Money talks. But
how?
Now I
understand why so many Floridians and citizens in other states in this free
country vote as they have been voting for so many years thanks to a report in
Salon.com and their source!
Read it here or in
the article?
From “Mr. Smith Goes
to Washington” to Citizens United, the story goes like this: The wealthy
corrupt and control democracy by purchasing politicians, scripting speech and
writing laws. Corporations and rich people make donations to candidates, pay
for campaign ads and create PACs. They, or their lobbyists, take members of
Congress out to dinner, organize junkets for senators and tell the government
what to do. They insinuate money where it doesn’t belong. They don’t build
democracy; they buy it.
But that, says Alex
Hertel-Fernandez, a PhD student in Harvard’s government department, may not be
the only or even the best way to think about the power of money. That power
extends far beyond the dollars deposited in a politician’s pocket. It reaches for
the votes and voices of workers who the wealthy employ. Money talks loudest
where money gets made: in the workplace.
Since December,
Hertel-Fernandez has been surveying more than a thousand employees and more
than 500 executives—board chairs, presidents, senior vice presidents—and top
managers. He’s also conducted follow-up interviews with execs and managers,
which he discusses in an unpublished paper “Office Politics: When Do American
Firms Recruit Their Workers into Politics?” (He kindly gave me a copy.) His
central finding, which has already attracted the attention of Vox and MSNBC, is
that one of the most important ways that business influences and controls the
political process is by mobilizing employees—sometimes coercively.
As the employees at
Murray Energy in Ohio would be the first to tell you. In 2012, The New Republic
ran a harrowing profile of the firm’s hardball tactics. Supervisors pressure
new workers to sign up for an automatic payroll deduction; one percent of their
wages is taken out for the company’s PAC. The CEO sends letters to workers at
home, asking them to make additional donations to individual candidates.
Workers are instructed to fill out and sign donation forms, which they send to
company headquarters, along with personal checks. The company uses tables and
spreadsheets to keep track of which worker has or hasn’t contributed. In August
2012, the company even required workers at its Ohio mine to attend a Romney
rally, without pay, where participants held up a sign that said “COAL COUNTRY
STANDS WITH MITT.” The New Republic interviewed several company sources:
“There’s a lot of
coercion,” says one [source]. “I just wanted to work, but you feel this
constant pressure that, if you don’t contribute, your job’s at stake. You’re
compelled to do this whether you want to or not.” Says the second: “They will
give you a call if you’re not giving. ... It’s expected you give Mr. Murray
what he asks for.”
While Murray
Energy’s tactics may seem extreme, nearly half the executives and managers
Hertel-Fernandez surveyed admit that they mobilize their employees for
political purposes. Of those, 71 percent try to get their workers to support a
specific policy or candidate (as opposed to just getting the workers to
register or turn out to vote). Firms press workers to participate in
company-sponsored town halls, where they are instructed about issues and
candidate platforms; to show up at campaign rallies; to volunteer for
candidates or make donations to campaigns; to lobby legislators; and to
persuade their friends and families to support a policy or candidate.
According to these
employers, leveraging their workers, along with more traditional modes of
lobbying, is the most effective way to control the political sphere. That’s how
firms get laws passed and candidates elected. Mobilizing workers, employers
claim, is more effective than making campaign donations, buying ads, or
investing in large corporate lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce. Workers seem
to agree: almost half of the workers Hertel-Fernandez surveyed claim that they
changed their political behavior or beliefs because of their employers.
One of the reasons
employee mobilization is so potent a force is that workers can be deployed with
almost military-style precision. As Hertel-Fernandez explains in his paper,
firms have extensive HR offices, which compile databases about where employees live
and who their legislators (local, state and federal) are. Firms issue specific
instructions to specific workers living on a specific street, say, to write
personal letters to a specific representative. Then the firms fire more
volleys, lobbying that representative with reminders of how many letters were
sent and from where.
To ensure that
workers do as they are told, firms use online systems that track whether a
worker opens an email from her boss, clicks on the links, downloads information
and sends her message to her representative.
One of the reasons
employees can be deployed with such precision is that they’re already under the
thumb of their employers. The most powerful determinant of whether bosses
mobilize their workers to support specific candidates or policies—and whether
they see that mobilization as effective—is the degree of control they have over
those workers. Firms that always engage in surveillance of their employees’
online activities are 50 percent more likely to mobilize their workers than
firms that never do. Firms with greater bargaining power are also more likely
to get their workers to do their political bidding.
Even with all that
surveillance, however, bosses sometimes have to use more coercive methods. Of
the more than 1,000 workers Hertel-Fernandez surveyed, 25 percent report being
contacted by their employers about politics. Of those, he shows in his paper, 20
percent received threats: if they didn’t adopt the right political positions or
engage in the prescribed political behavior, they’d lose their jobs, have their
wages or hours cut, or see their workplaces closed. After a particularly
sluggish season of employee giving in 2010, for example, Murray Energy’s CEO
wrote his employees that “we have only a little over a month left to go in this
election fight. If we do not win it, the coal industry will be eliminated and
so will your job.” Anywhere from 4 to 14 million American workers experience
this and other kinds of intimidation on the job.
Since the Supreme
Court handed down its decision in Citizens United, critics on the left,
including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, have been outraged
by the claim that a corporation is a person. That claim actually plays far more
of a role in Justice Stevens’ dissent than it does in the ruling opinion of the
majority. It’s also hardly an innovation of Citizens United; it goes back to
the 19th century. By focusing so much attention on it, critics misstate the
actual problem of corporate power and political influence.
The real problem is
that workers are the instruments of their bosses’ will. If a corporation were
just a person, it’d have only one vote. But corporations and firms have more
than one vote. Those additional votes can’t be measured by the money those firms
spend in a campaign, by the ads and lunches firms buy. Every CEO’s vote is
augmented by the workers he controls, by the votes he can deliver like the ward
bosses of old. While Citizens United made that problem worse—not because of the
unlimited cash it allows into the political sphere but, as some of its earliest
critics noted, because of the restrictions it removes on the power of employers
to influence and mobilize their workers—it was always and already there.
When we think of
corruption, we think of something getting debased, becoming impure, by the
introduction of a foreign material. Money worms its way into the body politic,
which rots from within. The antidote to corruption, then, is to keep unlike
things apart. Take the big money out of politics or limit its role. That’s what
our campaign finance reformers tell us.
But the problem
isn’t corruption. It’s capitalism. Workers are dependent on employers for their
well-being. That makes them vulnerable to their bosses’ demands, about a great
many matters, including politics. The ballot and the buck are fused. Not because
of campaign donations but because of the unequal relationship between capital
and labor. Not just in the corridors of Congress but also in the halls of the
workplace. Unless you confront the latter, you’ll never redress the former.
Without economic democracy, there’s no political democracy.
Corey Robin is a
professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate
Center. Author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah
Palin and Fear: The History of a Political Idea, he is currently writing a book
about Clarence Thomas.