Jay Reeves/AP Photo
Signs supporting the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union stand near an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, March 10, 2022.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
The Democratic Party is reportedly considering banning any political consultancy that works to bust or disempower unions from working with the party. This is an overdue reform, and one that could open the door to even more structural course corrections for the party and the country. If the party follows through with this new, shall we say, blacklist, it could help Democrats rekindle their relationship with labor that built power on behalf of working people for decades.
Tossing out all of the anti-unionists, however, would threaten the constituency that too many national Democrats now appear to consider their grassroots: high-powered political consultants in D.C., paid by the same corporate giants that oppress workers nationwide.
The importance of these consultancies can’t be overstated in diagnosing why Democrats are failing to pursue what seems staggeringly obvious to their voters. Why won’t President Biden pursue a corporate crackdown by marching in on costly drugs, fighting pollution at power plants, or just overriding the Trump holdovers in his administration? Because most of the party’s top advisers these days aren’t union leaders, environmentalists, or civil rights champions; they’re consultants and corporate lawyers, paid by big firms explicitly to scare Democratic officials away from doing the just and the obvious.
It helps to understand exactly what these consultancies do, and why they ought to have no power in a Democratic Party that cares about workers. Take Global Strategy Group (GSG), one of the most influential Democratic polling and PR firms. GSG should be near the top of the list of the kinds of firms to cut off.
The consultants at GSG trumpet their alignment with Democratic institutions and politicians, and claim they work for “leading changemakers fighting for social justice and racial equality, the environment, ending gun violence, [and] expanding women’s rights.” But they’re also making millions of dollars from companies fighting against those goals—and trying to do it under the radar.
Most recently, GSG worked aggressively to help Amazon try to thwart the unionization effort at its large Amazon distribution facility in Staten Island. (They failed.) New York City is one of Amazon’s most lucrative markets, and just as importantly is a city where union labor has retained its power even as the share of unionized workers declines in other parts of America. One in five working New Yorkers is a union member.
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The “Democratic”-aligned operatives at GSG monitored union leaders’ social media accounts, created and distributed anti-union public relations materials, and bombarded workers with flyers and communications. They also organized and participated in mandatory anti-union meetings that were billed as “trainings.” Biden’s own National Labor Relations Board is currently moving to ban these “captive audience meetings,” which the purportedly Democratic GSG operatives organized. To top it off, GSG worked for Amazon for months without disclosing their contract to the U.S. Department of Labor, as required by law.
It’s an embarrassment to the Democratic Party that a firm associated with establishment Democratic candidates for more than a generation has evolved into a band of mercenaries.
But this has been a long time coming.
Start right at home with former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who paid GSG more than $700,000 over the last five years. GSG’s founding partner Jefrey Pollock, a longtime Cuomo ally and member of his “rapid response” team, personally helped craft Cuomo’s public relations response to the sexual harassment crisis that ultimately drove him out of office. A year earlier, Pollock helped steer Cuomo through another scandal, after the governor’s dishonest handling of the COVID-19 risk in nursing homes likely led to many unnecessary deaths.
On the corporate side, the list of GSG clients in problematic industries is extremely long: fossil fuel companies like Lukoil and Chesapeake Energy, gig-economy giants Uber and Lyft (for which GSG helped to fight the reclassification of drivers from independent contractors to employees), and pharmaceutical giants like Purdue Pharma. Purdue is the company behind OxyContin; its employees lied to the public about the risks of opioid use and incentivized doctors to overprescribe, creating a public-health emergency that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, leading to a criminal conviction and $6 billion in civil settlements.
GSG’s clients are opposed to a range of other progressive priorities. GSG conducts polls for the health insurance industry and works for insurers, which are fighting the expansion of publicly funded health care. It was hired by a dark-money group that funneled corporate money to GOP-aligned organizations supportive of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which slashed public services and the social safety net. It has fought teachers unions to advance privatized education in multiple states, on behalf of wealthy interests and right-wing backers like the Walton (the Walmart founders) and DeVos family foundations. And it’s worked for a range of giant banks, including Citigroup (which paid $335 million in fines for violating consumer credit card protections) and JPMorgan Chase (which paid $13 billion in fines for manipulating the mortgage market in the run-up to the financial crisis).
For years, GSG has also promoted its ties to Google and Facebook. Both are under antitrust investigation for the ways they’ve concentrated market power in internet search and social media, respectively, invaded consumers’ privacy, and distorted public discourse.
These are all firms that Democrats should be directly attacking in rhetoric, and cracking down on for their flagrant lawbreaking in policy. But ostensibly “savvy” advisers like GSG are paid to keep Democrats fearful of action. This created the void that so-called “populist” Republican charlatans like Donald Trump have rushed to fill.
GSG knows that work like this puts its standing with progressives, if not with the entire Democratic Party, at risk: The firm scrubbed its own website in fall 2021 (and not for the first time), removing the names of dozens of clients that might cause controversy.
But it’s not enough for GSG to be reputationally embarrassed. They should be shunned. Self-respecting Democrats should cut their ties with a firm that is actively working against their political and policy objectives.
