The Conservative Upsurge and Labor Policy in the States

Abstract

During the early- to mid-2010s, there was a dramatic upsurge in conservative legislation restricting labor unions in U.S. states. The sweeping Republican victories at the state level in the 2010 midterm elections certainly enabled this legislative surge, though not all states controlled by conservative governments passed such legislation and there was considerable variation in the number of laws passed among states that did. Understanding the conditions under which restrictive labor laws are passed is important for labor scholarship as well as broader academic debates on corporate power and political influence. Using a longitudinal negative binomial regression analysis, this article evaluates the role of organized business and conservative mobilization on state labor policies between 2011 and 2016. Our findings are consistent with and extend literature emphasizing the growing influence of corporate interests on politics today. At the same time, the authors find little support for explanations emphasizing the economic aftershocks of the Great Recession and public opinion and find no evidence that grassroots pressure impacted state laws.

Keywords

labor movements labor politics labor law

The early-2010s witnessed an extraordinary wave of conservative policymaking in the states. At the forefront were restrictions on labor unions. Some of these efforts sparked spectacular backlash and protest, most notably in Wisconsin in 2011, when Democratic legislators fled to delay votes and more than 100,000 protesters packed the capitol square (Nichols, 2012). The adoption of legislative restrictions on labor unions was far-reaching. From laws impeding union organizing, to the repeal of prevailing wage laws that set wage floors on public construction projects, to right-to-work laws that make it harder for unions to collect dues or representation fees from workers they represent, state legislatures across the country proposed hundreds of anti-labor bills and passed 60 new restrictions on unions.

How did this happen? Understanding the conditions under restrictive labor which laws are passed is important for understanding the contemporary labor movement and labor politics. For example, legal restrictions on unions are shown to dampen turnout for Democratic candidates (Feigenbaum, Hertel-Fernandez, & Williamson, 2018) in addition to making it more difficult for unions to organize and bargain (Ellwood & Fine, 1987; Jacobs & Dixon, 2010). The recent curbs on unions also provide a window into larger academic debates about corporate power. Observers point to organized corporate interests like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as key players promoting restrictions on unions in recent years (Lafer, 2013). And there is mounting evidence that politicians are now much more responsive to elite and corporate interests than to ordinary citizens or mass-based organizations including labor (Gilens & Page, 2014; Page, Bartels, & Seawright, 2013). Still, others have found the corporate elite to be more fractured and less capable of unified political action than any time in recent memory (Chu & Davis, 2016; Mizruchi, 2013), sparking significant debate on the political efficacy of business (see Domhoff, 2015).

We build on and extend this work here by assessing the impact of organized corporate interests on anti-labor state policies between 2011 and 2016 relative to other social and political forces, including the economic and political aftershocks of the Great Recession, grassroots activism, and public opinion. In doing so, we contribute to scholarship on both labor and conservative mobilization and corporate power. While there have been informative case studies on the recent anti-labor mobilization and policy outcomes (Stein & Marley, 2013; Varga, 2014), most cross-state analyses are limited to the 2011 legislative cycle and to public-sector bargaining rights in particular (Freeman & Han, 2012; Skocpol & Hertel-Fernandez, 2016). Here, we demonstrate the far-reaching attempts to curb public- and private-sector unions alike. Taken together, the restrictions on unions pose significant short- and long-term challenges for the labor movement. We also assess the extent to which the legislative activity is a reflection of unions losing their way, be it diminished membership or waning public support, versus the outcome of an aggressive corporate strategy.

Our approach also provides new insight into the influence of organized business on labor policy. We account for not only business organization across states but also the influence of grassroots conservative mobilization in the form of Tea Party activism. Most work on the impact of the Tea Party movement focuses on federal policy, despite the fact that due to Democratic control of the Presidency and Senate, most conservative policy gains during this time period were on the state level. In addition, this work has not focused specifically on labor issues (e.g., Madestam, Shoag, Veuger, & Yanagizawa-Drott, 2013), which, along with federal spending, the Tea Party maintained a professed interest. By identifying Tea Party organizations least connected to corporate interests (DiGrazia, 2014), our analyses are able to separate conservative activism from below from the influence of organized corporate interests.

