Chamber Pot of Commerce
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The day after Barack Obama was elected president, we at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., draped the front of our building with a massive banner: “We’re Turning Around America.” In January, we added another banner supporting passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.
The AFL-CIO building is just around the corner from the Chamber of Commerce. So apparently after stewing lo these many months, the Chamber decided to drape itself in its own banner, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.
The banner proclaims the ludicrous—yet at an estimated $100 million, massively funded—campaign the Chamber announced yesterday to shore up free enterprise and create jobs. Or, as Politics Daily puts it:
Chamber of Commerce Relaunches Capitalism.
Chamber President Tom Donohue, who last week was battling Apple Inc. and other corporations about their decisions to leave the Chamber over its antediluvian climate change stance, had this to say about the campaign:
The free enterprise system, which has done so much for so many, is facing great challenges.
The Chamber of Commerce’s Jobs Deception Campaign
Unions are popularly known as “the folks who brought you the weekend.” In contrast, the Chamber of Commerce schemes to take away employees’ weekend—along with overtime pay, the minimum wage, Buy America rules, employee’ freedom to form unions, child labor standard protections….The list is long and ugly.
So it’s farcical that today the Chamber launched a campaign estimated to run in the tens of millions of dollars to promote job creation.
The Chamber’s campaign originally started out as an attack against financial regulation—until the Chamber found out how strongly U.S. taxpayers support reining in Big Banks and the financial industry’s widespread shady practices. So the Chamber changed the packaging to purportedly focus on jobs, which in fact the American people desperately need.
Big Corporate Dollars Fund Shoddy Studies
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.
Chamber of Commerce: Out of Touch with the Public
Here’s a proposal that makes sense: The Obama administration wants to set up a consumer financial protection agency to oversee the financial markets and make sure working families aren’t the victims of predatory lending, abusive credit card practices and the kind of irresponsibility and greed that have caused our economic crisis.
But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is putting its big bucks into preventing creation of any agency that would hold financial institutions accountable.
Earlier this month, the Chamber announced it would spend $2 million on an ad campaign opposing a consumer protection agency, and it has taken the lead in lobbying Congress to prevent new rules for our financial system.
Tough new rules—and an agency with the authority to enforce them—would protect families, their communities, the housing market and the entire economy. But the agency might make a small dent in the profits of a handful of huge banks and Wall Street corporations and the salaries and bonuses of CEOs. So the Chamber of Commerce is opposed to it.
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Corporate Campaign Against Workers’ Rights
To get a feel for the scale and viciousness of the campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act—and see how powerful interests are using the same tactics to try and defeat it as they are health care reform and other working family issues—take a look at the Harper’s Magazine article, “Labor’s Last Stand.” Author Ken Silverstein untangles the web of misleadingly named corporate front groups, like the “Center for a Democratic Workplace,” and the network of CEOs, political operatives and right-wing public relations firms who carry out the disinformation campaign against Employee Free Choice:
In terms of personnel, the fighters in the anti-EFCA crusade are approximately two dozen lobbyists and consultants, most of them Republicans, some of whom are married to each other, many of whom have shared the same jobs in government and at the trade associations….
Chamber of Commerce Sides with Foreign Embassies Against Buy American
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There they go again. Those running the show at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are attacking again the Buy American provision in the economic stimulus package.
Ignoring, once more, that Buy American makes fundamental economic sense by ensuring at least some of our taxpayer bailout money is invested in American-made productions, the Chamber is siding with foreign embassies battling the Buy American provisions. In a June 2 letter to lawmakers, Bruce Josten, the Chamber’s executive vice president for government affairs, asked Congress to exclude Buy American provisions from all legislation.
More recently, the Chamber held a joint press conference June 11 with the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters to decry the Buy American provisions in the stimulus. For a trade association with “U.S.” in its name, siding with foreign corporations against those in the United States is, well, you fill in the word that best describes it.
Big Business Likes Arbitration—If It Can Control the Process
Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act, desperate in their efforts to kill the proposed legislation that would level the playing field for workers seeking to form unions, have come up with another line of attack. They are making a lot of noise over the bill’s arbitration provision. The argument is just another straw-man attempt at gutting legislation that would enable more workers to have a voice on the job. (And one more sign of desperation—to wit, the trotting out of widely loathed figures like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove to attack the Employee Free Choice Act.)
Here’s the deal. Even after employees select a union to represent them, they need to bargain a first contract. But there’s no incentive for management to bargain in good faith. The longer contract negotiations are dragged out, the less likely one will ever be settled. In fact, nearly half of workers are denied a first contract, even when they’ve won their union.
Cheney, Rove Attack Employee Free Choice. Thanks!
Workers who want to pass the Employee Free Choice Act don’t just have a broad coalition of allies in support of them—they’re also very, very lucky in their enemies. Opposing the legislation has become a cottage industry for out-of-work, right-wing hacks, and the fight has attracted the attention of one of the most widely loathed out-of-work, right-wing hacks: Dick Cheney.
The broadly unpopular former vice president attacked the Employee Free Choice Act as a “huge mistake” on a Fox News appearance yesterday, reports Sam Stein of the Huffington Post. And naturally—does it even need to be said—Cheney’s claims about what the bill would do are flatly false and repeatedly debunked.
As advocates of the Employee Free Choice Act, we enthusiastically welcome Dick Cheney as an opponent. What better symbol of the anti-worker campaign than an angry multimillionaire who’s already been broadly repudiated for his disastrous effects on the country? (Even some Republicans are wishing he’d “go back to his undisclosed location.”)
Reality Check: Here’s the Real Deal on Employee Free Choice
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| Bill Samuel, AFL-CIO Government Affairs director |
AFL-CIO Government Affairs Director Bill Samuel provides a reality check for the media spin around the Employee Free Choice Act. Bill was on NPR yesterday in a discussion of the issue with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Check it out here.
As most of you know, the Employee Free Choice Act was introduced in the U.S. House and Senate this week.
Make no mistake: This is a big deal.
This year—finally—we have a chance to restore some balance to our economy and help working people share in the prosperity they help create.
This year—for the first time in 30 years—we will take up the challenge of fixing the nation’s labor law that for decades has been badly broken.
Citigroup Uses Taypayer Dollars to Fight Workers’ Rights
It seems that another bank on the public dole is using its taxpayer-subsidized time and resources to lobby against the Employee Free Choice Act.
Today, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post reports that Citigroup hosted a private conference call yesterday to bolster opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act that included a senior executive at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying group that has put tens of millions of dollars into the anti-Employee Free Choice disinformation campaign. Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake notes that the Citi stock analyst who downgraded Wal-Mart over fears of the Employee Free Choice Act passing was on the call, too.
Citigroup, the Huffington Post reports, has received some $50 billion in federal bailout funds—funds that are meant, in theory, to shore up the financial system, not allow Big Business to continue to distort the political process and lobby against critical legislation.
