 Welcome to New America, I want to thank all of you for coming, whether you came from a distance or it came from upstairs, we appreciate it. My name is Mark Schmidt, I run the political reform program here at New America. And to say that I'm excited about this event with Alex Hotel Fernandez on his book Politics of Work, so I'm excited about it would be an understatement. We've been interested in this topic of how employers are deploying not just their money into politics but also their workers for some time, several years ago when Alex was beginning to do some of this research, we did a great round table here that I helped raise awareness of these questions and hopefully helped Alex a little bit with this book. I'll say, let me just start with introductions, say a little more and then turn it over to Alex. We've got two people here today, the author and well let me, I'll just do the introductions. Alexander Hotel Fernandez is an assistant professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, he's been focusing on the political economy of the United States, looking at the politics of organized interests and business interests, done path breaking work on the structure of political organizations at the state level which is a kind of neglected but vitally important topic for those of you who are here for our event a few weeks ago on laboratories of democracy where we're looking at democratic innovation in the states, there's a lot to be learned about that. Alex received his PhD in government and social policy from Harvard in 2016 and his thesis which is on corporate conservative mobilization across the states received an award for the best dissertation in the public policy field from the American Political Science Association and in 2016 he was named by Pacific Standard Magazine as one of the 30 under 30 thinkers. Also joining us is Thea Lee who is the president of the Economic Policy Institute, think tank that we love having a great relationship with. She joined EPI in November of 2017 after a long-standing career with the AFL-CIO where she built a track record of economic research and overseeing its policy agenda leading a large organization through change and has focused on working families, wage inequality, workers' rights and fair trade. There's an interesting, we set this up this way to make sure that we're covering both the economic dimension of workers role of employer coercion and workplace which often takes place also around questions of union organizing and workplace rights as well as external political rights so we're making sure we're going to try to balance those two. Just want to say before I turn it over to Alex this issue's been of interest to me for a long time and for a long time it was largely in terms of anecdotes. You read about things like you know one of the most striking ones was the coal baron who shut down the mine for a day in 2012 but required all the workers to show up for a Mitt Romney rally and that guy does a number of nefarious things and appears somewhat in this book but it was fascinating to go from anecdote which sometimes you say maybe that's just an outlier to real data about it and what Alex has done is by talking to workers, talking to employers, managers really get the scope of this kind of intervention which ranges from you know maybe sometimes milder things like make sure you vote to some extremes and really find the dimensions of this practice which is incredibly valuable and one reason to me it's important as somebody interested in strengthening the political process is that we often seem to see debates particularly about money and politics or the role of economic inequality as it influences the political process often in terms often cast in terms of you know free expression versus regulation do corporations have speech rights do they not what this reminds us of is that there's a really important dimension in which people's autonomy their individual freedom to make their own political choices is deeply affected but is deeply threatened in this case not so much by government regulation but by their employers and we all have you know not much ability to resist our employers even if they're just suggesting something Alex quotes the political scientist Robert doll is referring to the despotic power that corporations sometimes have and that's I think what you see in the book is ways that that's manifested manifest so I think you know it's really important to really you know understand this dimension of political activism in part to get a to make to make sure we understand that the distinction between freedom and and restrictions on freedom is not always the way it's it's it's cast in these money and politics debates so that's just a note of that's just like a kind of a personal aspect of why I'm interested in this but there's a ton more to this book and this and this whole topic and I'll just turn it over to Alec for you know do a little introduction of it you can do it up here if you want and then we'll have questions we'll discuss and then we'll have that great well thanks so much for that kind introduction mark and thanks so much to the new america foundation for organizing this event making it possible it's a real treat to be here at an event with new america and of course with a representative from the economic policy institute you know mark mentioned that when I was first starting this project new america hosted a round table on some of the initial research that I did which was very helpful in forming the book and my first job out of college was with the economic policy institute so it feels in some way like I'm coming full circle here although hopefully not too much full circle because the first event that I did in DC as an intern at at EPI was a debate with Grover Norquist that did not end well hopefully this goes better than that oh we'll see so this is about the topic of employers recruiting their workers into politics to change elections in public policy and right from the onset I want to be clear what I'm talking about here I'm not talking about cases where say an individual co-worker talks about politics with other co-workers or even cases of where an individual manager might talk about politics with their employees that they supervise I'm talking about cases where an entire company decides to use their employees as a political resource and let me give you a few examples of what that looks like from the book so that you can sort of have a concrete sense of what I'm talking about the first example I want to give you is actually the one that Mark alluded to this coal baron in Ohio that held a rally for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election and you can see the coal miners lining up to attend that rally they were told by their managers that the event would be mandatory and unpaid so that's a case of where a company is trying to use their workers to build support for a candidate both at the rally and then I think the the owner of that company hoped that those workers would contribute to Romney's campaign and perhaps vote for for the candidate in the election but that's one example another example comes just a few months ago during the tax cut debate when republicans were trying to get tax legislation through congress at a council that was organized by the wall street journal vp mic pence um implored the ceo's that had assembled there to visit their break rooms visit their cafeterias to talk to workers about why the tax bill would be good for the employees and why the employees should then contact their members of congress to get that bill over the finish line the wall street journal ran a nice article then a few weeks later talking about how a number of companies ranging from big companies like ups to even small businesses like local dry cleaners were talking to their workers inviting republican members of congress to visit their companies to talk up the tax bill and then encouraging workers to then contact congress to lobby for the bill so that's a little bit different in that it's not a case about a particular election but it's about a piece of legislation that employers are trying to push through a bill through congress the last example i want to give you is a little bit different um it comes from a home improvement and hardware store in the midwest if you're a midwestern or like me you'll recognize them it's minards um they have about 45 000 employees across the country and they distributed an at home civics course that employees were encouraged