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