The term “ethical consumerism” is, today, largely associated with individual efforts to make more conscientious choices about what products and services to buy. We might try to buy from companies that market themselves as environmentally friendly or avoid brands that we know are engaged in egregious labor abuses.
These efforts are obviously well-intentioned. But while they may have some minimal impact in pushing individual companies toward less destructive practices for public relations purposes, they do almost nothing to address the systemic problems of climate change, sweatshop labor, and the like. They allow consumers to feel better about their purchases, but efforts at shopping ethically are usually disconnected from any broader vision of social change — and from larger movements that could bring about that sort of change.
It wasn’t always this way. In the United States beginning in the Progressive Era, a movement composed largely of middle- and upper-middle-class women organized under the banner of “ethical consumption” to demand labor protections and minimum-wage laws. Their efforts initially focused on eliminating child labor and addressing the plight of low-wage women workers. But by the New Deal era, voluntary-membership consumers’ groups were fighting for protections for all workers, including collective bargaining rights.
In the 1930s, leaders of groups like the National Consumers’ League (NCL) and the League of Women Shoppers (LWS) — many of whom were social democrats, socialists, or Communists — saw these fights as part of a larger effort to curb the power of big business and empower ordinary people, as both workers and consumers, by raising their “purchasing power.” This was necessary to prevent the kind of egregious inequality that made the Great Depression possible, consumer activists thought, and to thereby strengthen American democracy.
A number of factors worked to marginalize this current of left-wing activism in the postwar period, but not before the movement had chalked up significant victories, most notably the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938. This largely forgotten history is worth revisiting, as it reminds us of the importance of connecting ethical criticisms of capitalist business-as-usual to large-scale visions of social change. It also underlines the importance of tapping into the force most capable of realizing those visions: the organized working class.