to take at their on their own time at home and while the the course was billed as being optional store locations that had more employees that finished the course were singled out for attention and that course had a unit on american job security that talked about how regulations like those imposed on the environment or safety standards or the minimum wage or taxes were bad for economic growth and how if minards employees wanted to have a productive economy that they should oppose those sorts of policies that in turn is a little bit different from those first two examples and that it's not about a specific election and it's not about a bill that's pending in congress it's about changing the ways that workers think more generally about politics so all of these are instances of what i'm talking about in the book um so i don't have time to go through the entire book with you unfortunately and i i wouldn't want to do that in any case because i want you to uh to go out and buy a copy for yourselves um but this is the 10 cent version of the sort the three main messages that i want to get across in the book the first is that this is a practice that is increasingly common and it's a major way that companies think about shaping politics and just as we think about PAC contributions or hiring lobbying teams as being ways that companies engage in politics so too should we think about this strategy the second message that i try and get across in the book through a variety of different means is that this is often effective it's not always effective by any means but there are many cases that we can point to where policy has changed elections have changed as a result of these messages that employers are sending the last message that i want to get across is that this is normatively problematic that there are some issues at play here that deserve a serious government response okay um so i'm a social scientist um and um as mark alluded to i relied on a lot of data to put together these conclusions um and i just want to sort of give you a sense of what that looks like um in order to give you an understanding of the sort of evidentiary base that i have going in here um i did surveys of corporate managers in 2014 2015 and 2016 i then followed up with surveys of individual workers um a telephone survey and several online surveys um and then because so much of this effort by employers is targeting congress i did a survey of congressional staffers to understand what staffers think about when they receive these messages that employees are sending and lastly i supplemented that with qualitative interviews with a number of top corporate managers and business association leaders to get a sense of how all of this plays out on the ground okay um so the last four things i want to do is kind of give you a sense of what this looks like on on the on the macro level the sort of top line statistics give you a sense of why managers think of it as being effective talk about why it's become more common and then and raise some of the thorny questions on that mobilization presents okay so the top line picture that i report in the book is that about one in four american employees have reported that they've received political messages or requests from their top managers and about half of all managers report that they're doing something to engage their workers into politics and this chart below shows you of those workers who received messages from their employer you know what are the most common sorts of messages and you can see here that policy issues and legislation is the most common content in these employer messages that's followed by turning out to vote registering to vote and and other information about candidates and the least commonly reported type of information had to do with campaign contributions which as we'll see is one of the areas where um there's still some federal law prohibiting what employers can do as opposed to other sorts of information that employers might send okay um so i often get asked what is the ideological skew of the messages that employers are sending to their workers and there's a slightly nuanced story at play here so on average when workers say that there's a political slant it tends to be to the right they tend to be conservative messages but there's an interesting twist on this by worker income if we divide workers by their income levels lower income and middle income workers tend to be more likely than not liberal workers who are receiving conservative messages from their employer so a liberal worker who's receiving a message that skews to the right of where he or she is and it's really only when you get to the highest income workers that you encounter workers who are conservative and receiving liberal messages from their employer to the left of their position so there's an interesting twist by income there okay um so i next wanted to talk a little bit about why companies find this to be so effective um and i don't have a time unfortunately to walk you through the case studies and the different survey evidence i use i just wanted to give you a taste of why managers think of this as being an effective uh political tool so on the survey of managers that i fielded i asked them to rank from least effective to most effective the different sorts of strategies that their company used to change public policy and what i found was that managers were about equally likely to rank recruiting their employees into politics as being their most effective strategy as they were to rank uh hiring a lobbyist which is something that we know that companies do a lot of already um they actually ranked mobilization as being more effective than making PAC contributions and participating in the chamber of commerce which is quite striking you know as a political scientist a lot of attention is spent on studying PAC contributions thinking about ways of regulating that but actually when you talk to managers they're saying that their employees are often a more effective political resource so what does this look like for companies to actually use their employees in this way well in an interview i did with a telecommunications company they nicely conveyed why these messages were so important so if a member of the lobbying team of this telecommunications company was meeting with a member of congress or his or her staff it's so effective for them to be able to say you know what in addition to the fact that this would be good for our business we have 3,500 workers in your district they're fired up about this and you know that because they've contacted your office about this particular position um and if workers sent enough correspondence to a members of congress's office it might even be that member of congress who reached out to the company about the piece of legislation okay um so why has this become a more effective strategy over time um i i think um there's there's a range of evidence that i present in the book to make the case that it has increased um but i think that one way of summing it up nicely is to just look at these two quotes that sort of give a sense of how this is greatly increased since 1980 so in 1980 a corporate strategist who is writing for the american enterprise institute you know argued the following they said you know companies are being hit over the head with new regulations and yet they're not doing anything to push back and they can talk to their workers about politics but they're not doing it labor unions are companies aren't so contrast that with the following quote from the washington post from 2004 in an article on employer mobilization in which they argued that companies that do not communicate with workers they're now the exception in this political world so how did this transformation occur well um in the book i frame it as a matter of motive means and opportunity sort of borrowing the conceit of a who done it mystery um and so the first element we have to consider is why businesses might want to do this what's the motive and here i draw from the great book that lead rutman here at new america has written on business lobbying um talking about how since the 1980s businesses have had a lot more reason to get involved in politics facing new new prospects of regulation new prospects of public policy intervention there's a lot more at stake writing on the line in what government can do to businesses and so they're looking for all sorts of different ways to get involved with politics so that's sort of the motive the second component here that's