We begin by describing the political fallout for unions in the 2010s, its significant geographic reach, and some of the immediate consequences. We then turn to recent literature on corporate power and conservative political activism and its implications for this case. After outlining alternative explanations for the passage of restrictive labor policies, we present our data on state legislative cycles between 2011 and 2016. Controlling for multiple measures of public opinion and economic distress, we find that the right-wing corporate network strength of a state and Republican control of the legislature significantly increase the likelihood of adopting anti-labor policies. We do not find any impact of grassroots mobilization and only limited evidence that economic disruption caused by the Great Recession influenced the passage of anti-labor policies. Generally, our findings are consistent with work emphasizing the increased political influence (Gilens & Page, 2014; Page et al., 2013) and concerted activism (Dreiling & Darves, 2011; Hertel-Fernandez, 2014; Murray, 2017) of elite and corporate interests. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the labor movement, particularly in light of the recent Supreme Court decision pertaining to public-sector labor unions (McCartin, 2018).

Explaining the Conservative Upsurge in Policymaking

The 2010 midterm elections ushered in a dramatic increase in conservative control of state legislatures and governor’s mansions. On the heels of the Great Recession and with mounting public anger over jobs and health-care reform, Republicans made large gains in Congress; they took control of 20 state legislative chambers and gained outright control of 12 additional state legislatures. The showing of conservatives in state elections outpaced even the Republican landslide of 1994 (Balz, 2010).

Legislators moved quickly to advance an array of conservative legislation, from rollbacks on voting eligibility, to restrictions on immigration, to labor reform. But conservative efforts to curb labor rights were especially pronounced. In 2011 and 2012 alone, several states eliminated public-sector collective bargaining rights, passed right-to-work laws, and made it harder for municipalities to pass minimum wage laws. Wisconsin was perhaps the most contentious and well-publicized example. There Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill eliminated collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers and nearly sparked a revolt. Protesters occupied the capitol. Democratic legislators fled to Illinois to delay votes only to have the Republican majority pass a new version in the middle of night without the opposition present. Activists filed lawsuits in response and launched a controversial and ultimately unsuccessful gubernatorial recall campaign that stretched the conflict out for multiple years (Stein & Marley, 2013).

Wisconsin was hardly alone in its attempts to curtail labor rights. Hundreds of anti-labor bills were introduced in state legislatures between 2011 and 2016 and significant labor protests emerged across the country in opposition. Figure 1 shows the geographic reach of the legislative restrictions. While the Midwest got much of the press, 25 states passed at least one restriction on unions and 60 new anti-union laws were adopted in total (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2017). We discuss some of the short- and long-term impacts of the various laws in the sections that follow. One immediate consequence, however, is that the introduction of anti-labor bills forced unions to spend considerable resources fighting them—resources that could otherwise be directed towards collective bargaining and electoral politics. In a post-Citizens United era of unlimited political spending, dwindling union resources pose a significant challenge to the political left and the Democratic Party (Feigenbaum et al., 2018).

Figure 1.

Anti-labor laws passed by state (2011–2016).

Corporate and Conservative Mobilization

Labor advocates were quick to point to the role of organized corporate interests behind the restrictions on unions (Lafer, 2013). ALEC, while formed in the 1970s, gained notoriety this decade for the many, often identical, model bills that popped up across states, from those restricting public-sector collective bargaining to right-to-work laws. The organization brings together legislators and representatives from large brand-name corporations to promote business-friendly policies. This is facilitated by drafting bills and providing research support for time and resource-stretched state legislators (Hertel-Fernandez, 2014). ALEC was not the only group pushing for restrictions, however. Newer conservative and corporate-backed organizations like Americans for Prosperity (AFP), traditional employer associations including the Chamber of Commerce, and a host of conservative think tanks all provided support for the rollback on unions (Skocpol & Hertel-Fernandez, 2016; Varga, 2014).

The push from organized business to restrict unions comes at an interesting historical moment. High levels of economic inequality coupled with union decline have contributed to an outsized influence of business on politics relative to majority opinion (Gilens & Page, 2014; Page et al., 2013). Despite this seeming advantage, research is mixed on the ability of business to reach consensus and to collectively mobilize. For example, Mizruchi’s (2013) influential account finds the corporate elite to be fractured and unable to reach political consensus (see also Chu & Davis, 2016). According to this perspective, particularistic not class-wide issues have increasingly driven corporate politics since the 1990s. Other studies find the decline of an organized corporate elite to be exaggerated (Domhoff, 2015). Studies of corporate involvement in trade policy activism (Dreiling & Darves, 2011) and electoral politics (Murray, 2017) show considerable political unity and collective action by businesses, bound together through a host of mechanisms from common membership in policy-planning organizations to transnational corporate interlocks.

