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Boycotting Apartheid: Comparing US Labor’s Responses to the South African and Palestinian Freedom Movements

Jeff Schuhrke

Journal of Labor and Society2025https://doi.org/10.1163/24714607-bja10180article
ABDC C
Weight
0.37

What the paper says

Abstract In the 1980s, organized labor in the United States enthusiastically threw its weight behind the Free South Africa Movement, with top union officials championing boycotts and divestments against Pretoria to nonviolently push for an end to the racist apartheid system. But twenty years later, many of these same labor officials came out in opposition to Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions ( bds ), a South African-inspired movement to similarly pressure the Israeli government to end its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and to respect Palestinian human rights and self-determination. By juxtaposing US labor’s drastically different responses to the South African and Palestinian freedom movements, this essay highlights the ways that American unions choose to either embrace or reject calls for international solidarity and how, in the case of Palestine, the choice has been shaped by US labor officialdom’s traditional alliance with the State of Israel.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1163/24714607-bja10180

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@article{jeff2025,
  title        = {{Boycotting Apartheid: Comparing US Labor’s Responses to the South African and Palestinian Freedom Movements}},
  author       = {Jeff Schuhrke},
  journal      = {Journal of Labor and Society},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1163/24714607-bja10180},
}

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Boycotting Apartheid: Comparing US Labor’s Responses to the South African and Palestinian Freedom Movements

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Evidence weight

0.37

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06
M · momentum0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.