The doc­u­ment shows that, as of last year, employ­ees in the finance and insur­ance sec­tors account­ed for a stun­ning 19.7 mil­lion of those stored in BIPAC’s system.

The Wash­ing­ton, D.C.-based orga­ni­za­tion func­tions both as a PAC and a source of ​“tools and tech­nolo­gies” for busi­ness­es to ​“edu­cate” their work­ers about polit­i­cal issues and can­di­dates. Its net­work has explod­ed in recent years to encom­pass 7,000 busi­ness­es and trade asso­ci­a­tions across the Unit­ed States, com­pris­ing 25 mil­lion — or more than one-fifth — of the nation’s pri­vate-sec­tor employees.

A slideshow marked ​“con­fi­den­tial,” obtained by In These Times, sheds light on which Amer­i­can work­ers are being fed polit­i­cal infor­ma­tion by their boss­es in coor­di­na­tion with the Busi­ness-Indus­try Polit­i­cal Action Com­mit­tee (BIPAC).

Although BIPAC does not pub­licly link to it, the slideshow was dis­cov­er­able on Bipac​.net​’s serv­er as of Octo­ber 31 through a tar­get­ed key­word search on Google. (The doc­u­ment appears to have been since removed.)

BIPAC declined to com­ment on the doc­u­ment, stat­ing that the slides ​“are clear­ly marked ​’BIPAC Con­fi­den­tial and Pro­pri­etary — Not to be shared with any third par­ty’ there­fore we will not be com­ment­ing explic­it­ly on the slides them­selves.” BIPAC spokesper­son Jason Langsner added in an email that ​“just like Google or Apple would­n’t divulge any of their trade secrets — that wrong­ly were shared — nei­ther will BIPAC.”

BIPAC is nom­i­nal­ly non-par­ti­san, but aims to pro­mote free enter­prise and shows a strong pref­er­ence for Repub­li­can candidates.

Often BIPAC builds sites for com­pa­nies that bear lit­tle or no indi­ca­tion of involve­ment by an out­side polit­i­cal group (for exam­ple, Cono­coPhillip­s’s and Cintas’s polit­i­cal engage­ment web­sites). Many come com­plete with ​“action alerts” that encour­age employ­ees to write let­ters to mem­bers of Con­gress on issues relat­ed to their industry.

In a state­ment for an Inves­tiga­tive Fund-sup­port­ed Slate arti­cle I wrote about BIPAC last month, Greg Casey, BIPAC’s chief exec­u­tive offi­cer, said that in the 2012 elec­tion cycle alone, BIPAC gen­er­at­ed near­ly 2 mil­lion let­ters from employ­ees to pol­i­cy­mak­ers. The slideshow reveals that the largest two cat­e­gories these let­ters con­cerned were ​“reg­u­la­tion” and ​“health­care.”

These sub­jects square with the top two employ­ment sec­tors in BIPAC’s net­work — finance and insur­ance — giv­en that insur­ance com­pa­nies exert­ed tremen­dous polit­i­cal influ­ence over the shape and imple­men­ta­tion of Pres­i­dent Obama’s health­care reform bill, while Wall Street has fierce­ly opposed reg­u­la­tions meant to pro­tect every­day con­sumers and ensure the sta­bil­i­ty of the U.S. economy.

A Nation­al Restau­rant Asso­ci­a­tion ​“Action Alert Sam­ple” also found on BIPAC’s serv­er, appar­ent­ly aimed at the Senate’s 2010 craft­ing of the Afford­able Care Act, urges peo­ple to write their sen­a­tors to argue for small busi­ness­es and part-time work­ers to be exempt­ed from the ACA. Both of these pol­i­cy pref­er­ences were ulti­mate­ly adopt­ed in the final ver­sion of the health­care reform law.

In the 2014 elec­tion cycle, BIPAC claims to have facil­i­tat­ed the send­ing of ​“3 mil­lion grass­roots let­ters to pol­i­cy­mak­ers by pri­vate-sec­tor employ­ees,” accord­ing to Langsner, the BIPAC spokesper­son. The exact con­tent of these let­ters is unclear, but BIPAC’s pub­licly avail­able mate­r­i­al con­tains some clues. On a BIPAC-host­ed site, the fast-food giant Wendy’s asks vis­i­tors to write let­ters to their leg­is­la­tors about the ​“mis­guid­ed” cur­rent pro­pos­al to raise the min­i­mum wage to $10.10 an hour.

In a video uploaded to YouTube by the Penn­syl­va­nia Busi­ness Coun­cil, Melis­sa Craig, iden­ti­fied as BIPAC’s VP of Advo­ca­cy, sug­gests that many work­ers do not under­stand the com­plex world of pol­i­tics and might ben­e­fit from polit­i­cal edu­ca­tion from their boss­es. ​“Edu­cate them on what is affect­ing their day-to-day jobs and lives because they don’t under­stand it,” Craig said. ​“Often we’ll think that they do. But they’ll just hear, you know, all of the chat­ter going on there about social issues, and they don’t under­stand it.”

More images from BIPAC’s slideshow: