ABSTRACT
Two factors have helped to move the use of corporate campaigns well beyond the labor movement proper. The first is the origin of the campaign, which, as we have seen, owes much to social, religious, and other progressive activists with diverse agendas of their own. Through the Midwest Academy, through the National Council of Churches, and through a host of other organizations, the campaign has emerged as an accepted form of essentially political leverage-using the pressure generated against individual corporations or industries not only as a means to impose the campaigning group’s agenda on the target, but often as a means to highlight perceived deficiencies and force changes in public policy. The logic of this approach is that, by demanding change on the part of influential corporations, the antagonists can leverage the target’s discomfiture into support for their desired policy changes. The policies in question can range from affirmative action and civil rights to environmental protection, international trade, and human rights, or even to the domestic politics of other countries. Such a game was played, for example, with respect to the political situations in Burma and Indonesia in the 1980s and 1990s, in which attacks on such diverse companies as Freeport McMoRan, Nike, Pepsico, and Unocal were used to bring economic pressure and political embarrassment to bear on regimes that were anathema to the international human rights community.
