NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS |
April 7, 2017 | PAGE 7
Class War in the Capital City
By Don McIntosh
There’s a top-down class war under way,
but unlike the 1930s, when thugs shot
workers on strike picket lines, today’s
business organizations are using “hired
gun” lobbyists in state capitols, to rewrite
the laws — all of them — in their favor.
That’s the basic argument made by po-
litical scientist Gordon Lafer in his new
book The One Percent Solution: How
Corporations Are Remaking America
One State at a Time. Lafer, who teaches
at the Labor Education and Research
Center of the University of Oregon, spent
five years compiling a 50-state, 30-issue
database of corporate-backed legislation.
He was also there on the front lines, tes-
tifying against business-backed anti-
worker laws in Wisconsin, Michigan, In-
diana, New Hampshire, and other states.
The idea for the research came to him
in early 2011. Lafer had just returned to
Oregon after a year in Washington, D.C.,
as senior adviser to the U.S. House Labor
Committee. Now a drama was beginning
in the Wisconsin Legislature: A surprise
attack on public sector workers’ right to
collective bargaining drew 100,000 pro-
testers to the state capitol. Attacks on
worker rights and protections soon
spread to dozens of states.
“It was like watching a million bombs
go off in different places,” Lafer says,
“and each one was being treated like, ‘oh,
this terrible thing is being done by sena-
tor so-and-so in New Hampshire.’ ”
Lafer set out to study the wave of anti-
worker laws, and found distinct patterns
among the hundreds of bills backed by
business lobbies:
■ Corporate lobbies want to shrink public
services. In state after state, corporate lobbies would
push for cuts to business taxes; these would be
followed by cuts to budgets for schools and services. In
2011, 12 states actually gave out new tax cuts even
while they were enacting dramatic cuts in public
services. The Great Recession was a doozie, but didn’t
have to result in state budget cuts. In 2011, Lafer points
out, deficits in all 50 states could have been erased
entirely through two simple policy changes: undoing
the Bush tax cuts for the top 2 percent of income
earners, and taxing capital gains at the same rate as
ordinary income. Both were within the power of states
to enact, and both enjoyed popular support, yet no
state ever seriously explored that road to fiscal balance,
because of the power of corporate lobbies.
■ Corporate lobbies want to recreate public
education in their own image. Business groups
are supporting laws to eliminate teacher certification,
impose high-stakes testing, replace in-person with
digital instruction, and privatize public education via
vouchers or through privately-run for-profit and non-
profit charter schools.
■ Corporate lobbies want to cut worker
protections and compensation. Since 2010,
business groups have helped pass laws that cut public
employee compensation in at least 30 states,
particularly pension compensation. Other business-
backed laws rolled back child labor protections, made
it tougher for workers to get unemployment and
workers comp benefits, and barred local governments
CAPITOL IN THE 21ST CENTURY State capitols, like the one in Salem, above, are where corpo-
rations are most focused today on remaking America according to their vision, argues University
of Oregon political scientist Gordon Lafer.
from passing minimum wage, sick leave, or wage theft
ordinances. Nineteen states outlawed or restricted the
use of project labor agreements, while nine states
scaled back or repealed prevailing wage laws.
■ Corporate lobbies want to destroy unions.
Backed by business lobbies, new laws in multiple
states limit public employee collective bargaining,
make it harder for unions to collect worker dues or
political contributions, eliminate requirements to pay
the prevailing wage on public construction projects,
and prohibit public entities from signing project labor
agreements.
In almost no case were these laws
crafted in response to public debate.
Most often the politicians pushing them
hadn’t campaigned saying they’d do
those things. In fact, most of the legisla-
tion was deeply unpopular, and in many
cases, legislators brazenly disregarded
democratic norms in order to pass them,
rushing bills through in just days or
weeks, with little or no hearing, some-
times restricting protesters from access-
ing the state capitol. Nor did the laws
come about because hundreds of law-
makers came up with the same dozens of
ideas on their own, Lafer’s research
makes clear. They weren’t responding to
local conditions or local public opinion.
Rather, state politics is becoming na-
tionalized. Instead of laboratories for
democratic experimentation, state capi-
tols are becoming factories, stamping out
laws developed at the national level.
Central to that project is the American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),
an annual convention and clearinghouse
of model legislation, sponsored by some
of America’s biggest corporations.
ALEC claims to be responsible for pass-
ing 200 bills a year in state legislatures.
Leaked model legislation shows that
ALEC’s ultimate goal is the elimination
of minimum wage laws, unemployment
insurance, food stamps, welfare — even
license requirements for electricians and
plumbers. ALEC is the most important
organization in the movement, but it’s
not the only one. National and local
chambers of commerce, the National
Federation of Independent Business, and
Koch-brothers-funded groups like Amer-
icans for Prosperity are all key players
deploying enormous resources at the
state level. The groups differ on some
strategies and policies, but for the most
part, they act in concert.
To make sense of their agenda, Lafer
couldn’t rely on the business groups’ of-
ficial arguments, which as he details in
the book, can be wildly contradictory.
[ALEC, for instance, argues to state leg-
islatures that workplace ergonomic rules
should be set at the federal level, and at
the federal level, argues that it should be
left to the states.] Nor did Lafer feel he
could take the groups’ professed “free
market” ideology at face value: Even po-
litical actors as supposedly ideological as
the Koch brothers have shown a willing-
ness to drop their free market principles
when it serves their financial interests —
slurping up federal oil and gas subsidies,
for example, or coming out in favor of
the bank bailout.
Instead, Lafer had to infer the groups’
motives by studying the bills they sup-
port. When he brought all its components
together, the business groups’ ultimate
goal became clearer: to “restrict, weaken,
or abolish laws governing wages, bene-
fits or working conditions; to preempt,
defund or dismantle every legal or orga-
nizational mechanism through which
workers may challenge employer prerog-
atives; and to block, wherever possible,
citizens’ ability to exercise democratic
control over corporate behavior.” It’s a
dark vision, but it makes sense of the
dizzying variety of corporate-backed leg-
islation Lafer was documenting:
Why shrink government? Because regulation interferes
with profit, and public services make the public less
dependent on private employers.
Why reduce public employee compensation? Because
that pushes wages down in the overall labor market.
Why eliminate the prevailing wage in public construction?
Because it raises the economic expectations of non-
union workers.
Why devote so much effort to weakening unions, when
they represent just 7 percent of private sector workers?
Because as, Lafer writes, the labor movement is the
“primary political counterweight to the corporate
agenda on a long list of issues that are not per se
labor-related.”
What happened in Wisconsin was the
prototype. Now, the same forces are
close to being in complete charge of all
three branches of the federal government.
If Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil
Gorsuch is confirmed, the court is likely
to bar all public sector union dues re-
quirements within two years. That could
be followed by national “right-to-work”
legislation in Trump’s second term, and
soon after, repeal of federal prevailing
wage and other labor laws.
To defeat this agenda, workers will
need to unify and organize. Lafer’s book
couldn’t be more timely.