The United States was built on the philosophy of ensuring citizens' rights. Specifically, individuals have rights set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Throughout history, American citizens and consumers have expended considerable energy toward ensuring that organizations, retailers, and governments recognize and adhere to these rights. Further, when citizens believe one of those rights has been overlooked or denied, they join in protest to rectify the perceived injustice.
For example, even before the American Revolution, when they were still English subjects, colonists were disgruntled by the British Parliament's imposition of a tax on tea imports. On December 16, 1773, to protest the tea tax (which had been implemented to help the poorly managed and corrupt East India Tea Company avoid bankruptcy), citizens donned Mohawk Indian disguises, boarded three East India Tea Company ships docked in Boston harbor, and threw 342 chests of Ceylon and Darjeiling tea overboard.
Since the Boston Tea Party, consumers' quests to attain and maintain their rights have continued as an undercurrent of resistance to unfair business and industry practices that directly affected consumers' health, welfare, and safety. However, during certain volatile times (the Progressive era of the late 1890s, the Depression years of the 1930s, and the 1960s through the 1970s), consumer concerns have been more strongly emphasized.
Further, women's magazines (McClure's and Ladies' Home Journal, for example) awakened women to the activist movement as a way of ensuring safe products, achieving justice, and attaining a level of equality (Nader, 1999). Women have been concerned about such issues as price rigging, monopolies, dishonest labeling of medicines, and contaminated food. Outcomes of these efforts have included both self-policing and external policing by some business, industry, and government agencies to protect the environment and consumers.
Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle exposed unsanitary food-processing and meat-packing conditions. The graphic nature of the book sparked a public outcry that led to the passage of legislation by Congress, including the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which created the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
When use of a liquid sulfur drug, Elixir Sulfanilamide, resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people in 1937, the Pure Food and Drug Act was proven to be inadequate. In 1938 the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, became law; before marketing new drugs, manufacturers were required by this law to prove their safety to the FDA.
Consumer concerns were minimized by World War II and did not retake the stage until the early 1960s. President John F. Kennedy, considering consumer protection an important issue, suggested improvements in existing programs and also proposed two new consumer-protection programs: creation of the position of special assistant for consumer affairs (created by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964) and creation of a national oversight board made up of labor, cooperative, and consumer groups, the Consumer Federation of America (established in 1967).
Individuals have played, and continue to play, integral roles in ensuring consumer protection. Ralph Nader, for instance, has led a crusade to ensure consideration and enforcement of consumer rights for more than three decades. Nader and his advocacy groups, known as Nader's Raiders, have investigated complaints, documented harm, determined responsibility, disseminated information about consumer abuse, proposed alternatives, instigated reform, and campaigned to provide the consumers' viewpoint to a wide range of audiences, including government and large corporations. Often these activities not only resulted in important consumer victories; they also resulted in positive changes in the political climate and in the institution of self-regulation to ensure that regulations are met.
From the appearance of the automobile on the American landscape through 1966, when a federal auto safety law was enacted, corporate decision makers had determined the level of safety for their automobiles. From the first death in 1899 until 1966, about 2 million automobile-related deaths occurred as well as about 100 million injuries, a figure three times greater than U.S. combat losses in all military actions. Consumer advocates postulated that many of those deaths and injuries might have been avoided had automobile producers included certain safety features as part of the standard package. Consumers began to demand automobile safety features such as turn signals, seat belts, and air bags.
Nader began his first consumer campaign in 1965 with his book Unsafe at Any Speed, which detailed Detroit automakers' negligence and calling the Corvair "one of the nastiest handling cars ever built (quoted in Watson, 1997). In 1969, after considerable consumer activism, Chevrolet ceased Corvair production. Later, in 1972, the Department of Transportation (DOT) tested the Corvair and found the handling "at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles, both foreign and domestic" (quoted in Watson, 1997); however, Nader contested the DOT findings.
Another federal agency, the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was established to ensure highway and automobile safety. It was responsible for setting minimal safety standards for automobiles, as well as ensuring consumer notification of automobile safety defects. NHTSA developed and issued thirty standards in 1967 aimed at reducing crash potential and resulting damage. However, consumers were generally not aware of these safety requirements, which included, among others, installation of simple components that would reduce head trauma (laminated windshields), prevent injury to the upper body (collapsible steering columns), and prevent occupants from being ejected from the car on impact (stronger door locks). Consumer rights are also protected by local and state governments. For instance, establishing minimum safety standards to ensure highway safety is the responsibility of the individual states; and consumer complaints against specific businesses are often resolved with assistance from local consumer affairs offices.
Over the years, Nader and his associates formed several consumer watchdog groups and instigated activist movements. Included among these were the Critical Mass research project, which was directed at nuclear power's negative impact on citizens' health, and the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), which addressed banking and corporate accountability as well as tax exemptions and government subsidies for big business.
