Today, fewer than six in 100 private sector American workers are in a union — the lowest level in over a century. Yet public approval of unions has been hovering around 70%, the highest level of support in 60 years. What if there were a way to mobilize that broad public support to fuel a union comeback — by tapping consumer purchasing power?
It’s not a new idea. Boycotts (refusing unfairly produced goods and services) and buycotts (favoring union-made goods) are tools that go back to the earliest days of the American labor movement. But they’ve been largely left to rust in labor’s toolbox.
Label unionism
In 1874, San Francisco cigar makers became the first to affix a union label to what they made, and the idea caught fire over the next few decades. By 1909, 68 unions that were affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had some kind of label. That year, the AFL set up a Union Label and Service Trades Department to coordinate efforts to promote the union label.
A book published by the Union Label department in 1915 touted the strategy’s virtues: “The union label is a weapon with which the trade union arms the fair employer and disarms the unfair employer …. It accomplishes by peaceful means, with absolute certainty and at little cost, that which the strike and boycott seek to accomplish, always at great cost and sacrifice.”
In fact, the union label was one of labor’s top strategies in that era. To show that products were made by union workers, union labels were sewn into clothing, attached to hat bands, stamped on printed material, engraved on horseshoes, or displayed on the labels on cans. To show that retail establishments employed union members, union “shop cards” were displayed in storefront windows and behind the counters at bars, butcher shops, restaurants, and barber shops. To show that workers themselves were paid-up union members, union pins were worn by street car drivers, musicians, and construction trades workers. The tactic made unionism highly visible, and it made it easier for the public to support union enterprises.
How effective was it? Dana Frank, a professor of history at University of California Santa Cruz, has spent decades researching and writing about the historic use of the union label. In a 2016 paper, Frank said the union label thrived in economic sectors where working-class consumers bought products or services.
“It was especially effective in industries in which union men purchased low-priced goods in front of their union brothers, such as beer or the quintessential union-labelled product, the cigar, bought in bars,” Frank wrote.
Frank thinks the union label had its heyday in the 1920s, when the AFL was on the defense and strongly emphasized labor-management cooperation. But labor’s promotion of the union label continued well past that peak.
In 1938, the Union Label department began organizing gigantic “Union Industries” shows to expose the public to union goods and services. The events featured product displays, giveaways, and exhibits by union folk of all sorts, including air traffic controllers, firefighters, and letter carriers, and even skill demonstrations by union sheet metal workers, bricklayers, and others. The shows became annual after 1950. The 1960 show, held in Washington, DC, began with a ceremonial ribbon cutting by president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Portland, Oregon, hosted the union industries show in 1962, 1992, and again in 2005, when it drew more than 200,000 visitors to the Oregon Convention Center.
But attendance dwindled, and so did interest by unions in fronting the cost of the shows. The 2008 show, held in Detroit, had just 50,000 visitors. It was the last.
The 1970s saw one important resurgence of union label promotion. Starting in 1959, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) had begun insisting that its contracts with employers contain a clause requiring that a union label be sewn into all garments made in unionized shops. In the 1970s, as imported garments started flooding into the United States, the union launched a major television ad campaign with union members singing a catchy jingle called “Look for the Union Label.” The ads aired for about seven years and were widely popular, but the campaign to save union apparel jobs from displacement by cheap foreign imports was doomed. Today as little as 3% of the apparel bought in the United States is made domestically.
Boycott, even in the face of repression
Labor’s ultimate weapon may be the strike, but the strike’s close cousin is the boycott. Like the union label, the boycott dates back to the earliest days of the union movement. In a 1916 book published by John Hopkins University, professor Leo Wolman argued that the boycott had been the most effective weapon of unionism in the 1880s and 1890s. Wolman found that most boycotts were imposed as additional pressure on an employer when a strike hadn’t achieved success in the first few weeks. Boycotts could enlist the power of the buying public and other workers to turn the tide.
Employers fought furiously against the tactic, forming a group called the American Anti-Boycott Association and appealing routinely for court orders forbidding the boycott. In the 1900s and 1910s, two of those court cases went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, showing both how central boycotts were to the union movement and how far union leaders were willing to go to support them. In both cases, companies called the AFL’s promotion of a boycott “a conspiracy to restrain interstate trade,” saying they violated the anti-monopoly Sherman Antitrust Act.
In an anti-boycott suit by a fur hat maker in Danbury, Connecticut, the AFL settled the case by paying what would be equivalent to $5.9 million in today’s dollars.
In the anti-boycott lawsuit by the Buck Stove and Range Company in St. Louis, Missouri, a judge ordered a halt to the boycott, and when the AFL continued to list the company as unfair in its magazine, the judge found AFL president Sam Gompers in contempt of court and sentenced him to a year in prison. In the end Gompers spent only one day in jail but only because the conviction was overturned on several legal technicalities.
Because judicial decisions like that grossly violated the spirit of a law that had been aimed at reining in corporate monopolies, Congress passed new legislation making it clear that law didn’t apply to unions.
But repression directed at union boycotters took place at every level. In 1910, Portland City Council passed an ordinance making it illegal for any person to attempt to dissuade others from purchasing from any business or to picket or banner outside any business — activities that the ordinance said were a daily occurence in Portland, Oregon. The ordinance specified penalties of up to $300 and up to 90 days in jail. Unionists openly defied the law and gathered signatures to refer the ordinance to voters, who overwhelmingly struck it down.
Decline
The boycott and the union label were such a big part of labor’s tactical arsenal. What happened?
The digitized archives of this newspaper paint a statistical portrait of the steady decline of boycott and the union label as labor tactics. The phrase “union label” appears 180 times a year in the 1910s and 1920s, 130 times a year from the 1930s to 1950s, and then drops off steadily, bottoming out at 2 times year since 2020. Meanwhile the word “boycott” appears about 50 times a year from 1910-1930, drops to 30 times a year in the 1930s, 20 from the ‘40s to the ‘70s, and less than 10 times a year since the ‘80s.
