Definition
A blacklist is a record, list, or concerted arrangement identifying persons or entities to be denied a benefit, opportunity, or access — most commonly employment. In labor law, the term refers specifically to the practice by which an employer, or a combination of employers acting in concert, circulates the names of discharged or undesirable workers to prevent them from obtaining work elsewhere. More broadly, the term extends to any coordinated effort to exclude identified individuals or organizations from commercial, professional, or social participation.
The labor law meaning is the dominant legal usage and the one most extensively treated in legal sources. Secondary legal meanings include: the listing of persons as credit risks or insolvents (a commercial context), the listing of contractors or vendors deemed unreliable, and, in more recent regulatory frameworks, government-maintained exclusion lists barring entities from contracting or receiving licenses.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A list or set of people or entities to be shunned or banned, disallowed or blocked.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To put in a black list as deserving of suspicion, censure, or punishment; especially to put in a list of persons stigmatized as insolvent or untrustworthy, as tradesmen and employers do for mutual protection.
The common and legal meanings are closely aligned on the surface, but the legal significance lies in the combination element. A single employer refusing to rehire a worker is not, by itself, the legally actionable conduct that historical legal sources address. The law's concern is with coordinated action among multiple employers — a conspiracy to exclude — which transforms an individual employment decision into a restraint on labor or trade.
Common Confusion
Blacklisting is frequently conflated with boycotting. Bouvier's own entry directs the reader to BOYCOTT, reflecting the historical overlap. The distinction is directional: a blacklist targets workers (or suppliers) on the supply side of a relationship, denying them the ability to sell their labor or goods. A boycott targets a party on the demand side, organizing refusal to buy or patronize. A combined employer blacklist and a secondary boycott can arise from the same labor dispute, which is why the terms appear together in historical sources and why researchers should pursue both threads.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Employer blacklist: The classic labor law form. Multiple employers share lists of workers involved in strikes, union organizing, or prior discharge for cause, coordinating to deny those workers re-employment across the industry.
Commercial/credit blacklist: Lists maintained by trade associations or creditors identifying parties deemed insolvent, unreliable, or fraudulent, circulated among members for mutual protection.
Government exclusion list: A modern regulatory development. Federal and state agencies maintain lists of contractors, licensees, or individuals debarred or excluded from government programs. These carry specific procedural rights and are governed by administrative law frameworks rather than common law conspiracy doctrine.
Why It Matters in Research
Historical sources treat blacklisting almost exclusively as a labor conspiracy problem, and researchers working in late 19th and early 20th century materials will find it embedded in labor dispute and combination doctrine rather than in employment law as we now understand it. The analytical frame was conspiracy and restraint of trade — not discrimination or employee rights. This framing shapes how cases are indexed and how arguments are constructed in period sources.
The labor law transformation of the 20th century is critical context. As statutory labor law developed — particularly under the National Labor Relations Act and analogous state statutes — blacklisting acquired a separate statutory dimension. Conduct that was once analyzed as common law conspiracy came to be treated as an unfair labor practice or, in some states, a specific statutory violation. Many states enacted anti-blacklisting statutes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so jurisdictional variation in historical sources is substantial. A researcher finding a blacklisting claim in an 1890 source is in different doctrinal territory than one finding the same term in a 1950 NLRB proceeding.
Modern government exclusion lists (debarment, suspension, SAM.gov exclusions at the federal level) share the word's logic but are entirely creatures of administrative regulation. Researchers should not carry historical common law analysis into this context.
The term also appears in entertainment industry history — the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s — where it generated its own civil litigation and First Amendment dimensions largely absent from the labor law record.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is brief and functional, capturing both the individual-listing sense (persons held under suspicion) and the combination sense (multiple employers acting together). Bouvier cross-references the Standard Dictionary definition focused on employees, which signals the term's primary association with labor relations at the time of writing. The citation to American and English Encyclopedia of Law, 2nd edition, volume 4, grounds the combination definition in the treatise literature of the period.
Bouvier's immediate redirect to BOYCOTT is editorially significant — it reflects the late 19th century view that blacklisting and boycotting were analytically adjacent practices, both arising from labor-capital conflict and both potentially actionable as conspiracy. Researchers should follow that cross-reference in historical sources, as doctrine and remedies often developed together.
Webster's 1913 adds texture: the example quotation from labor journalist John Swinton — "If you blacklist us, we will boycott you" — captures precisely the adversarial dynamic that made both terms legally significant in the same period.
What historical sources do not address: the modern regulatory exclusion list, any statutory anti-blacklisting framework, or the civil rights and anti-discrimination dimensions that later attached to systematic exclusion of workers by protected characteristic.
Jurisdictional Note
Anti-blacklisting statutes were enacted by numerous states beginning in the 1890s, with varying scope, remedies, and definitions. Some statutes reached only the combination form; others addressed individual employer conduct. Federal law addresses the subject primarily through the NLRA's unfair labor practice framework and, for government contractors, through debarment regulations. Researchers should not assume uniform doctrine across jurisdictions or across time periods.