The vibrant debate on corporate power centers mostly on the mechanisms linking large firms and the degree to which they can facilitate political consensus and ultimately collective action by business.¹ We do not directly adjudicate between these theories of corporate cohesion as our focus differs in two important ways. First, instead of assessing the mechanisms promoting collective action among firms, we consider the outcomes of collective action by asking if key organizations that promote pro-business policy, and which draw significant membership and funding from large firms, influence the adoption of anti-labor policies. Second, we turn to an arena where conservative and corporate interests have made significant gains in recent decades in state politics. If we find organized business to matter for a diverse array of state labor policies, this would be consistent with, and extend, research emphasizing continued corporate unity and power (Domhoff, 2015). Alternatively, the lack of an effect would suggest the organizations coordinating business politics have little sway in an era of fragmentation (Mizruchi, 2013). There is some evidence for the former concerning labor policy. Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez (2016) document the expansion of the Koch network of conservative think tanks and advocacy groups promoting pro-business policy and find a positive statistical association between AFP organization in a state and the retrenchment of public-sector collective bargaining rights in 2011.

Pressure From Below?

In addition to the push by organized business for restrictions on unions, there was significant grassroots organizing on the right during the period of this study. The Tea Party movement, which emerged during the recession and shortly after the 2008 elections, was a large conservative political movement consisting of a nationwide network of local protest groups as well as more traditional advocacy groups funded by elite interests. Some of the latter, like the elite-funded Tea Party Express backed by Karl Rove, focused solely on electoral politics and faded quickly after the elections. The activities of local protest groups, which were primarily part of the Tea Party Patriots network, peaked in 2009 and 2010 but continued to have a lasting effect on the political discourse in the following years (Hare & Poole, 2014).

The rapid rise of the Tea Party as a protest movement has been examined in some detail (e.g., Parker & Barreto, 2014; Skocpol & Williamson, 2011). However, its impact on policy has been the subject of comparatively little empirical inquiry, particularly at the state level. Much of the research that does exist on the impact of the movement looks at congressional voting (Bailey, M. A., Mummolo, & Noel, 2012; Madestam et al., 2013). This presents an interesting problem, because while the Tea Party movement’s focus was primarily on national politics, particularly on opposing the policies of the Obama administration, Tea Party supporters were suspicious of government spending and what they perceived as lavish union contracts at state and local levels too. Moreover, most of the conservative policymaking that occurred during this period happened at the state level where Republicans controlled many state governments and were not encumbered by a Presidential veto. In what follows, we separate organized corporate interests across states from grassroots (i.e., not elite-funded) Tea Party organization to assess potentially complimentary or alternative influences of right-wing activism from below and organized corporate interests from above.

Alternative Explanations for Union Restrictions

The wave of restrictions on unions comes on the heels of the massive economic and political disruptions caused by the Great Recession. As states grappled with high unemployment and budget shortfalls, many conservative legislators saw shedding expensive labor contracts as a solution. Whether economic conditions forced states to cut back on (primarily public sector) union rights (DiSalvo, 2015) or provided an opening for opportunistic politicians who favored union restrictions is unclear. Freeman and Han (2012) find that, while the motivation for legislation attacking public-sector unions was primarily ideological and political, Republicans used the financial crisis to convincingly argue for the economic necessity of such laws. Lafer (2013) argues that Republicans used the economic downturn as a political opening for attacking both public- and private-sector union rights, often in the absence of any demonstrable fiscal necessity.

The disruption caused by the Great Recession on politics should not be understated (Campbell, 2018). Still, legal restrictions on both public- and private-sector unions continued to mount as state economies recovered and unemployment dropped. Moreover, some literature has found that difficult economic conditions are negatively associated with the implementation of anti-labor legislation. Jacobs and Dixon (2006) find that between 1960 and 2000, right-to-work laws were less likely to be implemented in high unemployment settings. This was partly because the public is more sympathetic to workers than management during economic downturns such that management-led campaigns during downturns could be seen as an overreach. A major caveat is that unions are now much weaker than during the period that Jacobs and Dixon found a negative association between economic distress and right-to-work legislation. Historically, union restrictions like right-to-work and curbs on public-sector bargaining and prevailing wage laws were mostly (but not always) limited to states where unions were weak and never gained a foothold (Dixon, 2010; Moore, 1998), whereas many historic bastions of union strength saw restrictive measures passed during the 2010s.

