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.