The Private Roots of Public Regulation: The Case of the National Consumers League

• In Event: 056 - Regular Session. Consumers and Consumption

Abstract

A substantial body of literature addresses the consumer’s prospective role in the struggle for better wages and working conditions in the developing world. While proponents of “conscientious consumerism” believe that buyers will pay a premium for “fairness and sustainability," and therefore place their faith in labels, codes of conduct, and “buycotts” designed to reward “ethical” employers, their critics worry that “stateless regulation” will not only fail to combat the worst forms of workplace abuse but will at times “crowd out” public efforts with better prospects. Who is correct? Are public and private regulatory efforts alternative—or potentially even complementary—means toward the same ends, or hostile rivals that are inherently incompatible with each other? I set out to address the question by reconsidering the National Consumers League’s gradual evolution from labeling to lobbying in the early twentieth century United States, and find that private regulatory efforts that are ineffective on their own terms need neither supplant nor substitute for their public counterparts but may instead set the stage for more deliberate efforts to combat market injustice by simultaneously forcing and facilitating government action—a finding that is buttressed by the discovery of similar links between public and private regulators in the developing world today. The results are doubly important, for they not only speak to the ambivalent prospects for “political consumerism” in a world of sophisticated marketing and public relations but simultaneously underscore the “maternalist” origins of the regulatory state in the Progressive Era.

Author

• Andrew Schrank, Brown University