Members

• U.S. CoC claims to represent over 3 million businesses in 100 countries.
• U.S. members include over 3,000 state and local chambers, plus 830 associations.
• Biggest member companies include major firms from the energy, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, legal, finance, and public relations industries.
• Though claiming to speak for all of business, the CoC advocates policies that primarily advance big business interests rather than small businesses and families.

Lobbying Expenditures

• $375 million in the last ten years ($91.6 million spent in 2008 alone).

Effect of Chamber lobbying on the rest of U.S. population

Worker pay

• Median pay has declined over the last five years, while the cost of living has gone up. A 2008 poll found 64% of Americans' incomes are rising slower than the cost of living.
• By 2010, it is projected that median income will drop below its level of a decade ago.

CEO pay

• Average CEO pay rose dramatically over the last decade even as worker pay fell. Today average CEO pay is 344 times higher than average pay for workers. In 1980, CEO pay was 42 times higher. The average CEO today makes in one day what the average worker is paid in a year.
• Recent studies show a link between CEO bonus structures (based on short term gains) and the level of risk the companies undertook. Thus CEO bonuses and stock options were likely linked to the recent wave of business failures.

Job security and safety

• More than 3 million jobs lost were last year, and the number of those laid off receiving unemployment has reached a record 5.1 million. Millions more may be lost this year; CoC board companies alone have announced over 100,000 layoffs for 2009.
• Increasingly, many workers are getting fewer hours at their job than they need.
• Between 2001 and 2005, the number of workers who were fired during a union organizing drive increased sharply. Over 1,100 workers were fired during this time, and at least one worker was illegally fired in nearly a quarter of all union elections.

Access to health care

• When workers lose their jobs, they also usually lose their primary source of health insurance. Currently, up to 14,000 families are losing their coverage every day.
• Even workers who have jobs often cannot afford health insurance. Over 80% of the uninsured population belongs to working families.
• By not providing workers with adequate wages and benefits, employers shift the cost of healthcare onto taxpayers. 67% of Medicaid enrollees belong to working families.

Bankruptcy and Foreclosure

• 2008 saw more than one million personal bankruptcies, and the number is expected tobe even higher in 2009. Two-thirds of bankruptcies were in families that had recently lost a job or a small business, according to an earlier study.

US CoC Lobbying

Opposes the Employee Free Choice Act

The measure would make it easier for workers to bargain with the employers for better wages, benefits, and working conditions by ensuring that they can exercise a free choice to join together in a union without management interference or intimidation.

• The Vice President for Labor Policy at the US CoC, Randel Johnson, has predicted of the struggle for this bill, "This will be Armageddon." Johnson also serves as an advisor to the notorious front group the "Center for Union Facts."
• At least one member of the Chamber Board, W. Melvin Haas III, is partner in a law firm which specializes in "union avoidance."

Opposes increasing the minimum wage

• US CoC consistently opposes any legislation to raise the minimum wage, and has even harsher words against "living wage" measures, which it found "ignore the principles of free market economics" in paying workers a minimum based on local cost of living.

Pushes for restricting family medical and paid sick leave

• US CoC is a member of an employer group deceptively named the National Coalition to Protect Family Leave which works to limit access to family medical leave, and opposes the Healthy Families Act. The Chamber called their opposition a potential "dog fight."

Opposes expansion of children's health coverage

• Opposed the recent expansion of SCHIP, the program to make more health care available for children, in part because funding came from a tax on tobacco.
• Despite CoC lobbying against expanding health care coverage, a recent poll of small businesses reported that a majority favored proposals to make health care more affordable even if it cost them 4% of their payroll.

Lobbies for restricting workers' rights to challenge discrimination

• Actively campaigned against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which allows victims of pay discrimination to effectively challenge unequal pay.

Fights against access for Americans with disabilities

• Lobbied against the ADA Restoration Act of 2007.

Continued push to privatize Social Security

• Has continually fanned fears that the Social Security program would be insolvent soon, calling the Trust Fund "a myth", and pushed for private accounts instead. If this had passed, recent market events might have cost current retirees a third of their benefits.

Donates heavily to conservative candidates

• Runs a PAC called Vote for Business, which spent $248,381 in 2008, and over $1 million since 2000. In most years, 80-90% of its donations have gone to Republicans.

Fighting government regulation as "burdensome"

• Has fought executive pay restrictions, even as executive pay shot up and encouraged further risk taking, which eventually led to taxpayer bailouts of major companies.
• Has consistently fought "burdensome disclosure requests" to corporations, including language in Sarbanes-Oxley to ensure transparency and minimize risk.36
• As a result of this "freedom from oversight," the five largest corporate bankruptcies ever have occurred in the last seven years: Washington Mutual, WorldCom, Enron, Conseco, and especially Lehman Bros. In all, these bankruptcies affected over $1.2 trillion worth of assets.