What is Boycott?
Boycott is a voluntary act or effort of abstaining from purchasing, using, or dealing with a product or an organization as a sign of protest or dislike for goods, services, policies, and other reasons. Most boycotts intend to give pressure to companies to change policies or reform ways and means in order to satisfy supposed customers or clients.

Boycott as a coordinated effort by various people is usually done as the last option in case negotiations with certain companies or organizations fail. Some groups of people try the usual route of having consultations with a particular company’s management to discuss certain issues on a particular product or service. But if these civil talks fail, some organize protest rallies to let the community know of their concerns. Others silently coordinate themselves and just abstain from the involved products or services. What pressures the companies is when the supposed “boycotting” of products and services involves many people. In this case, some people promote the idea of boycotting to other people to make their voices heard.

Like for example when a garment manufacturing company is involved in issues regarding poor labor conditions. When other people know that a particular company may have illegal labor practices or tend to be abusive to its workers, some groups may not like this idea and may want to protect workers’ rights. One way of getting the message to the top management of the company is to boycott the products manufactured by this particular company. In a coordinated effort, groups of people promote to others not to buy any product from this particular company because of labor code violations. In this way, the company’s sales and profit will be affected and may try to address the concern with possible changes in policy.

But aside from abstinence in terms of product purchase, boycotting may also be in the form of non-availment of services of a particular company, non-enrolment to a disliked school, or non-conformance to certain policies of a given organization.