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GOP Operative Behind 'Despicable' Anti-Halter Ad

Zachary Roth | May 10, 2010, 10:23AM

Arkansas Lt. Governor Bill Halter (D)

A hard-hitting TV ad that has been widely denounced as offensive could have an impact in next week's hard-fought Democratic primary election in Arkansas. The group behind the ad is run by an up-and-coming GOP operative, but won't say who's funding it.

The GOP-tied conservative advocacy group Americans for Job Security has said it's spending $900,000 -- a hefty sum in the state's relatively inexpensive media market -- to run a TV ad that accuses Lt. Gov. Bill Halter of shipping jobs to India when he helped run a tech company. On top of stereotypical "Indian" images and music, actors playing Indians thank Halter. The candidate has called the ads "despicable," and even his opponent, Sen. Blanche Lincoln, has labeled them "offensive."

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Topics: Americans For Job Security, Bill Halter, Blanche Lincoln, EFCA, Racism, Stephen DeMaura

Chamber of Commerce

Chamber CEO's 'Striking Innovation': Helping Corporate Backers Fund Attack Ads On The Down-Low

Zachary Roth | January 14, 2010, 3:43PM

Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Tom Donohue

This week, National Journal reported that the health insurance lobby funneled tens of millions of dollars to the Chamber of Commerce to fund an ad campaign attacking heath-care reform. The Chamber essentially acted as a pass-through, allowing the health insurers to avoid having their names tied to the campaign.

The story understandably generated outrage -- with health-care reform advocates now demanding hearings. But it looks like the pass-through tactic is nothing new. In fact, it's a technique the Chamber has been pioneering for almost a decade.

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Topics: AHIP, Chamber of Commerce, EFCA, Health Care, Tom Donohue, Wall Street

Earthgrains, The Wholesome New Poster Child For The "Extreme Anti-Union" Movement

Moe Tkacik | May 20, 2009, 4:07PM

A Cornell survey of trends in union intimidation released today is likely to provide labor supporters some critical talking points in their endless struggle to pass a "card check" bill aimed at making said tactics tougher to pull off.

It's called NO HOLDS BARRED: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing and the first company it singles out for strongarm tactics is...a healthy baked goods company called Earthgrains!

Until relatively recently, the report says, the St. Louis-based Earthgrains had "a history of maintaining a stable collective bargaining relationship with the majority of [its] workforce." All that changed in 2000, when its Kentucky plant tried to organize -- and Earthgrains responded by videotaping employees talking to union representatives, publicly confiscating any union literature the reps distributed, interrogating employees about whether their co-workers supported unions, maintaining to know how other workers planned to vote, and outright threatening their jobs and retirement plans. Such tactics are now "standard practice," according to the study of 1,004 union organizing drives between 1999 and 2003, in which management threatened to close plants in 57 percent of the campaigns and threatened to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent. (Electronic surveillance and attempting to infiltrate the organizing committee were less common tactics, used in 11% and 28% of campaigns, respectively.)

What distinguishes the current organizing climate from previous decades of employer opposition to unions? The primary difference is that the most intense and aggressive anti-union campaign strategies, the kind previously found only at employers like Wal-Mart, are no longer reserved for a select coterie of extreme anti-union employers.

The report cites the campaigns for the ever-widening gap between the percentage of American non-managerial workers who say they would vote for a union -- higher than ever at 55% -- and the actual union density, which stands at 12.4%, and blames "deregulation, investor-centered trade and investment policies, and an underfunded and disempowered National Labor Relations Board" on what it terms "the rise of the union avoidance industry." But let's go back to Earthgrains for a minute.

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Topics: EFCA