Based on the initial successes of the PIRG, Nader formed the Public Citizen Tax Reform Research Group in 1972. The tax group's People and Taxes was the first publication to explain the manipulation of the tax system to subsidize big corporations, thereby burdening the average taxpayer. In 1976, after many successful tax-reform actions, Tom Stanton, and his colleagues Bob Brandon and Jonathan Rowe, published a succinct, understandable tax analysis: Tax Politics: How They Make You Pay and What You Can Do About It.
Nader and his Raiders have played major roles in addressing and resolving consumer matters involving, among others, consumers', workers', and airline passengers' rights; telecommunications; education; banking; automobile safety; environmental protection; and legal issues. Their campaigns, publications, and books have also resulted in the emergence of public opinion in support of environmental protection. Additionally, John C. Esposito's 1970 book, The Vanishing Air, presented the Clean Air Act of 1967 as having failed to initiate effective air pollution controls. At about the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency increased its focus on environmental issues, and the Clean Water Act (1972) was passed, both resulting from public reaction to the publication of David Zwick's Water Wasteland, which critiqued the failures of pollution-control laws. Further, in response to statistical findings in 1970 that worker deaths and disabilities totaled over 14,000 annually, Nader sponsored Joseph Page's report Bitter Wages, which helped turn the public and political tide toward enacting the Occupational Health and Safety Act legislation.
While OSHA has often been perceived by consumer activists as being slow to act or react, it has established standards that ensure business compliance with workplace safety mandates. Additionally, OSHA standards aid in reducing and, hopefully, minimizing cancer risks resulting from use of ordinary carcinogens, including industrial chemicals, such as benzene; pesticides, such as DBCP; ethylene oxide, a carcinogenic gas that is used for medical equipment sterilization; and formaldehyde, which is used in countless educational and industrial environments. All these standards stemmed from the work (from 1974 through 1983) of the Public Citizen Health Research Group headed by Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe.
Nader and his Raiders managed to pinpoint and report dozens of consumer inequities, including ones involving such corporations as Du Pont and Citicorp, but they have not been alone in the quest to establish and enforce consumer rights. Individuals and other traditional and newly established groups (such as the Rainforest Action Network, People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, Earth First) have used various means, including boycotts, to make their displeasure known to business, industry, and government entities. Manufacturers suffered from more than 200 boycotts in 1990 (Rice, 1990), and the numbers have continued to increase as technology has facilitated ease of information access.
Friedman (1995) defines a consumer boycott as an action that deprives the organization of sales, thus threatening its survival. Such action is "an attempt by one or more parties to achieve certain objectives by urging individual consumers to refrain from making selected purchases in the marketplace." (p. 199) Local, state, and international boycotts appear to be less common than national boycotts, and the duration of boycotts varies. Short-term boycotts usually last three months or less, whereas long-term boycotts sometimes last more than a year. Friedman (1995) also noted that boycott characteristics evolve over time. From the beginning announcement that a boycott is being considered, the level of militancy builds, and many media-oriented boycotts combine the power of the media with their own actions to achieve the desired outcome.
In 1994, protesters boycotted dairy products in an effort to prevent products from cows injected with BGH, a hormone to increase bovine milk production, from being marketed. The hormone has potential to create other medical complications, which could result in potential health risks to consumers. The FDA affirmed that the concerns expressed by boycott participants might be valid. Additionally, in response to the boycott, several national food distributors and grocery chains announced that they would not sell goods from BGH-treated cows.
In 1996, Consumers Union of the U.S., Inc., published its 60th anniversary article, which detailed consumer action victories over the preceding sixty years and affirmed the value of their publication Consumer Reports. This publication's mission is to detail the most urgent consumer issues. That article provided a listing of consumer issues perceived at that time to be most pressing: commercial clutter, health care, the information age, economic insecurity, the environment, and consumer rights.
As mentioned earlier, self-regulation through codes of ethical conduct and establishing, reviewing, and maintaining product standards has become essential for maintaining fruitful customer /organizational interaction. Self-regulation, has engendered creation of such consumer focused organizations, as Better Business Bureaus, the International Business Ethics Institute, and the Internet Law and Policy Forum, to name a few. Additionally, self-regulation programs have been created, such as the Chemical Manufacturer Associations Responsible Care program and the standards of ethical conduct drafted by numerous professional organizations (e.g., American Bar Association, American Medical Association, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and American Dental Association). While these self-regulation initiatives generally were responses to consumer concerns in the early days of consumer protest, industries subsequently began to self-regulate voluntarily and now view it a matter of course and as a complement to government regulation.
Today, the consumer movement continues pressuring for consumer protection against such problems as misleading advertising and defective products and for such benefits as safer food and drugs, and affordable utilities. As the level of activism grows greater, challenges are generated for businesses and industries, for some complaints are costly to resolve. In the past, the sides (activist versus business) became polarized, resulting in delayed resolution. Wise business and industry representatives, therefore, are not only proactively assuming responsibility for meeting activist-generated challenges, but also taking an active role in setting the public agenda for consumer concerns.
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[Article by: MARY JEAN LUSH]
