Big Labor’s Deep Pockets
Posted on February 2, 2007 at 6:40 pm by Chuck Muth
From Stephen Moore and James Tyler Grimm in today’s Political Diary…
Labor unions are again ruling the roost on Capitol Hill this year — with big legislative victories already scored in the House on the minimum wage, drug price controls, taxes on big oil, and other high priority items. Yet just last week the Labor Department reported that a smaller percentage of Americans work for unions than in anytime in the past five decades. So why are the Democrats so completely beholden to Big Labor?
The answer is money. We recently calculated that of the gargantuan $583 million in political contributions made by the labor sector since 1990, $536 million, or 92%, went to Democrats. This staggering disparity is not mirrored by business sector donations to Republicans. Over the same period, the real estate and venture capital industries only gave 54% and 48% (respectively) of their donations to Republicans.
These spending figures, from the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, also show that labor union contributions to Democrats went down slightly during the decade of GOP rule — from 96% in 1994 to 86% in 2006. But now that Democrats are in the majority, their haul will certainly climb again. In comparison, despite the then-GOP majority and despite the fact that Democrats made Big Oil their favorite whipping boy in last year’s election, the energy industry gave only 76% of its contributions to the GOP.
Labor donations, as Republicans are painfully aware, are funded largely out of compulsory union dues. Republicans typically receive between 30% and 40% of the union vote but only 10% of labor campaign contributions.
An even bigger problem for Republicans is that business donors are now dividing their political dollars fairly evenly. In 2006, industry gave $608 million to the GOP and $509 million to Democrats. With Democrats now controlling both Houses of Congress, Republicans would be lucky just to achieve parity in 2008. Already the party of Big Labor, Democrats are on their way to becoming the party of Big Business too.
