Why are businesses registering more than 2 million workers to vote?

[rodeodance]

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11855
Funny Business

T@P Why are businesses registering more than 2 million workers to vote? A great challenge lies within the answer.

By Mark Schmitt
Issue Date: 09.12.06

What would the legendary labor leader Walter Reuther have said if 40 years ago he was told that American business was going to spend millions to register workers and encourage them to vote? He would probably have been ecstatic: “They’re spending their money to turn out my people?!”

And indeed, since World War II, business usually stayed far away from that kind of politics. Corporations and their political action committees provided the money that drove campaigns -- for both parties, but more exclusively to Republicans after 1994 -- and that was where their involvement ended.

But recently, big business has quietly become a political actor in a new way, organizing employees and getting them to vote in what they see as the interests of their employers. For 2006, the Business Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC) has a goal of registering 2.1 million new “pro-business voters” in 15 targeted states. In 2004, the BIPAC program registered 16,000 voters in Iowa, a state George W. Bush won by 13,000 votes. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s “VoteforBusiness.com” program in 2004 set up 400 Web sites for companies and local chambers with information on candidates’ positions on issues that matter to employees, like tort reform, energy policy, and of course, “the death tax.” This year, they’ll set up approximately 1,000 sites.

Want to read the full article?

All magazine subscribers can read this piece and the rest of the current issue online weeks before it hits the newsstand.

If you are already a magazine subscriber, claim your free E-subscription now.

[Warpy]

1. They may still be Reuther's people, but the Democrats

abandoned them during the Nixon years, and they know it.

Unless the Democrats offer working people more than business as usual, working people may register, but they'll continue to stay home.

The ones who DO vote may continue to vote for the illusion of tax cuts offered by the GOP. It's something, whereas the Democrats offer nothing.

[PATRICK]

2. Old pre-union tactic a century ago

Bryan's populist and rural Dems were swamped by business GOTV in the Northeast. With the decline of unions and some union members' common sense, Hannah's days seem revived on every front. At least they are looking for SOME base other than raging nutcases to reclaim the industrial belt or what's left of it. No new ideas, just old-fashioned cheap labor conservatives.

Devolution of the working class back to the days of capital glory and civic misery.

[tomreedtoon]

3. Why don't the unions hold Democrats responsible?

The unions are not allowed to be deliberately tied to one political party or another. But they do make "recommendations" to their members. And for the most part they have blandly taken whoever the Democratic candidate is as their default person - the guy who's "less worse" than the other.

But they could make a nationwide public statement, saying something like this: "We do not see any candidates that are able to help the American worker. We will continue to speak to the candidates of both parties to see how they are willing to support us. If we are not satisfied, we will inform our members that we will not recommend any candidate."

The unions don't have to play lapdog to any political party...do they?

[PATRICK]

6. The unions

like a marriage gone routine or "open" support GOP prostitutes who have locks in their regions and are somewhat sympathetic to unions. The "smart" tactic amidst a drifting Dem party relationship and declining unionism has accelerated the decadence of pragmatism into the decadence of actual decline. Until the party is inclined to start a second honeymoon with the working man their lack of enthusiastic and powerful populism is heading the entire working class and Dem party onto the rocks- and no GOP/corporate partner, paid or otherwise will bother to be there to pick up the pieces.

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. Chamber of Commerce. There it is again. Folks, they're as bad

as the Christian Right.

[kineneb]

7. cue for voting

simply vote the opposite of what the CoC recommends! They do not have the common person's best interests in mind.

[McCamy Taylor]

5. Might backfire. Employees HATE their employers in the USA.

[skids]

8. Actually, more likely...

...it will backfire because the overworked employees are too tired or overbooked to be bothered to vote. And, they'll shoot themselves in the foot by not making it easy either -- it's not like those types of people would actually give people time off to go vote. It's against their nature.