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Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce headquarters
Corporate America is speaking out on issues of the day. Will Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce get with that program? Probably not and it will hurt our economy.
The Republican Party is fast becoming a parody of itself. When it comes to election law, the party is like an arsonist demanding a stronger fire department. It would be funny if it weren’t so serious.
Republicans dutifully followed President Donald Trump down a rabbit hole in their claims of voter fraud that didn’t exist. Now, GOP legislators are introducing bills in states all over the country, including here in Wisconsin, to fix what isn’t broken.
In response, corporate America is voicing its disapproval and threatening what are essentially sanctions against states that might pass these laws. In the wake of a law passed in Georgia, the Atlanta-based companies Coca-Cola and Delta raised objections and Major League Baseball pulled its AllStar game from the city. (I actually think the Georgia law was more nuanced than is often reported, but there’s no question that the overall thrust of bills introduced around the country is to suppress the vote of Democratic constituencies.)
In response, the formerly corporate-friendly Republican Party shot back. Georgia Republicans even floated the idea of yanking a tax exemption for Delta. Sen. Marco Rubio suggested Amazon workers vote in favor of a union as a way of punishing that company for its generally liberal political views.
What happened to Republican reverence for the free market? I don’t know why these companies are responding as they have. It could be pressure from their executives and employees or from activists outside the company. It could very well be that they are trying to appeal to young adults, who are the prize targets of any marketing campaign. Maybe they just truly believe what they’re saying.
It doesn’t matter. If a company believes that taking this route is in their best interests, that’s their decision. Classic conservatives would never think to interfere, much less threaten these businesses with reprisals.
Which brings us to the WMC. The WMC has been a close partner of the state Republican Party — some would say that the party is a wholly-owned subsidiary. The organization routinely opposes tax increases and any regulatory protection for workers or the environment. The WMC seems to still labor under an old economic model of attracting big industries as opposed to the new model of attracting talented workers who are then followed by companies who need them.
When you look at things through the new paradigm, economic development is no longer all about lower taxes and less regulation. Instead, it’s about quality of life that attracts workers — mostly young workers. So, taxes need to be sufficient to support high quality education and regulations need to be sufficient to provide clean air and water. Certainly not excessive, but sufficient to do the job.
And then there’s the general cultural climate of the state. So, for example, I would argue that one of the best things WMC could do would be to support repeal of the state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. Yep, that still exists, even though it has been rendered unenforceable by a Supreme Court ruling. What message would it send about the state if we were to repeal it? An absolutely positive one, I’d say. It would be far more powerful economic development than any tax cut.
And yet, there’s no chance that the old, hidebound leadership of WMC would support that course of action. Which gets us back to the national corporate activism on voting rights and some other issues. It might be, in part, genuinely felt, but it’s also good economic development because talented young workers want to live in places that are culturally in tune with them.
The WMC and the Republican Party just don’t get it. Or maybe some of them do, but they’re now so beholden to the hard right in the culture wars that they can’t do what they know is smart.
This may be generational. One interesting business voice on the other side is Kirk Bangstad, the young owner of the Minocqua Brewing Company and founder of the MBC Super PAC. Bangstad ran a quixotic campaign for state Assembly in a heavily Republican district, but he remained politically active after losing. Bangstad is creating all kinds of havoc in the north woods. He called out businesses for not following COVID rules and he’s taken out billboards attacking U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, among many other things.
In a recent email exchange Bangstad told me that he was not doing this to set himself up for another campaign. In fact, he took offense at my question. I don’t know if his activism is helping or hurting his business and, with things just starting to come back from the pandemic, it’s probably hard to tell. Still, it strikes me that Bangstad is the new model of business person, not afraid to speak out on hot button cultural issues and current political debates. I don’t know if he’s made any kind of shrewd business calculation here, but I wouldn’t be surprised (and I’d be pleased) if he does well because of it.
The national corporate statements and Bangstad’s activism seem to me to represent the future of business. WMC will remain, for the foreseeable future, tethered to the past.