Taken together, this work suggests a number of factors shaping the passage of anti-labor laws in addition to the corporate and conservative mobilization. If the drivers of state labor politics stem mostly from fiscal necessity, we should expect the economic disruption caused by the Great Recession to outweigh political factors in shaping the adoption of anti-labor laws. If, however, economic conditions provided greater opportunity for ideologically motivated Republicans to advance their cause, we should expect partisan control of state legislatures to matter in combination with or to outweigh economic factors. Alternatively, if economic downturns engender sympathy for workers but not necessarily employers, anti-labor laws should be least likely in those states most affected by the Great Recession.

We assess these possibilities while accounting for other likely correlates of anti-labor legislation, most notably union strength and public opinion. Although the percentage of union members in the workforce has declined across the board over the last half century, there is still significant variation across states ranging from near 3% in North Carolina to 24% in New York (Hirsch & Macpherson, 2017). Given that unions fought vigorously against state labor restrictions through traditional lobbying efforts as well as protests to keep pressure on legislators (Stein & Marley, 2013), it is plausible that the patterning of anti-labor laws is driven at least in part by differences in union strength. In addition, restrictions on unions could be shaped by legislators’ responses to public sentiment and dwindling public support for unions. In contrast to union membership, public support for unions has remained more stable historically (Cornfield, 1999). Yet, this too varies significantly across states. Freeman and Han (2012) present polling data suggesting that public opinion remained mostly favorable to unions at the beginning of our period, but these data are not systematically incorporated into a multivariate analysis, so it is unclear if or how public sentiment matters in relation to corporate and conservative mobilization or economic distress. Examining only public-sector collective bargaining rights in 2011, Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez (2016) do not find public opinion to drive union restrictions. In what follows, we produce new state-level estimates of public support for unions that span multiple years. Doing so not only produces a better assessment of the role of public opinion on the wave of union restrictions but also provides for a more conservative test of explanations emphasizing corporate and conservative mobilization.

Data and Analytic Strategy

Dependent Variable

We measure restrictions on labor unions adopted during the three legislative cycles between 2011 and 2016. Our unit of analysis is the state legislative cycle. Our primary dependent variable is a count of restrictions on labor unions adopted by state legislatures from the National Conference of State Legislatures’ (2017) Collective Bargaining Database. The authors searched all labor-related bills enacted during the time period and then coded for those that sought to limit unions’ ability to organize, collect dues, strike, and collectively bargain. That is, legislation that sought to restrict or slow unions in some way. The number of union restrictions adopted by states in a given legislative cycle ranged from 0 to 4 with 60 anti-union bills adopted between 2011 and 2016.

Table 1 shows the key types of laws passed by states and their frequency. Highly publicized examples include legislation weakening public-sector collective bargaining rights or rights for public school teachers in particular. This and the repeal of prevailing wage laws, which set wage floors on state-funded construction projects and which are a key source of leverage for building trades unions, constitute the majority of legislation during this period. But states went much further. Several adopted new right-to-work laws or strengthened existing ones. These laws forbid unions from requiring dues or a representation fee from workers they represent. Other states outlawed card check union representation elections that circumvent lengthier secret ballot procedures and enacted new restrictions on aggressive picketing and union organizing strategies like corporate campaigns. As a robustness check, we estimate separate models on restrictions targeting just public-sector unions and report on these in the “Results” section.

Table 1.

State Anti-Labor Legislation, 2011–2016.

Type of law	Number of laws enacted
Dues checkoff	7
Picketing/corporate campaigns	4
Prevailing wage	16
Public-sector collective bargaining/teachers	18
Right-to-work	6
Secret ballot elections	5
Other	4

Some laws pose bigger problems for the labor movement than others. For example, the near elimination of collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers as in Wisconsin is a critical blow to the labor movement given that unions had retained significant public-sector membership despite decades of private-sector decline. This is more consequential than, for example, South Carolina strengthening their existing right-to-work law with harsher penalties. While the latter example is mostly symbolic, the vast majority of the laws in Table 1 posed an immediate challenge to unions in terms of organizing, their ability to collectively bargain, or in some cases their existence. Finally, just the introduction of anti-labor legislation is consequential in another respect. It requires unions to commit resources to fight these measures that could be directed to collective bargaining and especially electoral politics. Indeed, diminishing unions’ political capacity appears to be a major objective of some of the key backers of union restrictions (Feigenbaum et al., 2018).

