Corporate Influence on Labor and Employment Politics

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Abstract

Scholars in the pluralist tradition have argued that conflicts of interest between firms and sectors lead businesses to routinely oppose each other in political matters, undermining the process by which businesses as interest groups might cohere to form united fronts that can regularly subvert majority interests (Truman 1951; Dahl 1961; Epstein 1969). Moreover, they suggest that other social and political groups act as countervailing forces that preclude any possibility of state capture. We know from a large body of empirical work, however, that businesses do in fact often work in tandem to advocate for legislation and agency rulings on a wide range of issues (Hertel-Fernandez 2019; Skocpol and Williamson 2012; Smith 2000, Mizruchi 1992; Akard 1992). In the domain of labor and employment law, businesses across sectors have particularly large incentives to coordinate given that changes to statutes governing issues such as unions or minimum wages have implications that are often generalized to all firms. Using an original dataset on the employment backgrounds of presidentially appointed and senate confirmed officials over the last century at agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor, this paper empirically traces the penetration of the employment/labor bureaucracy by corporate interests. Previous scholars have documented the dynamics of "politicization" of the bureaucracy whereby presidents and governing parties attempt to place individuals in government positions with political orientations that would shift agencies towards the majority party's ideal point. The present research, however, is an attempt to study a more extreme measure of politicization that seeks to get at a phenomenon that labor historian James Gross terms “counter-staffing,” whereby officials are appointed to positions in agencies they are fundamentally opposed to. Recent appointments in the Trump Administration and the subsequent widespread media attention they attracted serve to highlight this phenomenon. Take for example Donald Trump’s first appointment to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, who famously spent years trying to undermine EPA regulations as the state attorney general in Oklahoma (Eder and Tabuchi 2018). Or Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Education, who spent decades as an activist advocating for reduced funding for public schools before she took charge of the principal federal agency in charge of supporting public education (Green 2017). Using data on the complete employment histories of officials in positions such as Board Member at the NLRB or Secretary of Labor, I construct measures of counter-staffing based on employment at firms such as corporate "union-busting law firms" and anti-labor interest groups such as the National Right to Work Foundation or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

References:

Akard, Patrick]. 1992. Corporate mobilization and political power: The transformation of U.S. economic policy in the 1970s. American Sociological Review 57:597-615.

Dahl, Robert A. Who governs?: Democracy and power in an American city. Yale University Press, 2005.

Eder, Steve and Hiroku Tabuchi. “Scott Pruitt Before the E.P.A.: Fancy Homes, a Shell Company and Friends With Money” The New York Times. April 21, 2018. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/us/politics/scott-pruitt-oklahoma-epa.html

Epstein, Edwin M. The corporation in American politics. Prentice Hall, 1969.

Green, Erica. “To Understand Betsy DeVos’s Educational Views, View Her Education.” New York Times. June 10, 2017. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/us/politics/betsy-devos-private-schools-choice.html

Gross, James. Broken promise: The subversion of US labor relations. Temple University Press, 2010.

Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander. State capture: How conservative activists, big businesses, and wealthy donors reshaped the American states--and the nation. Oxford University Press, USA, 2019.

Mizruchi, Mark S. The structure of corporate political action: Interfirm relations and their consequences. Harvard University Press, 1992.

Skocpol, Theda, and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the remaking of Republican conservatism. Oxford University Press, 2016.

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Author

• Danny R. Daneri, Princeton University