at play is the opportunity and here i draw from the work of the economic policy institute that really highlights the ways that workers have lost bargaining power relative to their employers since the 1980s you know this is the the chart that i like to think epi has made famous the the disconnect between productivity and compensation of rank and file workers that nicely illustrates this decline of bargaining power so why does this matter for employer political recruitment well i think it matters in two ways first um in a world where you have stronger protections for labor unions uh and you have more labor unions in the private sector managers have to compete with those labor unions for the political attention of workers in the 1950s if an employer were to send a political message to their workers they'd have to contend with competition from a labor union that might be communicating and going against what the employer was arguing um so in a world like we have today where labor unions are far less present in the private sector you know there's a lot less competition for workers attention the second reason why i think this matters is that it's a lot harder for workers now to say no to requests that their employer makes of them when they have less bargaining power in the 1950s they might have faced a situation where they could have said you know what um i don't like this political messaging that's happening at my company i'll go down the street and have an equally good job with equally good benefits but that's less likely to be the case less likely to be an option for employers uh for employees today um another aspect that we have to consider what i consider to be the means of why this has increased over time is really the role of business associations and entrepreneurial business leaders um including the business industry political action committee and the chamber of commerce and the national association of manufacturers so um they were really crucial in convincing managers that this was something that they should be doing that this was a strategy that was legal effective and that was something that was in their interest and so it really took this extra nudge from business association leaders to to get managers sold on this concept the last aspect that i think intersects with these three streams of explanations is the law and here there's been a big change since 2010 and the citizens united decision and this may come as a surprise to some people who think about the citizens united decision as only covering campaign contributions but actually by making it easier for companies to spend from their own treasuries on elections so long as it's not coordinated with um specific candidates or parties uh companies are allowed to use their employees time and effort as a resource in election campaigns and that's been interpreted in that way by the by members of the federal election commission and by uh law firms such as comington and burley who i quote on this slide so that's the picture of why i think this has increased over time um and become much more prevalent uh among corporate america the last thing i want to do before we get into the discussion is really to raise two concerns that i have with employer mobilization that i want to put on the table and that i hope we can dig into so the first concern i have is that this relationship between employers and employees it's not like other relationships that exist in society when a political party or a non-profit group asks a worker to participate in politics that's different than when an employer asks their employees to participate because ultimately the employer has a lot of sway and clout over the economic circumstances of their workers the second reason why i think we should be concerned about this behavior is that we're living in a time when companies already have quite a bit of clout in the policy making process and majorities of americans favor limits on what companies can do to participate in politics and so to the extent that this is one more strategy that companies can use to shape politics we should be thinking about ways to to rein it in and ensuring equal playing field um so that is a sort of top-line summary of the book um and now i'm very much looking forward to thea's comments thank you i feel like before i turn it over to thea i realized that i didn't say this is a co-sponsored event with epi in new america so um we're all here together thanks to epi thanks to new america and thank you to alex uh for that great presentation and for the book which i do recommend everybody go out and buy do we have it here yes great so it's it's really a pleasure to be here to have an opportunity to talk about this book which is so interesting and he and alex has done the research and the surveys that help us really put numbers and um context on on this phenomenon that as mark said you know we've been sort of watching and in fact you know through my career in washington for the last 20 years or so i worked at afl cio first as a trade economist and policy director but i sort of lived in that world of corporate lobbyists versus labor lobbyists and i wanted to tell one anecdote that i think was interesting in the late 90s and i was um working on trade issues and uh william daily was the commerce secretary at the time and he had something he called the virtual trade mission where he wanted to go around the country with corporate leaders and educate workers about how great free trade was and at some point you know i think he was prevailed upon because it was a democratic administration to have like one labor person so i i went to one of these events in illinois and i think they were literally 18 corporate hacks and me uh on the stage in illinois and but what was funny for me was being part of the planning conversations and everything where this line of and this happened from you know from the commerce department but also in the the various trade advisory committees where i represented the afl cio along with the people who represented the corporations you have to go tell your workers you have to mobilize your workers because your workers know how much they're going to benefit from free trade so-called free trade and so it was i think an early example of how corporations were starting to see their workers as as a resource but you know and i think it really is interesting over the course of the 20 years to see the companies do it sometimes effectively and sometimes ineffectively because sometimes they're you know they're flogging a dead horse and i think the trade issue was one where they were never all that successful in really getting those voices but another example is the employee free choice act which the labor law reform the big labor law reform package that the labor movement worked on for many years that would have strengthened workers right to bargain collectively to get a first contract and i think you know employers and employer representatives and wealthy donors really put a lot of resources into trying to get as many worker voices in opposition to the employee free choice act as they could and i think that was effective because i will say you know over the years i heard from democratic members of congress saying well i heard from a worker who thinks this is a bad idea and and that really had a lot of impact and so i i think you know the the phenomenon that alex is talking about is real and it it makes a difference in washington i wanted to um just say one word about martin luther king jr who was assassinated 50 years ago today and just thinking about 50 years ago uh when he talked about the the confluence between labor interests and african americans interests and he's talked about um our needs are identical with labor's needs for decent wages fair working conditions livable housing old age security health and welfare measures conditions in which families can grow have education for their children and respect in the community and then he he went on that was actually at the aflci convention in 1961 which is really interesting to see how closely he was working with the labor movement back then and in another speech he talked about how captains of industry did not lead this transformation they resisted it until they were overcome and you know so this tension between labor and capital in the political sphere i think is an important one and the kinds of mechanisms that alex talks about that are helping to tilt the bargaining the playing field more towards exacerbating the imbalance of power