Independent Variables

To assess the influence of organized corporate interests, we include a time-invariant score of the right-wing corporate network strength of a state. This measure comes from a larger project on conservative corporate political organization in recent decades by Hertel-Fernandez (2014). This measure was originally employed to explain state decisions over Medicaid expansion. It is useful to us here as the same actors seeking to restrict Medicaid expansion were also key backers of anti-union legislation. The composite score ranges from 0 to 1 based on the share of a state’s legislators who are members of ALEC, budgets of prominent conservative think tanks in the State Policy Network, and the strength of AFP in a given state. The lowest score is Vermont (0) and the highest is Virginia (1) (see Hertel-Fernandez, Skocpol, & Lynch, 2016, pp. 247–248).²

Taking each of the actors in turn, it is clear how this measure applies to labor legislation. First, ALEC produced a number of the model bills on labor in the states, including several public-sector bargaining and prevailing wage bills (Lafer, 2013). The Koch-funded AFP, which combines lobbying and grassroots campaigns, has been an important backer of right-to-work and limits on public-sector bargaining (see MacLean, 2017 on the long history and intellectual underpinnings of the Kochs’ conservative project). Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez (2016) find AFP to have a positive association with collective bargaining restrictions by states in 2011. The State Policy Network serves as an umbrella organization for a host of conservative market-oriented think tanks, many of which produce research and rationale for anti-labor initiatives. We should note that these actors do not align on every issue. For example, sometimes Koch network positions run up against those of traditional corporate lobbies, such as on infrastructure spending (MacLean, 2017; Skocpol & Hertel-Fernandez, 2016). However, on many key labor and inequality-related issues, including labor unions, labor market protections, taxes, and social spending, their priorities are aligned. We are therefore confident that this measure captures an important segment of organized business that pushes for a wide range of pro-business and conservative policies from limited government spending to free trade to curbs on unions.

Our analysis is unique by including important corporate and grassroots sources of support for labor restrictions. For grassroots organization, we include the number of Tea Party Patriots chapters in a state per 100,000 residents as of late 2010 (roughly the point at which Tea Party activism peaked; see DiGrazia, 2015). This measure provides a rough indication of the organizational strength of the Tea Party movement within each state and the extent to which this organization would have been visible to legislators and the general public. While a variety of conservative political groups including the elite-funded political action group, Tea Party Express, and the short-lived, for profit Tea Party Nation, used the name Tea Party, the Tea Party Patriots were the largest and most grassroots of these organizations an exhibited greater longevity. Consisting of a network of about 3,000 local chapters at the height of their activity, they operated with little central coordination and comparatively little funding (DiGrazia, 2014).

We use two measures to capture the economic disruption caused by the Great Recession. First, we include states’ unemployment rates as of the beginning of each legislative cycle. Second, we include a time-invariant indicator of the severity of the recession, with the percentage change in unemployment between 2007 and 2009. As we discuss later, we also conduct several robustness checks including a measure of state funding obligations. To disentangle economic distress from pure partisanship, we include Republican strength in a state as measured by control of the legislature and executive branch (1 = yes).

We use union density measured at the beginning of each legislative cycle to measure the organizational capacity of state labor movements, which should negatively impact the adoption of restrictions. A potential alternative explanation is that union restrictions were driven in part by public sentiment. We therefore include two measures of public opinion. First, we use the vote share for President Obama in 2008 and 2012 to account for the general liberal sentiment of a state. The 2008 score is used for the first period and the 2012 score is used for the remaining two periods. Second, we use multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) to generate new state-level estimates of public support for labor unions drawing from national polls (see Lax & Phillips, 2009).³ Using MRP, we first estimate a multilevel model predicting support for unions among survey respondents as a function of demographic (age, race, gender, and education) and geographic (state and region) predictors. In other words, state-level estimates are produced as a function of both demographic- and state-specific effects. We then weight these estimates by the percentage of each demographic type in the actual state population using American Community Survey data. Opinion scores for the first legislative cycle are derived from polls conducted during 2010 and the beginning of 2011. Scores for the latter two cycles are from polls conducted in 2013 and 2014. The percentage mostly or very favorable to unions ranges from 41.8% in Wyoming to 59.7% in New York. We include the two sets of opinion scores in Appendix A, and the R code is available upon request.

Finally, we control for the number of neighboring states with right-to-work laws and include a dummy variable for each legislative cycle (2015–2016 is the reference category). Descriptive statistics for the dependent and all independent variables are shown in Table 2, and a correlation matrix is included in Appendix B.

