Professor Bainbridge makes some excellent points about Wal-Mart’s new romance with the prospect of an employer “pay or play” mandate for health care. In so doing, he touches upon Wal-Mart’s longstanding status as a target for labor organization and its apparent hope that by endorsing “pay or play” the company can stave off the unions.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing at all untypical about this. Businesses commonly employ lobbying strategies that embrace for their own parochial purposes policies not in the general business interest.
Thus a few years ago, most big businesses endorsed Sarbanes-Oxley even though everyone knew that the bill imposed ridiculous and costly new mandates on business. The hope was that by feeding the beast with SOX, the union pension fund “activists” and other gadflies would be satisfied while the real cost burden would be borne by smaller public companies. One sees a similar phenomenon with the corporations that support cap-and-trade such as Alcoa (where many members of my family labored). Alcoa is shipping its energy-intensive production processes overseas and is therefore in a great position to lecture less flexible businesses about the advantages of going green.
A final example is the Committee for a Level Playing Field, founded last March by Starbucks, Costco, and Whole Foods. The Committee wants to find compromise language that would enable Congress to enact a version of the Employee Free Choice Act. These companies have every right to do this, of course. But the suspicion lingers that the impetus behind this effort is largely a public relations effort by Starbucks, Costco, and Whole Foods to differentiate themselves and their right-thinking customers from those dreary companies with their dreary customers that would prefer not to be unionized. The latter group, of course, includes their chief retail competitor, that large firm headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas.
I always tell our CEO-members that when big companies make noble sounding pronouncements about public policy, hold on to your wallets.
Tags: card check, SEC, Wal-Mart