THL’s David and Goliath Story
When I joined The Humane League (THL) back in 2019, I expected them to have thousands of volunteers. After all, THL managed to strong-arm hundreds of major US corporations into adopting cage-free egg policies, creating an industry-level shift. The reality I found was much different. Most of the events I attended had half a dozen protestors, a dozen at most. These numbers were reflected in the protest photos I saw from other cities. Multiplying the number of volunteers at an individual protest by the number of cities with active chapters, you get a figure that comes out to around 100 to 200 active volunteers nationwide. That’s fewer people than my high school graduating class.
And it’s not like these volunteers are spending significant amounts of time on activism, either. When I started attending THL’s protests and participating in their digital campaigns, I quickly found that I could run through all the available actions for the month in a couple of hours. Over the course of a year, these time commitments add up to somewhere between 10 and 20 total hours. To put it in another light, I spent more time last year rewatching The Good Place than I did on THL direct actions.
With so few volunteers and so little engagement, is it really the volunteers that make the difference or could these victories be achieved with THL’s paid staff alone? The staff runs a large portion of the campaigns: They pick targets, do research, create marketing materials, and meet with corporate executives to negotiate about our demands. THL relies on volunteers for the one thing that the staff can’t do - create a sense of public outrage. But what is public outrage worth? To understand that, we need to look at the mechanism driving THL’s success.
The Anatomy of Pressure Activism
The secret sauce that The Humane League relies on is pressure activism. Pressure activism has its roots in the abolition, temperance, and labor movements of the late 1700s to early 1900s. Pressure activism is about using collective, coordinated power to fight for specific concessions from key decision makers by taking away something they value. Let’s break it down. We’ll go through the components and look at how they apply in three different movements: labor unions as a historical example of the power of pressure activism; Occupy Wall Street as an example of a modern protest movement that’s failed to produce any lasting policy change; and The Humane League as an animal activism organization that manages to successfully apply these principles.
The heart of pressure activism is collective, coordinated power, when a group of people act together to withdraw or apply their labor, time, attention, and money towards a particular goal. If one worker goes on strike, they get fired. If everyone in the factory goes on strike at the same time, management is straight out of luck. Their power is created through their coordination and solidarity. The same collective strength is on display when people turn up at THL and Occupy protests. The challenge is getting everyone coordinated and building the trust to take risks together. Other modern activist movements have been much better at meeting this challenge than the animal activism movement. We’re lucky to get a couple dozen people at a protest, while other movements regularly get hundreds or thousands of attendees. These are no small feats of coordination and we should be learning everything we can from other movements.
In addition to people, every successful movement needs specific concessions. Think SMART goals. Specific goals are important for negotiating with adversaries, knowing when to switch gears, and can be a powerful draw for getting people into the movement. Labor unions bring a variety of demands that improve their members’ lives: higher wages, shorter working hours, more safety protections, etc. THL has similarly concrete demands: First, we campaigned for a commitment to cage-free eggs. Now, we campaign for companies to follow through on their commitments. Conversely, Occupy’s goals are broader and more abstract: more balanced distribution of income, bank reform, forgiveness of student loan debt, and more. All excellent goals, but there are a myriad of different interpretations for how they could each be implemented. And that’s just the problem - Occupy had a lot of good ideas, but few demands concrete enough to bring to the negotiating table. If you aren’t clear on what you want, you’ll never know when you’ve won.
Speaking of the negotiating table, your movement has to identify key decision makers so you know who’s sitting on the other side of the table, fulfilling your demands. Union strikes go after management, the people who are setting wages and working hours. THL follows a similar pattern, targeting the C-Suite executives who call the shots about supply chains and company policies. In contrast, Occupy had a number of possible targets: banks, bankers, government regulators, and congress, to name a few. Unfortunately, you can’t just campaign against an institution. You have to pick people out of the organization and work with them as individuals. That requires researching the organization and finding out who has the power to influence policy. At the end of the day, every organization is made up of individuals and those individuals are the people we have to influence.
When we’re negotiating with decision makers, we have to create a reason for them to come to the table. Usually, that’s by taking away something they value. In the case of unions, the workers withdraw their labor. Without labor, the factories shut down. Without the factories, the owners and management stop making money, which is the raison d'être for the capitalist system. THL also goes after one of corporations’ most valued resources: their reputations. By hammering social media and protesting, we make companies look terrible just by telling the world what they do. One corporate executive even called our campaigns “a PR nightmare”. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, involved occupying space and speaking out against banks and financial institutions. These activities did not particularly affect banks or legislators, two potential key stakeholders. An alternative strategy could have been for everyone to withdraw money from banks, which would at least have been felt by the banks. The point is to make the pain of the protest worse than the pain of going along with our demands. As long as we can do that, we can get companies to change.
There you have it. Four steps for changing the world; four steps that have changed the world already. Among other victories, pressure campaigns by labor unions are the reason we have a 40-hour workweek rather than a 70-hour workweek. They were so effective that corporations, with the help of the government, have spent much of the past hundred years crushing unions and running smear campaigns. These measures worked, causing major strikes to drop from over 250 a year in the 1970s to 11 in 2010. In that time, a new generation of activists has grown up largely without reference to pressure activism techniques. It’s time to pick up the mantle. The heads of corporations are just as human as they were a hundred years ago and they still need our labor, attention, and money. We have the power to change the system. We just have to apply it skillfully.
Implications for the Movement and You
As a movement, we’re limited by two factors: how much power we can generate and how well we can apply it. Since the power behind pressure activism comes from people, more people equals more power. With more people, our old tactics become more effective - a 100-person protest looks a lot better than a 10-person protest. We also gain access to entirely new classes of tactics - you can’t physically block a store entrance with 10 people, but you can with 100. There may never be an easy answer for exactly how many people we need to accomplish our goals, but the positive relationship between people and power suggests a clear direction for our efforts. We need to figure out how to scale our communities and increase the number of people we can mobilize.
The more important half of the equation is how we apply our power. Application of power covers the other three parts of pressure activism: selecting specific goals, identifying decision makers, and applying pressure. Within these steps, there are countless ways to approach the problem. A good strategy is the difference between changing multinational corporations with a few hundred activists and having thousands of activists protest with few concrete results. The development of such strategies is a subject that fills books, but the immediate takeaway for organizers is that we should be spending a little less time putting boots on the ground for another protest and a little more time picking targets and strategizing.
For the individual, what this all means is that you can make a very real difference. If you could get ten friends to regularly volunteer with the Humane League, you could increase the national volunteer base by 5-10%. If you do a little research and get creative with your strategy, even a small group can make a huge difference. If you’re not already regularly engaged with the movement, what are you waiting for? Hop on over to the Fast Action Network and take action. Or better yet, get in touch with a regional organizer and find (or organize!) some in-person meetups. Go be a nuisance and change the world.
Great post! I strongly recommend Peter Singer's book "Ethics into Action" for more details on exactly this approach to activism. It's definitely my all-time favourite nonfiction book and I was really surprised it got so little attention compared to his other books!
I could not agree more! It's a big part of what inspired this post.