Table 2.

Descriptive Statistics.

Variable	Mean	Standard deviation	Minimum	Maximum
Anti-labor laws (count)	0.40	0.83	0.00	4.00
Right-wing corporate network	0.34	0.22	0.00	1.00
Tea Party groups per 100,000	1,157.68	601.15	578.80	3,858.38
Recession (change in unemployment 2007–2009)	4.11	1.41	1.00	7.00
Unemployment	6.62	2.01	2.70	13.00
Republican control	0.45	0.50	0.00	1.00
Union strength	10.57	5.27	2.10	24.70
Obama vote share	48.97	9.97	24.76	71.85
Public opinion	47.49	3.93	41.83	59.71
Neighboring states w/RTW	2.26	1.84	0.00	6.00

Note. RTW = right-to-work.

Analytic Strategy

The analysis uses a multilevel negative binomial regression analysis with states nested in years to assess the effect of the independent variables on our count of labor restrictions over the time frame of the study. Negative binomial regression analysis allows for the modeling of count data with overdispersion or greater variance than dictated by the assumptions of the Poisson distribution (Long, 1997).

Results

Table 3 presents results from the negative binomial regression analysis, first presenting the results of models showing the effects of right-wing corporate network strength and grassroots organization on the right, then economic factors, and finally a full model showing the joint effects of all factors together. For all the models, we include Republican control of state legislatures, union density, both measures of public opinion, and the number of neighboring states with right-to-work laws.

Table 3.

Population-Average Negative Binomial Regression of Labor Law Count on Independent Variables.

	Conservative mobilization	Recession	Full
Right-wing corporate network	2.291** (3.25)		2.521** (3.24)
Tea Party groups	−0.00042 (−1.45)		−0.00038 (−1.21)
Recession		0.051 (0.36)	−0.0222 (−0.17)
Unemployment		0.279 (1.90)	0.338* −2.38
Republican control	1.250* (2.44)	1.334* (2.27)	1.167* (2.40)
Union strength	0.0388 (0.69)	−0.0336 (−0.55)	0.0459 (0.84)
Obama vote share	−0.0433 (−1.39)	−0.0493 (−1.80)	−0.0644* (−2.14)
Opinion	−0.0103 (−0.16)	−0.0332 (−0.52)	−0.0539 (−0.78)
Neighbors w/RTW	−0.0923 (−0.65)	−0.167 (−1.12)	−0.179 (−1.32)
Time 1	1.084** (2.73)	0.277 (0.38)	−0.0749 (−0.11)
Time 2	−0.452 (−0.90)	−0.714 (−1.13)	−1.006 (−1.65)
Constant	−0.24 (−0.07)	0.625 (0.23)	1.171 (0.37)

Note. N = 150. RTW = right-to-work.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

In the first model focusing on corporate and conservative mobilization, we see that right-wing corporate network strength has a positive and significant effect on the passage of anti-labor laws. There is also a positive and significant effect for Republican control of state government. The magnitude of the right-wing corporate network strength effect is considerable. We plot the effects of these two important drivers of anti-labor policy in Figure 2. With all other variables held at their means, an increase from one standard deviation below the mean to one standard deviation above the mean on right-wing corporate network strength is associated with a change in the predicted rate of labor law passage from .12 to .33. By comparison, a state with Republican control of government has a predicted rate of .40 compared with a predicted rate of .12 for states without Republican control. A change of ±1 standard deviation around the mean of right-wing corporate network strength, therefore, has an effect of almost the same magnitude as Republican control of state government. Furthermore, the predicted rates for the minimum and maximum values of right-wing network strength are .09 and .92, respectively.⁴

Figure 2.

Predicted rate of anti-labor law passage by values of RW corporate network strength and Republican control, all other variables held at their means. RW = right-wing.

While right-wing corporate network strength has a considerable impact on policymaking, grassroots pressure does not. We find no significant effect for Tea Party Patriot groups in any of our models. Considering the controls in Model 1, union strength and public opinion have no effect. This indicates that the primary political force behind the conservative push on labor legislation came from business interests, not activist pressure from below, nor the ideology or opinions of the general public.

Model 2 shows the effects of economic measures related to the great recession—that is, the unemployment rate and the change in the unemployment rate after the onset of the Great Recession. Model 2 shows no effect for either economic variable, although there is a significant positive effect for the unemployment rate in the full model. These findings provide some limited support for the alternate explanation that the economic effects of the Great Recession provided Republicans with a motivation or cover to enact labor legislation.