that we already see where employers have so much power and they have so much wealth relative to workers and now they're going to use this additional tool of actually um you know sometimes using coercion sometimes using implicit threats of hiring or firing or um rewarding to to um to alter the the political debate seems like it is really an important thing for alex to have brought attention to it's really insidious and it's um and i hope you know that when you look at his book you'll look and we can maybe talk more about it too i think i'm really interested in what are the the policy responses that we could do and i know alex does talk about some ways in which these things we could have if we get a more progressive government uh in the next five minutes um that we could be able to to address some of these questions and you know i think most of you will find shocking and i certainly found shocking some of some of what what alex describes but also it's not just what companies do but the fact that it's legal and you know some of it became legal in 2010 with Citizens United but i think some of us maybe live in a maybe a too sheltered world where it seemed if it seems like it would be see that seems inappropriate or it seems uh overreaching that an employer would actually tell you who to vote for or how to act or punish you for not showing up at a rally for a political candidate um but this is the world that we live in and so it's it's important for that but it's also important i think for the context in which this happens and alex is very good at bringing that out that we have several decades of business and right wing billionaires concerted attacks on labor and that's i think with the tragedy when i think back to the martin luther king 50 years ago we had 50 years ago martin luther king went to memphis uh to stand with the sanitation workers who were on strike that you know he was recognizing that the power of workers through a union was one of the key ways in which we could redress some of the inequities and race and gender in our society and yet we all failed you know we have failed in many important ways because when we look at the progress that's been made in 50 years it's inadequate you know the gaps are still there they're still large and i always think that you know 50 years ago if unions had become stronger instead of weaker over those 50 years you know what would the difference have been in terms of wage inequality and in terms of the racial and the gender gaps that we know that we're that unions help close those gaps between um blacks and whites and latinos and whites and between men and women and so it's um a problem so i that's those are most of the points i wanted to make but i'm really thrilled to be here look forward to your questions and look forward to further conversation with alex in this great book great well let's talk about i want to raise a few questions and you know both of you can uh respond a bit i think on your last point yeah i think the um the you know unions do a number of things and one of them is raise wages and improve working conditions another is that's a way you know it's a way to protect yourself against your employer's demands when they're when they're unreasonable and you can do that you can do that with law you can do that with regulation but the best way to do it is by having voice and uh and and that's an important aspect of this i was thinking like the first time i kind of became aware of this issue my my wife had written an article for the financial times in the mid 2000s about those buy pack the beginnings of the buy pack effort and they were creating websites for for companies and i remember looking at a bunch of the websites and it's like these are the issues that should be important to you and the number one on all of them at that time was the estate tax and and so really helps answer this you know this real paradox in american politics which is why the estate taxes has been so unpopular despite the fact that you know in many states it's you know five families that would ever pay it um and and it's not just because they gave it a good nickname the death tax because i don't think that quite that level of power um so that was that was interesting to me um i'm curious a couple questions um to get this started Alex one is like when you refer to liberal messaging um what does that look like and what you know are we talking about ben and jerry's here or are we talking like what what's what's your definition and and what kind of employers are engaging in what you would call liberal messaging that's a great question and it's one that you know i'll admit is tricky to pin down because i'm relying on workers themselves to evaluate these messages and to say was it a left wing message was it a right wing message um i think for the most part the messages that workers were coding as liberal were expansions of training programs education spending health care um and it's worth bearing in mind that there are industries that rely very heavily on government intervention in those areas and therefore a move in that direction might be coded as as being liberal another example would be a renewable energy company that i interviewed that mobilizes its workers to promote the federal production tax credit which subsidizes renewable energy use in the united states and so that's another example that might be considered left left wing the other thing i was interested in is i i'm i i sometimes feel like there's a divide in american business now between privately held and private equity owned companies and those that are more you know that are publicly held and consumer facing um and you know you often see you often see in trump world a very heavy role of the private equity and you know people have never had to deal with a shareholder um or or anything else do you is there a distinction in the way those two kinds of uh employers communicate with uh workers on politics i was expecting to find one and i didn't find one in the aggregate survey data from companies or in the interviews that it kind of pointed both ways you know there was an episode or an interview that i conducted with a privately held it company that said they didn't engage in politics in any way because there are two owners disagreed one was left wing one was right wing um and i interviewed a publicly held company that said that they didn't want to engage in politics because they didn't want to uh uh experience backlash from their consumers but by the same token i interviewed other manufacturing companies that said they felt like they had to mobilize their workers because their shareholders expected them to generate as much value as possible and the way that one way you generate value is by pushing for regulations and subsidies that are good for your business i had a question um i was thinking a little bit about the difference between sort of firm specific messaging versus generic kind of right wing conservative pro rich uh like the estate tax is something that maybe the ceo of a company would care about but that most companies don't really have an interest in but something else you know like you know our company needs a subsidy from the government to continue to exist seems kind of more understandable versus taxes are bad governments bad unions are bad so did you did you see much difference or were you able to to figure out how much well into the two categories yeah so thinking about the workers survey it seemed to be the case that the modal message was about firm specific benefits but it's hard to make a clear distinction between these firm specific issues and the general political issues because some of the managers i interviewed said that they would start off talking about general political issues to get people to understand why this is something that the company should be talking about and then they would zoom in on specific issues as they came up um in the legislative process so um you know that distinction may be harder to uh to kind of make in in practice and i know one one interesting case that came up in the last week that one of our colleagues wanted us to ask you about was a Sinclair broadcasting where the journalists were given a you've probably all seen that uh video now what uh where journalists were given a very specific message that they were required to you know read out loud on every Sinclair station but it also came out that there were incredibly restrictive uh contract details for these for these employees like that they had to if