Amazon Labor Union, With Renewed Momentum, Faces Next Test in Congress
This morning the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest business lobby in Washington, launched a massive $100 million campaign supporting the effort to defeat the first major attempt to regulate the business of union security since the Reagan administration.
The Chamber has invested about $6 million in a new pro-union group, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFLCIO. The other $54 million — more than doubling its previous investment in support of union-busting — will be pumped into the AFL-CIO’s national political arm, the Alliance for Union Democracy (AUD).
The AFL-CIO is an umbrella group, but we can see a “C” shape below the “A” — the Chamber is a member of AUD, and the AFL-CIO has a member in every Congress, including the one the Chamber is targeting. This is why the Chamber launched a major attack on AUD’s leadership.
It’s also why the Chamber’s new ad buys highlight how well it is polling against Democrat candidates and the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The Chamber got its big money investment into pro-union campaigns because the AFL-CIO — a union-friendly group backed by Wall Street and billionaire George Soros — is failing at the task it was set up to do.
It is fighting for a fight that its own history proves it can’t win, and it is failing miserably.
Labor unions — the country’s strongest force for good — are growing stronger, and unions are making more money. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is funded by the very businesses it says it wants to be rid of, is attacking one of the tools that allows unions to make more money.
There are two reasons why the U.S. Chamber’s attack on labor unions is doing so well.
One is that unions are in the middle of the biggest growth in the labor movement in the last 30 years.
That’s because of a series of economic reforms enacted by President Obama’s administration, including the passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and the 2013 Affordable Care Act.