Reading the coverage of events in Egypt and how the government was able to instruct phone companies to shut down mobile phone networks brought the idea to my head. There’s probably the *realpolitik *thing that if you start boycotting these companies you probably soon find there’s few companies left with a clean rap sheet! Would mass boycotts in the west of these companies be of benefit to the oppressed people in these countries? Has a campaign like that been effective in the past?
I know in the past goods from Apartheid South Africa were boycotted in this country but I don’t think anyone ever organised to boycott international companies that operate both here and there otherwise.
We live in a global economy. How much business is too much business?
For instance do you boycott a tour company that has trips to the Pyramids?
How do you know where the oil in your car came from? Do you boycott Mobil and Exxon and Shell and Amoco and all the rest and stop driving?
In short, it is difficult to draw lines in these things.
That said some boycott campaigns have been effective in the past in making companies change their policies. IIRC Nike changed where its shoes were made and/or insisted on better worker rights where their shoes are made. Apple recently (not due to a boycott but bad press) twisted the arm of the company that builds their iPhones in China to improve worker conditions.
Well yes, boycotting is hard. But does that mean we shouldn’t do it. Obviously an individual choosing to not buy stuff isn’t going to have much effect on a multi-national corporation. But advocacy groups can choose one corporation, drum up negative publicity, and get a large boycott going. Sure, it’s “unfair” to pick on one corporation when many corporations do the same thing. Life is not fair.
Poor little Sikander in Cairo should not be run out of his job as a office boy in Vodafone in Egypt (which is his family’s only means of support) because Vodafone was forced to end operations in Egypt because Alex in Cincinnati boycotted Vodafone for doing business in a dictatorship.
I think boycotting is useful even if difficult to do accurately, and we just have to try to do it well. If there are real consequences to how companies behave, and if we as customers influence them with our dollars, then we have some obligation to consider those consequences when we vote with our dollars. Of course, being insufficiently thoughtful about it can cost poor little Sikander his livelihood.
I think in some cases, yes. When the company itself is doing extremely immoral things, such as providing weapons for a dictatorship to use against its people, et cetera.
I don’t think telecommunications companies should be punished because just like in the first world democracies, any telco operating within a dictatorship has to follow the laws of that country. Vodafone has to obey U.S. laws in the U.S. and obviously it should have to obey Egyptian laws in Egypt. It isn’t the role of a private telecommunications company to try and rewrite the laws of Egypt, their responsibility is simply transmission of data, they are mostly blameless for having to operate under the laws of Egypt.
I think you just have to draw the line when the company goes above and beyond such things; like when a company materially aids a dictatorship in tracking down dissidents abroad and et cetera. But just for obeying a lawful order to shut down service? Nah, I can’t really blame them for that, it’s Mubarak who is acting improperly there, not the corporation.
It’d probably make more sense to boycott the American companies that actually produced all the tear gas Egypt is using. Of course, since the American public isn’t their consumer anyway, that company isn’t going to much care. Further, it’s because of an agreement we struck with Egypt many years ago in which the United States agreed to give Egypt military aid that causes that trade to happen.
We give Egypt over $1bn a year in military aid, mostly out of an agreement that if we do that they won’t attack Israel. As part of that agreement Egypt was bound to buy a lot of its material from American companies.
The Cuban embargo is a good example of why boycotts over international political issues rarely work. You rarely have a clear target of a corporation that’s doing business directly with an oppressive foreign government and with the general population of the United States.
I ran across a website that claimed any company that had contracts with the military should be boycotted. They gave examples of the companies they wanted boycotted and one of them sold toothpaste to the armed forces. Am I suppose to take something like that seriously?
The concept most people accept is that corporations exist to maximize profits. They have no constraints other than legal. We are at peace with them pushing to the edge of legal. They are designed to be predatory organizations. How can you judge them on an ethical or moral basis?
I agree that the proper place for discouraging exploitative practices is at the government level. We should not be importing items with a bad provenience. Unfortunately, that is pretty unlikely because half the time we are actually funding these dictators.
So. We buy cheaper . We do not care where it is made. That has been made clear. Chinese goods have harmed us but darn ,they are cheaper. They have killed and injured a lot of animals. They have sold tons of plasterboard that releases poisons. They have painted and made kid toys with lead based paint and ceramics. They are still flooding us with goods.
If your government does business with a particular government then why shouldn’t the corporations of your country be allowed to do so, too? As long as they work within the laws of both countries then there shouldn’t be an issue.
Maybe if democratic governments stopped recognizing the legitimacy of governments with dictatorships things might change.
Well, what would it look like, to “not recognize the legitimacy” of undemocratic governments?
Do you mean we should try to contain them, cold war style? Should US-Cuban relations be an exemplar of how to deal with undemocratic governments?
What would be the purpose of such treatment? Would such treatment do any good? In case you hadn’t noticed, the US treatment of Cuba hasn’t exactly been a notable success story in transforming the Cuban government. How long has Castro been dictator again?
Well, the thread is about boycotting companies who business with dictatorships. Why not make a United Democratic Nations where democratic governments do business among themselves and do not do business with the dictators?
I am with Martini. The Vodaphone example is actually the reason why firms like Voda should be in Egypt, and elsewhere. They built an infrastructure that now has partially enabled Egyptians to get around the stultifying regime monopolized jobs and communications.
The simple minded piousness of arguments for “not doing business with dictatorships”(whose definition?) would have condemned Egypt to a Burma type situation (a situation where everything is in the hands of the generals). Firms like Voda etc being in Egypt and elsewhere build up alternatives to purely regime controlled jobs, to purely state centric opportunities and locks them into a regime.
Boycotting doesn’t magically make anything better, it only makes comfortable Westerners have a momentary warm glow at the cost of opportunities and jobs for people otherwise condemned not to have them.
What do you imagine this would accomplish? Would it make the lives of the people living under the dictatorships better? Would it shorten the life of the regimes?
We already have such a system in place against Cuba, how’s that working out for us?
And which countries are we imagining should be included? Some countries are easy, like North Korea. Except North Korea is already completely isolated. Iran? Pakistan? Russia? China?
Were the Chinese people better off when China was isolated? Was the rest of the world better off when China was isolated?
Who knows what it would accomplish because there was always someone willing to trade with them if others were not.
And maybe not a total ban, just a preferred trade solution with those countries that are democratic or taxes on trade goods against those that are not.
You mean you do. I am free to go there as I please. Maybe if everyone was on board with boycotting Cuba then the government would have no funds to support itself and would fail. Who knows?
Which companies should we boycott then? Why them and not the countries themselves that are under dictatorships?
I’m not advocating either solution. I’m just asking why one form of boycott and not another?
I’d advocate boycotts of companies that sell single-purpose tools of repression. So if a company sells waterboards and tear gas to Algeria, they’re doing something evil. But building a phone system is something different, unless only the oligarchs get to use the phone system.