they quit they had to pay money to the company and things like that pay back their salary if they quit um and as well as non-competes and things like that you like you know in addition to the EPI chart that basically shows workers have less bargaining power and less room to maneuver are you are you seeing more of those kinds of very you know those all enhance the power of the employee over of the employer over the employer are you seeing more of that is that part of the deal here those kinds of very restrictive employment requirements yeah i'm glad that you pointed that out about Sinclair because i think it fits with one of the key messages from the book that this sort of employer recruitment is more effective when workers have less bargaining power relative to their employers and in the surveys i found that it was workers who were most fearful of losing their jobs or thought that there there would be consequences or retaliation for not responding to their employers that were most likely to respond to their employers and so i think that fits with the pattern from from Sinclair um you know it's an interesting case of mobilization where these employees um are receiving political messages that they're then communicating on to the general public and there's actually a great paper by two emory political scientists that shows that when Sinclair comes into a local media market the content begins to nationalize and it moves to the right um as well so this is a case of employer mobilization that has ripple effects beyond the individual company and i just wanted to jump in on that front about um you know all the accumulation of ways in which employers kind of stack the death in their favor and the epi is working on a paper we're calling first day fairness which is that there is this accumulation of things that are related to each other but they're they're all separate actions that employers can take to basically disadvantaged workers from the very first day they walk into a job and they range from things like you know non-compete agreements or forced arbitration where you have to you have to sign away your rights in order to get a job and if you have a labor market which has not been real healthy or robust for a long time then you know as you say that sort of that plays into whether workers feel like they can just walk away from that job and especially if all the employers in a particular sector whether it's fast food or software development are all asking for the same non-compete agreement then it's kind of hard to take a real stance against that you know and you add on to that that um workers may not know who their boss is because of all the the fish and workplaces they may walk into a job and not know if they're a subcontractor if they're an employee or an independent contractor and so you know I think it's this accumulation of things that really kind of piles on to the the phenomenon that Alex is talking about where if employers have all the the strength and workers are discouraged from criticizing or leaving or finding another job somewhere else then they're more likely to have to put up with this kind of um imposition on their political freedom yeah I think it's it's no accident that that California doesn't allow non-compete agreements and that might have something to do with the state's economic dynamism as well let's open it up to questions although I want to make sure we do talk about solutions and and both what you think are good solutions to the end and that and that section of your book is about and yeah please wait for the microphone which I guess I didn't give enough warning to uh to do that well why did yeah what just just use your use use your outdoor voice thank you okay I have two questions that are it's it's sort of one question um and and I wrote it down um but but my question is that I know that the government or public sector employees often um are not allowed to um to be politically active within their their workspace or for instance friends of mine at the DOJ like they're discouraged from um certain types of political activism even outside of their work like going to marches speaking on political things and newspapers etc um and my question is is twofold is that the case anywhere else other than public sector jobs like are there any other type of workplaces where um there is an expectation or um a written rule where it would be a breach of contract in some regard for employees to be told that they have to go to a romney rally unpaid um and um um um yeah just where there's stipulations and contracts for employers uh sorry for employees not to be political at all sorry that was kind of meandering no that that makes a lot of sense and I'm really glad that you brought up public sector workers because it's an important distinction that I make in the book between the world that private sector workers live in and the world that public sector workers live in and the private sector world looks a lot different because for the most part you don't have those sorts of protections that exist for public sector workers um so you know in the in the case of the federal government there's the Hatch Act that um not only limits political involvement of federal employees but political recruitment in the workplace precisely because of fears of pressure and coercion and to my thinking there's no reason that we should be any less worried about coercion or pressure in the private sector than in the public sector now when it comes to any limits that do exist at the federal level no um you know this actually perhaps embarrassingly took me by surprise when I started this project there is no first amendment right to free speech in your private sector workplace that doesn't exist uh some states do have limitations on um whether or not you can be discharged or treated differently for your political views but most states do not um and one of the solutions that I write about in the book is adding political views and actions to the civil rights act so just as an employer cannot treat you differently on the basis of your sex so too should they be limited in their ability to treat you differently based on your political views that's something that most other industrial countries have but that we lack at the federal level but are there workplaces for instance I'm thinking of um of a friend who works for the New York Times who in in a non-political reporting job at the New York Times who's he feels bound to not participate one way or the other like not be seen at a march for one thing or or another are there are there workplaces where you're not allowed to be political just at all yeah so that's a nice example of an employer that may set limits either implicit or explicit on political activities um but you have to be careful because workers have what are known as section seven rights under the national labor relations act that allow them to talk about politics if it's related to the collective well-being of the employees at that workplace and employers cannot interfere with those rights there've been a couple of cases that have gone before the national labor relations board on this matter you know Chipotle for instance had a handbook that limited employees from talking about the company related to politics on social media or in the workplace and that's a clear violation of of those rights that workers have and panelists have been talking about employees and unions as if they had common interests and my question is are we seeing unions be effective protectors of the political rights of employees and consumers especially in the environmental arena when the uh employer has an interest in deregulation for example or even in the teacher strikes now in in the south are we're seeing wildcat strikes uh what out of the roles what is the role of the union in in limiting those worker demands as opposed to protecting the rights of of the public and and the employees that's a great question so it's a complicated question but you know I think a good union is a democratic organization and is responsive to what its members you know ask for it to do and you know whether that happens in every case I mean I think that the the wildcat strikes is a really interesting example because one of the reasons that's happening is that those workers do not have the right to strike and so the the union cannot legally strike but the workers can't walk out of the job and what you know what happened in west virginia was actually that the um you know the superintendent closed the schools