In the full model (Model 3), we see that in addition to the continued significant and positive effect of right-wing corporate network strength, there is a statistically significant and negative effect for the Obama vote share, though public opinion on labor unions specifically has no effect. Unemployment is also statistically significant in the full model and exhibits a positive effect on the adoption of union restrictions. While this latter effect is consistent with research emphasizing the recession as providing motivation or cover for Republicans to act on labor (Freeman & Han, 2012), we find no significant interactions (models not presented here) between economic factors and Republican control.⁵ There is no support for the argument that economic downturns produce greater sympathy to workers as opposed to management and thereby diminish the likelihood of anti-labor legislation (Jacobs & Dixon, 2006).

Robustness Checks

Given that many of the laws and public attention centered on public-sector unions, we estimated separate models considering only those laws targeting public-sector unions (Table A2 in Appendix A). For these restricted models, we also include a control for unfunded pension liabilities scaled for state population. We suspected that Tea Party organization would be more meaningful in this context as activists were motivated to reel in public finances and what they saw as expensive labor contracts. Yet, neither Tea Party organization nor unfunded pension liabilities was significant, while right-wing corporate network strength continued to exhibit a positive and significant effect on the passage of anti-labor laws.

To assess whether legislative outcomes are in part a reflection of the underlying level of productivity across legislatures, we estimated a separate model controlling for the total legislative output of states (Table A3 in Appendix A). The measure is not statistically significant and does not alter our findings.⁶ We also reestimated the models with ordinary least squares as well as with a collapsed time-invariant model (Tables A4 and A5 in Appendix A, respectively). The results are mostly similar and continue to show significant effects of right-wing corporate network strength on anti-labor legislation. Finally, and as shown in Table B1 in Appendix B, the correlations between the covariates are not exceptionally high and few are correlated above .5 (the exceptions being union strength, Obama vote share, and the public opinion measure). We fit an ordinary least squares model based on Model 3 of Table 3 to calculate variance inflation factor scores. All of the scores are below generally accepted thresholds.

Taken together, these results show strong support for the effect of right-wing corporate network strength on the passage of labor restrictions. Across all of the robustness checks, right-wing corporate network strength is consistently significant. The findings offer some evidence that the economic downtown may have provided motivation or, at least justification, for state legislatures to pursue labor restrictions. At the same time, there is no evidence that grassroots organizing, from either the Tea Party Movement on the right or from organized labor on the left, mattered for the patterning of anti-labor laws across states. The results also show limited support for the effect for public opinion on the passage of labor restrictions. While the Obama vote share is significant in Model 3 of Table 3, public opinion on labor unions has no impact. Indeed, public preferences and political activism from below seem to have had little effect on the actions of state legislatures on this issue.

Discussion

This analysis assessed the influence of organized business and conservative mobilization from below on the recent wave of legislation targeting unions, alongside alternative explanations emphasizing the economic and political aftershocks of the Great Recession as well as union strength and public opinion. We find that the strength of the right-wing corporate network in a state is a consistent statistically significant predictor of the passage of anti-labor laws net of Republican control of government, unemployment, and a host of other factors across multiple estimation strategies. Many labor activists claimed that the rollback on unions was driven by ALEC, AFP, and like-minded conservative organizations (Lafer, 2013; Stein & Marley, 2013). Our findings provide some empirical support for this claim and are consistent with Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez (2016), who found AFP influential for the restriction of collective bargaining rights in 2011.

Our results also speak to larger academic debates about corporate power in the 21st century. Our findings are consistent with recent work emphasizing the continued cohesion and influence of business on politics (Domhoff, 2015; Dreiling & Darves, 2011; Murray, 2017). While we do not adjudicate between the factors facilitating or fracturing corporate consensus (e.g., Domhoff, 2015; Mizruchi, 2013), and we acknowledge that the organizations comprising the right-wing corporate network measure do not align on every issue, we do provide important evidence on the outcomes of collective action by business. We show that key organizations that promote pro-business policy, and which draw significant membership and funding from large firms, influence the adoption of a wide range of anti-labor policies affecting public- and private-sector unions alike. The effect of the right-wing corporate network in a state is nearly equal to that of Republican control of the legislature. Given the success of key players in this network (e.g., AFP) in pushing state Republican parties to the right on economic issues in recent decades (Skocpol & Hertel-Fernandez, 2016), the broader influence of the right-wing corporate network is possibly understated, at least in relation to labor.

