Office Politics

[ashling]

nside the PAC teaching corporate America how to make its employees vote for the right candidates and causes.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/10/bipac_how_the_business_industry_political_action_committee_teaches_corporate.html

It isn’t the first time in recent years that large American employers have told their employees how to vote. For instance, in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, employees of Koch Industries and Cintas, the uniform company, leaked letters they had received in which CEOs indicated a strong preference for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney; the Cintas letter predicted heavy job losses if President Obama were re-elected and asked workers to visit the company’s political website, which featured negative rankings of legislators thought to be hostile to a pro-business political agenda.

But there is a common thread that links those efforts to those associated with ConocoPhillips and scores of other American companies: the Business-Industry Political Action Committee, or BIPAC, a political organization that has attracted little media scrutiny.

Each of Alaska’s “big three” oil companies—ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and BP—are affiliated with BIPAC, which has ties with more than 100 prominent American firms, including Campbell Soup Co., eBay, Nationwide Insurance, and Walmart. Include its partnerships with hundreds of the country’s major trade associations, and BIPAC can reach more than 25 million employees in the United States.