so it wasn't actually a strike but because the superintendent was in agreement with the workers saying you know we need to adequately fund education we need to adequately fund teachers and so the union I think was playing a supportive role in that case but because of the limitations and this is I think you know an important lesson for the right wing about be careful what you wish for in terms of the the janice case which is in front of the supreme court right now which could very you know limit the rights of a lot of public sector workers well limits the rights of public sector unions to collect dues from all their their workers and it could lead to more labor more wildcat strikes more kind of labor unrest I mean one of the reasons that we have the rules that we have in terms of labor was to buy labor peace and a kind of an important part of American history and that may be at risk now because the attack on unions from the right has been so successful that they've been beaten back to as Alex said it's around six percent of the private sector workforce only six percent has a union to protect them but I don't know Alex if you saw any differences in your um in your research between unionized workplaces versus unionized workplaces and you know are the unions able to stand up and say you can't tell us what to do and we don't want to have to go to your stupid rally yeah so um it's worth noting that employers in some ways learned about the strategy from unions so when I interviewed business associations like the chamber and by pack about how they arrived at the strategy you know they emphasize that this is what labor unions have been doing forever and employers are just kind of copying and learning from that strategy although now there's less competition for these workers it's it's generally much more one-sided given that union density has fallen to such a low level but I just say one thing it's kind of interesting so you know when when unions mobilize their members around an issue whether it's a trade agreement or the employee free choice act you know in principle they're they're standing up for workers interest and the cases where the workers interests are identical to the corporate interests you know are fewer and fewer because the um the employers are going in different directions and you know one example because I work in trade policy when I started this work you know 25 years ago there were more cases where you had a national um alliance between workers and unions kind of like in the steel sector where you know both the worker and the the unions and the business might have the same position like we need protection from foreign imports and and then when the businesses started to outsource then their interests diverged very dramatically from those of the workers and I think you see it obviously in terms of tax policy the companies don't want to pay corporate taxes but then who's going to fund schools and roads and waterways and so on so um you know I I guess I there is a a lot of parallelism between unions did this and they did it successfully because I think I would say you know that their members could see instinctively oh good finally we have a collective voice we have a way of weighing in in a way that can be effective and when employers do it it's a little bit more artificial although it's worth noting that you know I well I I think I agree agree generally with your point which is a good one that you know business interests and worker interests have become unmoored particularly since the 1970s there are cases where you might think that it it makes sense for the employer to be talking politics with their employees and that their interests are aligned in the sense you know trade in some cases trade is an example of this I interviewed the steel tariffs yes yeah yeah an example where the the company and the the union are on the same side of that issue yeah can you wait for that you talk a little bit about who typically drives this within a corporation is it government relations human resources the ceo is there a correlation between the level at which is driven and the effectiveness it's a great question kind of getting inside of the firm I think what the interviews revealed is that it's very different at large companies and small companies at large companies it's part of the government affairs division you know just as they have a PAC strategy they have an employee engagement strategy at smaller firms it tends to be a lot more idiosyncratic the views of the managers and their particular political inclinations that get shared with workers and that's reflected in the tone of these messages as well at smaller companies these messages tend to focus a lot more on candidates and elections and at larger companies it tends to be a lot more on policy issues because it's about about their government affairs strategy thank you so could you actually say a bit more on the heterogeneity because on the one hand we kind of have in mind you know a kind of Marxist framework where the the interest of the worker not aligned with that of the capitalist and we know that since the 70s this has changed and so it's just theoretically in thinking about companies where either around free trade so not just the you know regulating steel but also free trade per se these are very complex issues so in Europe that I study I was wondering maybe it would have been business interest with the best actor to defend the European Union to explain what it does all these things so two question is thinking about the heterogeneity and thinking about the interviews you made in companies like you know the example would be Google for instance where I think most employees feel that whatever the employer likes they're gonna like um maybe not so I'm just interested in like the heterogeneity to some extent on economic policies my sense is potentially the premises are aligned and then a second larger question is within these companies what does class mean to some extent like what does it is there a zero-sum conflict maybe over kind of marginally splitting profits but in doing your interviews how do they think of their employees to some extent yeah these are great questions um so in terms of the diversity of these messages across companies I think one important dimension is the the sort of the the size of the company and the institutionalization of its government affairs operation whether it's the idiosyncratic preferences of the boss who owns the company versus a more formal government affairs division so that's one another important division in that I think exists in the in the data is by their previous level of political engagement as well so if they tended to before this tactic arrived on the scene be involved in making PAC contributions really aggressively or having close ties to particular ideological business groups they were much more likely to pursue more ideologically driven messages to their employees um in terms of how these managers think about class inside of these companies you know they do think about the responsiveness of workers along not I wouldn't say class lines but you know in the book I talk about bargaining power lines so I think about this pharmaceutical company whose government affairs officer I interviewed and he was making the case that it was a lot harder to get the bench scientists to respond to their messages because and they even feared sending recruitment requests to the bench scientists because they would just write in with whatever was on their mind he didn't trust them to tow the company line in contrast the supportive staff as he called them the sort of sales folks the administrative folks who might think have less bargaining power he found were much more responsive and so they often targeted the messaging efforts to those staff as opposed to the the bench scientists yes and I'll give you an example that I think resonates with the with the two of us we both previously had Harvard University as our employer and during debates in Congress over the funding of political science by the National Science Foundation our boss the government department contacted us to encourage us to lobby Congress for this extra funding I think that's a perfect example of where our interests are very clearly aligned and I was happy that I was recruited in that way by my employer I think what makes that situation different is I wasn't fearing for my job I was in a not in a position where they had a lot of bargaining power over me per se and so I think if more workers were