The Union Label and Service Trades Department still exists, but its annual budget has fallen from $1.7 million in the early 2000s to $513,000 last year. It has its own independent structure and funding — 30 unions are considered affiliates, paying dues of 4 cents per member up to a maximum of $9,224.
But all that remains of the Union Label department is a web site, a publication, and one full-time staffperson who works remotely from upstate New York. Richard Kline has been Union Label’s sole employee for the last 17 years. A former New York City school teacher who later served as an instructor at the AFL-CIO’s now-defunct George Meany Center (a union college that ran from 1969 to 2015), he came to the department after serving as communications director for the Glass Molders union for 31 years. The department’s web site, unionlabel.org, features a database of union products and services. Its publication, begun in 1975, is called the Label Letter. Six times a year 12,000 copies are distributed through union offices. Two of its eight pages list “Do Buy” union-made products and the boycott list; the rest is repurposed copy from other AFL-CIO communications.
Every few years, the national AFL-CIO convention approves another resolution drafted by Union Label department that affirms support for efforts to promote the union label. The resolutions then gather dust. For example, a 2005 resolution declares the 10 days after Thanksgiving to be Buy Union Week, and says “all national and international unions of the AFL-CIO will use all available means to publicize Buy Union Week.” Though the resolution remains in effect, today not even the Union Label Department promotes it.
Boycotting as well appears to have become close to an afterthought. According to procedures adopted at the 2011 AFL-CIO convention, affiliates are supposed to have a strategic plan and timetable for a boycott. If there’s no objection from any other union that has a contract with the targeted employer, a company will be placed on the AFL-CIO’s boycott list for a year, renewed annually by request of the affiliate “where an organizing or bargaining campaign is actively in place.”
This year, CWA’s boycott of T-Mobile for union-busting was added to the list of AFL-CIO-endorsed targets. But other listed boycotts stay on the list year after year like zombies. The Albany, New York, law firm Gleason, Dunn, Walsh & O’Shea has been listed on the list since 2011 at AFSCME’s request, without any campaign or even public information about why they’re boycotted. The most recent issue of the Label Letter lists a national boycott against Seattle food distributor Catapult NW. It was placed on the list in November 2023 by UNITE HERE with the unanimous approval of Catapult workers. But workers got a union contract in March 2024; UNITE HERE ended the boycott and now officially encourages patronage of the company. And a year and a half later, it’s still on the national AFL-CIO’s boycott list.
Resurgence?
UNITE HERE — which represents hotel workers — is the one big exception to the disappearance of the boycott and buycott, because it still makes active and ongoing use of both tactics. At fairhotel.org, you can search for and find union hotels by location, and also see which hotels are in or near a labor dispute. A spokesperson for UNITE HERE says the union has had great success with the campaign in putting pressure on hotels to sign fair agreements. The union promotes the site to convention planners and to labor-friendly organizations. More than 200 organizations have signed a pledge not to hold a meeting at a boycotted hotel, and the union even coaches meeting planners how to negotiate rental agreements that allow no-fee event cancellation in case of a labor dispute.
Retired labor educator Bob Bussel, former director of the Labor Education and Research Center of the University of Oregon, first came to work for labor in 1976 as one of 30 full-time coordinators of a clothing union boycott of union-busting J.P. Stevens. Bussel says traditionally a successful boycott requires at least two key ingredients. First, it must target a company whose goods or services are widely known, sold directly to consumers, and rely on the reputation of their brand. And second, unions have to commit sufficient resources to support boycotts — which can take time to make their impact felt. It’s not enough just to declare a boycott and hope the word will trickle out and consumers will line up to observe it.
In fact, boycotts appear to be alive and well in other movements. They’ve lately become a tactic of culture war conservatives. In 2023, Bud Light saw its sales drop by double digits after Kid Rock called a boycott to protest the signing of transgender TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney as a brand ambassador. Target lost sales too when it was boycotted — first by the cultural right for promoting LGBTQ Pride Month merchandise, and then by the cultural left for abandoning DEI initiatives. Meanwhile a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel for human rights abuses of Palestinians has spread worldwide. And in an echo of the repression faced by labor boycotts in the early 20th century, anti-BDS laws have passed in 38 states, for example requiring government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel.
Could boycotts also gain traction for organized labor? Bussel thinks the moment would be ripe for labor to revive the boycott as a means of exerting pressure, because public support of unions is at a historic high, news media have been paying close attention to union struggles, and social media makes it possible to disseminate a boycott message quickly and broadly.
What about the union label? Could such a tactic work again? There’s arguably a need for it. In the absence of the union label, other labels have proliferated, like Fair Trade Certified, FSC-certified (for sustainably harvested lumber), or USDA organic (grown without toxic pesticides). Most of the new labels are based on companies paying a third party to certify adherence to a set of standards. Presumably they do that because at least some consumers are more likely to choose products with those labels, and may even pay a premium for them.
But none of those labels are good at certifying that workers are treated fairly. Back in the 1910s and 1920s, the Industrial Workers of the World and some state and local AFL leaders called for one universal union label instead of the 60-plus union labels of that era. With the near-disappearance of union labels since then, that idea might be easier to dust off.
A century ago, union labels and boycotts helped ordinary people use their dollars to steer the economy toward fairness. Today, with public support for unions soaring, those long-forgotten tools could be ready for a second life. If consumers are willing to look for labels that protect forests or certify fair trade abroad, why not a label that certifies dignity for the workers who made the product? Labor doesn’t lack public support; it just lacks a mechanism to channel it.