With respect to grassroots pressure, we find no evidence that Tea Party organization influenced the adoption of anti-labor laws across states. This finding is at odds with other literature that found Tea Party mobilization to have had an effect on Congressional voting records (Bailey et al., 2012). This may be because the Tea Party’s messaging and protests were overwhelmingly aimed at opposing the Obama administration and its proposed policies at the national level rather than on policy at the state level. State-level politicians may have seen the Tea Party’s message and activism as being unrelated to their agenda. Still, the absence of any influence from below, and the limited impact of public opinion, or even the Great Recession (as we describe later), underscores the important role played by organized business in labor’s recent setbacks and is suggestive of a larger disconnect between legislatures and the wishes of ordinary citizens (Gilens & Page, 2014).

We find some evidence that states with higher unemployment rates were more likely to pass anti-labor laws net of all else. This is consistent with the argument that Republicans used difficult economic conditions as a justification for a potentially, otherwise unpopular piece of their legislative agenda (Freeman & Han, 2012). However, the effect of unemployment is not as robust as the right-wing corporate network, nor do we find any evidence that those states impacted the most by the Great Recession were more likely to target labor, or that the impact of Republican control was magnified in these depressed economic contexts.

Clear from all of this is the current crisis faced by the labor movement and the growing influence of a highly organized and well-funded adversary. Not only was the legislative rollback on unions far-reaching in number, but states adopted such restrictions whether unions were relatively strong or weak. Whereas prior research on legislative restrictions has found labor to fare better during economic downturns (Jacobs & Dixon, 2006), we find the opposite. Moreover, across multiple measures and models, we find that public opinion exhibits little or no effect on union restrictions. Public support of labor unions in particular has no effect. The recent rollback on unions was not a case of dwindling public support.

Conclusion

Our study contributes to scholarship on the growing political influence (Bartels, 2008; Gilens & Page, 2014; Page et al., 2013) and concerted activism (Dreiling & Darves, 2011; Hertel-Fernandez, 2014; Murray, 2017) of elite and corporate interests. This work finds that the preferences of elite and corporate interests drown out citizen sentiment. Here, we find it to outweigh grassroots influence as well. Most research on corporate political influence understandably focuses on congressional politics and elections. Future work in this area should consider the arena of state politics. In the absence of a strong countervailing force like a vibrant labor movement, corporate interests have found state governments increasingly amenable to their agenda.

In their weakened state, unions are unlikely to reverse these policy setbacks in the states anytime soon. While this increases the pressure to develop new models of labor organizing (McAlevey, 2016), the funding and resources with which to do so continues to dwindle. Indeed, the recent Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME established a national right-to-work law in public-sector employment (McCartin, 2018). Many of the same organizations who were influential in this analysis are reupping efforts to make it more difficult to collect dues in the wake of the court decision and to codify the decision and the state level. Some are also directly targeting workers and encouraging them to opt out of their unions (Vyse, 2018). The coordinated push by business to curb unions looks to continue despite their many successes to date.

It is notable that in the midst of this push for union restrictions, there has been a spate of high-profile strikes, from teachers in Chicago and even in Deep Red states like Oklahoma and Kentucky, to fast food workers and their related minimum wage campaigns across the country as part of the Fight for 15 movement. One potential unintended consequence of the weakening of state protections for unions is that labor activism is perhaps now more grassroots and less connected to traditional labor organizations and state backing than any time in recent memory. These developments pose important sociological questions about formal organizations, unions, and activism. Organizational scholarship suggests that the destabilization of fields can create opportunities for new actors or spur innovation by incumbents (Fligstein & McAdam, 2011). Alternatively, a significant strand of social movement scholarship finds that activism detached from political allies and favorable institutional environments is severely limited in terms of influence and longevity (Amenta, 2006). Contemporary labor activism, with unions facing varied configurations of labor laws and restrictions across states, provides a useful testing ground for these questions. Greater understanding of where and when collective action by workers is successful in an era marked by union weakness will inform scholarship on inequality and politics today.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Alexander Hertel-Fernandez for sharing his data on right-wing corporate network strength.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Joseph DiGrazia is a sociologist at York University whose work focuses on political institutions and behavior as well as quantitative research methods.

Marc Dixon is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth College. He has written on unions, social movements, and their impact on corporate and governmental policy. His current research examines conflicts over labor rights in the United States as well as non-state attempts to regulate and improve corporate labor and environmental standards.

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