in that position I'd feel a lot more comfortable with these kinds of messaging requests a question occurred to me I'm kind of curious about related to your survey research you also surveyed congressional staff and I'm curious you know somebody who's worked on the hill and that that dilemma of trying to distinguish like real opinion from fake which I think is you know a hundred times harder even than it was you know when I work up there I wonder you know how do they how do they beyond I think you said one thing about it but generally how are they reacting to are they seeing some of this stuff is organized and dismissing it or yeah so I you know it cuts both ways because on the one hand staffers are wary of astroturf groups that I you know where it's a very low-cost operation for a large group of people to all send the same message so they tend to discount that sort of signal but the cross-cutting consideration is that these employees are being recruited by their employers to care about this issue and potentially to vote on it in the next election and so my co-authors and I we had a little experiment on the on the survey of little hypothetical vignette where we told staffers to imagine that they had received a whole bunch of letters from a group in their constituency it could be ordinary citizens or it could be employees of a large company and then we asked them you know how representative do you think these messages are of your constituency's opinion as a whole and we found that they were more likely to rank the employee letters even if they were a huge group of employee letters as being more representative of their constituency than messages that came from individual citizens and I think the follow-up interviews indicated that they tended to take these messages more seriously because they thought that these workers were more informed and that they would also act on these issues in a way that maybe other astroturf like organizations would not and you know something about them as opposed to the other ones where you kind of know nothing yeah about how those people got when you look at the companies themselves did you think about that their age and industry type so imagine like a either x y axis or a two by three box right so industry type they're born without thinking at least percept self-perception not needing government help or born clearly needing government help and then as they age as a company they again perceive they don't need government help at some point they graduate to the second category like hey can you help me out but you know make sure I don't get screwed here to full blown rent seeking right and so as you go up that curve as the and can this kind of behavior actually be seen as a proxy for economic sclerosis right if you have more this employee being asked to force to cajole to encourage to that suggests lack of economic innovation because the more you have people that at the you know the beginning of those two curves the health of your as far as I've been understanding is the health of your economy more innovative more entrepreneurial economy is the less entrepreneurial your economy is as Leah said the more lobbying you get yeah that's a great question and you know I'm also persuaded by Lee's work that once companies develop an institutional operation for government affairs it tends to be pretty sticky because you now have a whole team of people whose job it is to identify problems in government and find ways of of solving them and so I think this definitely fits into that story and you know when I think about policy solutions in the book I try and make the case that you know this is something that libertarians should care about as well not just because it represents a violation of of individual liberty potentially of these workers but also because it contributes exactly like you said to rent seeking that in many cases this is about securing favorable regulations or subsidies for narrow interests that potentially come at the expense of the overall overall economic pie. I thought that was a really good point by the way. The white shirt white shirt. Thank you the fantastic presentation and thank you for the comments. A lot of my questions are already answered about the corporation but I was wondering if you could mention that something about the fissured workplace because it seems like many corporations of that nature would have the greatest number of districts or areas covered on the other hand they may not be able to control their workers as well in terms of mobilizing and political engagement so could you just comment on that quickly? That's a great question. I also be curious to get your perspective because I know you thought a lot about this. Just really quickly I would say you know fissuring how I interpret that you know thinking about David Wiles framework it's a way of shedding responsibility while magnifying your bargaining power over these employees that you're no longer responsible for and I think there's a sweet spot where people are still potentially responsive to you because they see you being the management because they see you as being ultimately in control of your economic situation but I think if you go all the way to the end of fissuring and you're completely unmoored you're an independent contractor maybe you don't have a lot of loyalty to that particular company because you're working with 10 other different companies and you can just kind of leave that one company if you find them disagreeable when it comes to politics but yeah I'd be curious to know what you make of that. I don't have I think it's as you say there's a balance in there where a lot of the some of the fissuring is just phony where clearly somebody's the employer and they can hire or fire you in which case and I think most workers are aware like I sort of work for Marriott but I don't really work for Marriott because I'm part of a cleaning service that is subcontracted to Marriott but if Marriott yells at me and they don't want me on the job then I'm gone so I think you know I maybe a question of how real the fissuring is I'm the geographical dispersion I think of a whole separate question and I think that's something you know certainly unions struggle with like it's hard to organize a workforce that's not in one place you know you don't stand out the outside the plant gate with your fliers anymore and I think that's true for unions it's probably also true for employers that it gets more challenging I mean you have probably technological ways of communicating with your workers you can send them an email they'll probably open it because it's from the boss but but it's not a you can't just bring everybody together in the cafeteria lunch room anymore and even that in Marriott may not be your may not be the employer either it may be a franchise I wonder if in coordination yeah between those two levels right exactly and the whole question of franchising yeah yeah you know I think it's something not in the scope of this conversation but has a lot to do with the way the economy affects workers I want to make sure we have some time to talk about solutions I think you know sometimes authors refer to the chapter 10 problem of you know where they've scoped out all the dimensions of a problem and and literally it is chapter 10 for you but you have a lot in there and I want to make sure we put you talked about a sort of private sector hatch-act option can both of you talk about what you know what you find interesting or appealing in in terms of ways of you know reasonably regulating this accepting that some political communication like what you like the you know the NSF case that you talked about as a Harvard employee some you know there is there are real rights here for employers to say something about some issues so what fixes the extremes here yeah so I think it's good to start by asking what kind of practices do we want and I think we want those cases where workers feel secure they feel comfortable and there's a clear alignment between managers and their employees and that information is useful another sort of contact that we might think is a good thing is when employers are just simply trying to get their employees excited about politics and participating and so you know Marriott actually in as well as Starbucks committed to getting their employees registered to vote and turning out turning them out to vote in the last election in a completely non-partisan way and I think we can all agree that that's probably a net benefit for society