Boycotts always hurt workers

Capitalism is made to shift the cost of consumer activism away from the rich.

PHOTO CREDIT: War on Want. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

Democrats, furious with Jeff Bezos’s refusal to allow his newspaper to endorse Kamala Harris, are cancelling their subscriptions to the Washington Post. It’s one of the most widespread consumer actions this country has seen in a long time: more than 200,000 readers have left the paper, according to NPR. But as Post employees have been pointing out, Bezos himself isn’t likely to feel the pain:

So we’re also getting a lot of takes from journalists urging readers not to boycott, like Don’t Cancel Your Subscription to the Washington Post from Laura Miller:

If 200,000 subscribers permanently bail on the paper, it may never recover...Many bad things would follow from this, including journalists losing their jobs...

I empathize with Miller’s reasoning here, but I can’t help but wonder: where was all this worker solidarity back when she was claiming to “boycott Amazon whenever possible”? The economic calculus is absolutely identical: you can try to deny Bezos your dollars through WaPo or Amazon, but either way it’s just going to put workers at risk.