Big Corporate Dollars Fund Shoddy Studies

by Seth Michaels, Oct 13, 2009

With the insurance industry releasing a “study” today that uses dubious numbers to fight health care reform, it’s useful to remember that the tactic of relying on fake numbers is nothing new to corporate lobbies.

Case in point: a study by Anne Layne-Farrar, paid for by business interests that use it as a cudgel against the Employee Free Choice Act. Layne-Farrar’s study contended that passing the Employee Free Choice Act would cost the U.S. economy hundreds of thousands of jobs—a figure without factual grounding but useful to those interested in preventing workers from forming a union and bargaining for a better life.

At In These Times, Art Levine takes a close look at Layne-Farrar and other scholars whose work do not reflect reality, but instead pushes the anti-worker agenda of groups—like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—who paid for the study. These groups are fighting to protect the status quo for CEOs, not jobs for workers.

As Levine notes, Layne-Farrar’s shocker of a bottom-line number is based on extremely slim data and unsustainable leaps in logic:

Despite the wide dissemination of Layne-Farrar’s report, critics like Chris Kromm of the Institute of Southern Living have found distortions and shoddy analysis in her work. Of the 10 Canadian provinces she studied, Kromm discovered that only three actually had significant changes in card-check [majority verification] rules.

And he found that the report itself acknowledged there wasn’t enough data to draw conclusions about the impact of card-check. It further admitted that the provincial card-check data they did collect was too “weak” for economic analysis. Kromm also wondered, “If unions really were the cause of unemployment, why has Canadian unemployment risen in recent years…even as union membership has declined?”

Layne-Farrar’s numbers are farcical when you consider the broad array of countries, like Denmark and Norway, that have higher rates of union membership but lower unemployment than the United States, as well as rigorous scholarly research that indicates no correlation between higher union membership and unemployment.

It’s no surprise the Chamber is having some trouble with numbers. As David Corn reports at Mother Jones, the Chamber of Commerce is exaggerating its own size by a factor of 15, by counting business that are members of local bodies that are not affiliated with the national Chamber:

By counting the memberships of 2,800 local chambers as its own, the U.S. Chamber is being deeply misleading. Unlike many true grassroots organizations, there is usually little or no relationship between the local chambers and the national organization. The Chamber “is not a governing body, chartering agent, or a regulatory agency for chambers of commerce,” its website explains, “and we have no say in how chambers decide to run themselves.” Nor do most local chambers have any say in the national group.

When the numbers don’t look like you want them to, the Chamber’s lesson seems to be, why not make them up?

No wonder the Chamber of Commerce is so out of touch that it’s losing members.

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