so thinking about preserving those while curbing the most coercive aspects it's a tricky line to to thread and I think the way that I would recommend approaching it is by making sure that workers do not feel as though they're under pressure to respond to their employers rather than trying to limit what employers can say because I think we've learned if there's anything we've learned from campaign finance law it's really tricky to to define speech in that way both from a legal perspective and from a practical perspective and so I would call for you know adding protections in the civil rights act for political speech in action so that workers know that they are protected regardless of whether or not they talk politics on the job or if they hew to a particular political agenda or not so that's something the federal government could do but states could step in in the meantime and when the federal government is unwilling as it appears to be to take on these issues states could could step up to protect workers in this way I don't have much to add to that I think that makes a lot of sense is just to remove the coercion is is clearly that important and of course anything that we can do to raise workers bargaining power too if to the extent that the analysis in the book is correct and it's these vulnerable workers who are most at risk of coercion if we can raise the bargaining power it makes them more comfortable and so anything in that department such as making it easier for workers to unionize enforcing labor's regulations those sorts of things would happen for employment for sure yeah and and I neglected the green shirt so um I was wondering about whether there are any budding fight back strategies that you might have encountered I'm glad you mentioned the national labor relations act and and concerted activity employees have a right to engage in concerted activity the supreme court held in the 70s in the east case that political activity can be concerted activity so employees have some tools to resist on the job if it's done conservatively I also would mention that the in two years ago the american law institute published its restatement of employment law and there's a chapter on employee autonomy there to growing areas a new area of law since it's section 7.06 and there are possible tools in the common law to to fight back against the employer's pressures I'm wondering whether you encountered any fight back strategies in your research yeah that's a good question and I think you pointed to one solution which is section 7 of the concerted activity provisions that employees they have used rights to organize and talk about politics that concern their workplace um even if they're not in a union so that's one um you know I think putting pressure on companies from the outside by investor pressure or consumer pressure can have a big impact as well you know companies particularly publicly traded companies or consumer facing companies they face a lot of pressure here you know in other work I've done I've studied the american legislative exchange council or alex and you know you saw a big effort there to put pressure on companies to sever their ties with alex and it worked mostly for consumer facing companies so you know that's that's one strategy that could be used as well I wanted to um toss in and I was just thinking of another policy possible policy implication which is um you know to the extent you can't stop the employer from having an opinion and expressing it and and so on I guess one question is whether there would be a right to rebuttal or a right to you know have more of a balance provision because particularly in some of these cases and some of the ones that you talk about alex where the employer is actually providing wrong information they're saying you know it's going to be terrible for you and you're going to lose your job and we don't get this that and the other thing um and some of it's not actually right or factual and so you know one question would be whether the workers have the right to say okay we listen to you but we also want to hear from somebody who has a different view about whether you know raising the corporate tax cut tax rate might be beneficial in some ways in terms of funding local social services so and there's a precedent for that in labor organizing with um you know partly created new rights for employers to talk to employees about why they shouldn't join a union precisely because you know the conservatives in congress were worried about one-sided conversations from labor unions alone so this would nicely have turned that on its head and say well when employers are talking about politics you should have an opposing perspective as well it's interesting i one of the real dilemma case and it's anecdotal but one of the anecdotes again from 2012 that i found really um interesting an interesting problem was the employee who says if obama's reelected i'm gonna have to lay off half of you you know that's a pretty powerful message you know there's a 50 chance you'll lose your job you're gonna you know you're like it's not a direct threat that you're the one about your vote but that's going to be a very powerful threat and i think it was also a lie you know he did not lay off half the staff when obama was was reelected so there's a real deception there that that you know i don't it's hard to respond to that because the employer is saying what his intent is even though he's lying about his intent i just think that's a there's a kind of i i don't know what the there has to be some solution for that because it's a it's the equivalent of a false advert of a false advertising or fraud but you know i weren't it's not obvious how you would fix that yeah and labor organizing here too points out the difficulties of this i mean i in the book i quote epi's work on the kate brawn from brenner's research that shows that employers aren't allowed to make direct threats to their employees in the labor organizing process but many of them still do or they construct the threats in these hypothetical ways that if if you have a union i will have other company that you know i think look what happened to them they went out of business yeah um but but that's how is that restricted how is that is that regulated at all i think they aren't allowed to make well in the context of the union organizing tribe they're not supposed to threaten to close the factory but they do and that's a lot of kate's work is how hard it is to enforce even when the law is on the books and in this case we don't have that law on the books right so double double challenge all right i think you know we could do one more question if there's anybody or we can yeah well i'm i'm wondering if there are so many other influences on how people form their political views social media in particular but you know everything from sinclair to what you hear on talk radio and whether as the workforce changes both in terms of the relationship with an employer you know gig economy retirees that in fact there'll be a shift in how influential retirees can be or companies can be yes they can say if you don't turn up to the to the romney rally we'll fire you but you know how how many industries will that actually be possible to happen in because there'll be so many other things that you know for everything from workplace engagement to what they hear from their family and at their church that will determine political activity and engagement that's a great last question yeah that's a that's a it's a tricky question to answer i you know i don't have the sort of gold standard research that other people have used in political science to pin down exactly what drives people to vote but my suspicion is that this isn't like other types of messages that people receive from parties or you know a one-off message that you get to vote for a particular candidate because it's happening day in and day out by people who are you know surround you in your job and who are responsible for your economic livelihood so i think even with the increased additional sources for information the workplace remains a unique context and employers remain unique political recruiters because of that yeah you want the last word no that's okay i'm a good last word okay i want to thank you all for coming i encourage you to pick up a copy of the book there's a lot in here a lot that i could barely imagine uh would be in here so it's a really exciting book and i want to thank alex and thea for giving us our time and their time and