang rape); others for their manufacturing practices (Scott Paper, by environmental groups for spraying herbicides in Nova Scotia); still others for outside interests (Estee Lauder, by Women & Guns, a lobby, for contributing to anti-gun initiatives).

Boycotting is an old weapon with new ammunition.

It might still involve a picket line of striking farm workers with “Boycott Lettuce” signs. But these days it also is media-savvy activists wheeling a load of Exxon credit cards to the mailbox for a platoon of TV cameras, or Meryl Streep testifying before Congress on behalf of Mothers and Others for Pesticide Limits.

“You know it’s working when you’re on CNN,” says one boycott veteran.

Putnam’s irregularly published Boycott News, with its mix of news, background stories, analysis pieces and tips, offers a comprehensive window on the churning activity--but without taking sides.

“We just want to keep readers and consumers posted,” says Putnam. His Seattle-based paper serves as a clearinghouse, listing boycotts and the organizations behind them, along with corporate responses and recent developments.

Putnam, 29, who dropped out of college in 1984 to start the paper, regards this as a healthy surge of citizen activity. The Boston Tea Party, he notes, was a boycott, and the civil rights movement was fueled by boycotts.

Today’s consumers, he says, increasingly suspect that their best interests are not being served by either big government or giant corporations.

“A boycott is a good way for consumers to learn about their political power and the power of their pocketbook,” he says. “We have ‘lite’ and we have ‘nonfat’ food products today because companies responded to consumer demand.”

The newsletter is largely the volunteer work of Putnam and Timothy Muck, executive editor. They live and work in a brick apartment house near the University of Washington. Their one-room office, crammed with boxes of boycott folders, is so low-tech it lacks even a photocopier.

They get all sorts of inquiries, including letters from people who want to launch personal boycotts--such as canceling a subscription because they don’t like a magazine’s editorial policy. Although that may be psychologically satisfying, says Putnam, in his eyes a legitimate boycott is something more collective.

It’s tricky work: After a boycott is reported, he notifies the target company. If they respond, and accounts of the dispute don’t conflict, Putnam prints both sides. But if the opponents disagree on the facts, and they frequently do, Putnam consults a third party.

“We used to have trouble getting responses from the target companies,” he says. “They would just shrug us off. Our first newsletter was only eight pages.”

But after eight years of publishing on an “irregular annual basis,” Putnam got caught in the boycott boom of the 1990s, touched off by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. With a surge in grass-roots boycotts and an unexpected deluge of corporate responses and counterclaims, Putnam was on the verge of boycott gridlock.

“We have not been on vacation, we’ve just been quite busy,” he writes in the new edition, which has a printing of 20,000. For $10, subscribers receive one issue and three updates on boycott activity.

For Putnam, who earns a living by doing odd jobs for friends, “it’s a very subsistence level of existence.” But he’s had an effect.

“He’s a hard-working young man who has given extraordinary time and energy to boycotts,” Monroe Friedman, a psychology professor at Eastern Michigan University, says of Putnam. “He’s providing important information.” Friedman has studied boycotts for 25 years and finds them difficult to evaluate. “It’s very hard to track the success rate because no one likes to come forth and say, ‘We caved in,’ ” he says. “Still, there have been some successes.”

One reason, he says, is that companies dread being hit with a boycott. Although only 18% of Americans have participated in boycotts, studies show, those who do tend to be affluent and well-educated--the last group a company wants to alienate. And one-third of adults surveyed in a 1990 Gallup Poll said they have boycotted a product because of a company’s environmental record.

“Boycotts are the wave of the future,” declares Michael Petrelis of Washington, D.C., who, with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, has launched a national boycott against Marlboro cigarettes and Miller beer because their manufacturer, Philip Morris Inc., contributes to Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who opposes gay rights.

ACT UP is one of the groups on Putnam’s informal list of effective boycotters. Others with successful track records run the political gamut from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (opposing cosmetic companies’ testing procedures) to the Rev. Don Wildmon’s American Family Assn. (targeting “anti-Christian bias” in entertainment).

Boycott effectiveness depends on a number of factors, but rule No. 1 is to “keep it focused,” says Dave Phillips, whose Earth Island Institute Dolphin Project is credited with changing the tuna industry’s fishing techniques. “Do your homework and don’t underestimate the power of the consumer to get involved if given information,” advises Phillips.

The tuna effort--which involved lawsuits, court injunctions, smuggled videotapes, millions of dollars, schoolchildren protests and a massive letter-writing campaign--is considered a watershed. “It’s a wave, and I have to say we were lucky in our timing,” says Phillips. “The same campaign with the same images 10 years earlier would not have worked.”

Also in their favor, he says, was Anthony O’Reilly, chairman of H. J. Heinz, owner of StarKist Tuna. “Heinz was our big target, and when they decided to go dolphin-safe, we had to make sure the announcement was not just lip service. It wasn’t; they went all the way. It took a very forward-thinking CEO to do that.”

O’Reilly says Heinz learned that consumers are increasingly aware of a company’s reputation: “When we recognized in late 1989 that consumer concern had increased dramatically, our response was swift, sincere and effective.”

The celebrated 1990 StarKist news conference announcing the dolphin-safe policy is not an isolated victory. Putnam’s current Boycott News lists almost 100 boycotts that have ended since 1989. “Success can be hard to measure,” he says, “but we want people to know that boycotts can work.”

Putnam also says a boycott should be a last resort, enacted after attempts to negotiate have failed.

Putnam’s model for the perfect boycott is one that never materialized: Long-term negotiations between the Environmental Defense Fund and McDonald’s ended with a joint news conference in 1990 announcing that McDonald’s would ban polystyrene packaging at its 8,500 U.S. restaurants.

“That,” Putnam says, “was a success.”