Do you think it’s appropriate for a company to send its employees a list of approved candidates (from president to the statehouse), with a warning that workers “may suffer the consequences” if those candidates lost? What if a company told its mineworkers that attendance at presidential rally during the 2012 election cycle was “mandatory”, but “no one was forced to attend”? Do you think they would feel like they might be penalized for non-attendance?

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These examples are real, and they come from Alexander Hertel-Fernandez’s new book, Politics at Work: How Companies Turn their Workers into Lobbyists. The book documents an extraordinary practice, and admittedly, one to which I had paid far too little attention: companies frequently try to persuade and mobilize their employees to support politicians and policies beneficial to the corporation.

Hertel-Fernandez calls this phenomenon employee mobilization. And the examples continue: a company pressuring employees to give money to the corporate Pac and calling out workers who didn’t attend political events. Companies stuffing their employees’ paycheck envelopes with political messages. A curriculum for employers to educate their employees, including arguments that the “rich pay more than their fair share” and “taxation, regulation and legislation can all … make it more difficult for a business to make a profit [and] will, in the end, negatively affect you and me”.

One-third of workers in one study worried about retaliation if they didn’t follow corporate wishes

Because of the inherent power imbalance between managers and workers, these practices look more like coercion than simple free speech. Hertel-Fernandez is a political scientist at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and Politics at Work brings together a variety of studies – of managers, workers, legislative staff – exploring different aspects of employee mobilization. He reports that one-third of workers in one of his studies worried about retaliation if they didn’t follow corporate wishes. And unsurprisingly given their precarious financial situation, lower-income workers were more susceptible. When corporations monitor whether employees engage in political activities (and Hertel-Fernandez says that some do), employees are also more likely to respond to managers’ wishes.

Another interesting finding is that corporate managers think these practices are extremely useful. Managers ranked employee mobilization efforts as more effective for influencing policy than any other activity except lobbying – more than donating to candidates and more than buying political advertising.

This is important because many activists and scholars who focus on political corruption and reform emphasize campaign finance issues. While such issues are hugely important, they are only the tip of a deep iceberg that includes lobbying, the revolving door from industry to government, and funding for grassroots groups. Employee mobilization plunges still further into the frigid waters where money turns to power. Interestingly, according to Hertel-Fernandez’s analysis, the Citizens United case was particularly important in expanding employee mobilization activities: after the case, it became clear to corporations that such activities were protected.

Economically, worker and corporate interests are not always aligned

Hertel-Fernandez is careful to note that employee mobilization has taken place through history, that it can happen on both the right and the left, and that workplace politics might have some virtues. But it is worth lingering on the reasons why the practice can be destructive. Economically, worker and corporate interests are not always aligned. Corporations arguing against healthcare or the minimum wage might be acting more from ideology than any real threat to their bottom line.



It also isn’t clear that mobilizing employees to support the corporation’s profit-seeking agenda will be good for the economy overall. We have a consumer-driven economy, which grows when consumers have money to spend. This, in turn, means that policies that build and preserve a strong, large middle class will be superior to those that deepen the pockets of the wealthy.



Politically, employee mobilization shrinks the space for active citizenship, blurring the line between work and politics, especially for financially insecure workers who might be more susceptible to implicit threats. And with labor unions in decline and corporate employees mobilized, the asymmetry of political power and influence will only deepen if employee mobilization expands.

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Of course, with Citizens United still on the books, the question is what to do about it. Hertel-Fernandez focuses on solutions to the worst excesses of employee mobilization, including extending the bar on coercing employees into corporate Pac activities to all corporate political activities, banning companies from penalizing workers who refuse to attend political meetings, and protecting workers from employment retaliation for their political beliefs and actions.

All of these solutions would help, but the real challenge is that we are trapped in a vicious cycle. The greater the power differential between ordinary citizens and corporations, the harder it is to make change. And the more that corporations lobby, donate to campaigns and engage in employee mobilization, the wider the power differential gets.

