Consumer campaigns for workers’ rights: A historical comparative study of consumer-worker solidarity

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 9: Alternative Solidarities, Cooperation, and Consumer Alliances

Abstract

This paper examines organized consumer involvement in struggles for workers’ rights through a comparative historical analysis of consumer-worker solidarity across different moments of capitalist development. Focusing on three cases – the Progressive Era campaigns of the National Consumers’ League, the late 1960s consumer boycott supporting agricultural workers during the Delano grape strike, and the transnational anti-sweatshop movement at the turn of the twenty-first century – the paper analyzes how consumers have been mobilized to act collectively on behalf of workers with whom they do not share a common occupational position or direct economic interest.
Rather than approaching these campaigns primarily through the lens of ethical or political consumerism, the paper draws on recent sociological debates on solidarity to conceptualize consumer-worker solidarity as a mediated and relational practice that must be actively constructed under specific historical conditions. Using secondary sources and selected primary materials, the analysis compares how solidarity was framed, organized, and enacted in contexts marked by varying labor regimes, institutional protections, and market structures.
Across the cases, consumer solidarity takes different forms that reflect the changing configurations of power and production. Yet a recurring pattern emerges: consumers collectively leverage their position within circuits of exchange to intervene in labor-capital relations, particularly when workers’ own institutional power is weak, excluded, or denied. Through the comparative historical study, the paper demonstrates that consumer-worker solidarity is a recurring and consequential mode of collective action that that adapts to changing labor regimes and market structures.

Author

• Yaniv Ron-El, Bar Ilan University