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The many voices of business (back row, left to right): Dann |
Jacobsen’s Law—coined by and named for the longtime
Democratic state senator Ken Jacobsen, from Seattle—puts forth a theory about
legislative life in Olympia: “If your bill is in trouble for no discernible
reason, big timber is against it. If your bill dies for no discernible reason,
Boeing is against it.”
But Jacobsen’s Law reflects a bygone era when the business
community was largely big forest-products concerns, the aerospace giant and
everybody else, and when the acronym for the Association of Washington
Business, the equivalent of a state chamber of commerce, was translated by some
as “Alcoa, Weyerhaeuser and Boeing.”
Today, as Jacobsen acknowledges, big timber is a shadow of
its former self. And while Boeing still matters a great deal to Washington,
it’s not clear how much Washington will matter to Boeing in the long run.
“Business has never been a monolith,” says Steve Leahy, who
worked for the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce for more than 30 years, most
recently as its president. “It’s certainly less so today then ever before.”
Today, the business community is really a gaggle of
communities, a cacophony of voices and an alphabet soup of organizational
acronyms—AWB and BIAW and NFIB and WTIA—the industry-specific trade
organizations, the regional and local chambers, the business-oriented policy
groups and think tanks, all clamoring to be heard by legislators, agency
directors, regulators and elected officials.
“It’s more fragmented than it ever has been before,” Leahy
says.
And it’s about to get more so. A group of business leaders
and investors, seeking representation of what they call a more politically
moderate viewpoint, is organizing the Washington Business Alliance.
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David Giuliani is one of the co-founders of the Washington |
One of the business leaders involved in that effort is David
Giuliani, the co-founder of Optiva Corp. (inventor of the Sonicare toothbrush),
and more recently, the founder of a company marketing a skin-care brush, the
Clarisonic.
“There are existing business organizations, but a lot of
them are politically polarized or have narrow interests or [are] limited in
scope,” Giuliani says. “Business guys tend to be politically moderate. We tend
to see things from ‘how do we solve business problems and how do we use
business solutions?’”
What Giuliani and fellow Washington Business Alliance
leaders want is a “statewide, centrist pro-business group that all businesses
can feel comfortable joining unless they happen to be at the political
extremes,” and hope to amass its memebership so “there’s a signal in Olympia
that lets legislators respond to business as a strong voice rather than all the
lobbyists.”
Giuliani doesn’t believe AWB, the Association of Washington
Business, fills that role. “AWB, as far as I can tell, tends to be pretty right
wing in its point of view,” he says, citing positions on such issues as tax
structure and environmental policy. “They’re pretty hard to align with. I think
that’s part of the problem. The AWB tends to represent itself as the voice of
business, but they tend to take positions that most businesspeople, in my
opinion, wouldn’t agree with.”
Won’t that further fracture business’s voice in Olympia?
Giuliani says “the last thing we need is another weak, fragmented voice in the
wilderness.” But, he adds, the competition among business voices can’t get much
worse. “I think it can get a lot better by having a stronger, more organized
collection of businesses that feel this is an organization that represents
them.”
Giuliani says organizers are in the “market research and
talking phase,” seeing if there’s enough critical mass to justify the effort.
“I’m beginning to sense it,” he says.
AWB President Don Brunell observes such differences aren’t
new or confined to business. “In my 32 years in Olympia, I’ve yet to find a
monolithic voice in any organization,” he says. When environmental groups and
timberland owners reached agreement on forest management policies, there were
people unhappy with the result in both camps, he notes.
Nor are criticisms about how broadly AWB represents the
business community new, he adds. For years, AWB was seen as the big companies’
association; these days, the largest dues-paying segment of the association’s
membership is made up of companies with fewer than 50 employees. “We’ve tried
to be inclusive,” he says.
As for the formation of a new organization along ideological
lines, Brunell says AWB has encouraged its members to join chamber and trade
associations as well. “If we are not doing our job and continuing to sell the
value of AWB, then people should uproot and move to organizations that will
suit them,” he explains.
Tied to the issue of who speaks for business is the issue of
whether anyone listens to business.
Pat Connor, Washington director for the National Federation
of Independent Business (NFIB), says that by and large, the business community
does get heard in Olympia. “All policymakers [need to] understand if they want
to put people to work [is that] they’ve got to have job creation out there,” he
says.
The reception to business, Brunell adds, “is cordial. It’s
not as openly hostile as it is in Washington, D.C. A lot of folks are
sympathetic to business.”
But even if lawmakers and rule writers are sympathetic to
business’s cause, it can be perplexing when business speaks with multiple,
sometimes conflicting, voices.
“It hurts the business community since they are not always
talking with one voice—especially on what looks like a simple, pro-business
issue,” says Dann Mead Smith, president of the Washington Policy Center, one of
several think tanks that increasingly figure in legislative and policy debates.
“This can be difficult when a business issue is up against the competing
interest groups—unions, environmentalists and sometimes the tribes. It
definitely hurts a business issue when those on the other side are united
against an issue and then business is divided.”
Leahy says the proliferation of voices is in part a
reflection of the success Washington has had in diversifying its economic
portfolio. The state’s economic future no longer rests predominantly on the
fortunes of Boeing and the forest products industry.
With the rise of sectors like high tech, which can be
further divided into areas like software or medical devices and biotech, comes
the rise of specialized associations to represent each business segment’s
specific agenda. And what one industry might want in tax policy—gross receipts
versus corporate income tax, for example—might be opposed by another.
Businesses tend to agree on the bulk of issues, but
high-profile topics like tax structure is “where we see more of a breakdown” of
the coalition, says NFIB’s Connor.
Leahy sees the same trend in geographic terms in Seattle
neighborhood business groups that often express a different view of city
policies from larger regional groups like the chamber.
As result of those intrabusiness disagreements, large umbrella
groups like AWB or the Seattle chamber might defer taking a stand on some
controversial issues. Connor, whose association includes 8,000 small businesses
in Washington, says the NFIB stays clear of issues of interest to specific
industries. “We try to keep our focus on the big picture,” he explains.
That approach, in turn, produces a fluid, changing dynamic
of alliances, such as ad hoc coalitions of various business voices combining
when their individual agendas overlap or coincide. Companies will also “join
one organization for one purpose,” and join another with a focus on a separate
issue of concern to that company, Leahy adds.
Washington Policy Center’s Dann Mead Smith says it’s not
always a bad thing that business doesn’t speak with one voice.
“It can also be a positive when business sticks together to
be proactive supporting an issue or taking a stand against an issue and there
are several voices on one side but with different messages,” he says. “This
makes an issue look bigger than just being in one company’s—like
Boeing’s—interest.”
Boeing’s changing role in Olympia has created “a larger role
for associations like AWB and other trade associations and our organization,
which does not lobby, but does work on business issues and presents recommendations
to improve the business climate,” Mead Smith adds. “I think groups that can
show a wide appeal and membership like AWB, WashACE [the Washington Alliance
for a Competitive Economy], chambers and our organization have the most
credibility now in Olympia on general business issues; and then other
trade-specific associations are used and are credible on specific industry
issues.”
Brunell believes the splits within business aren’t as
divisive as 20 years ago. “You don’t hear people in business attacking one
another as much as before, and there is a realization that what hurts small
business hurts Boeing at a much greater level, and vice versa.” Business groups
are also coordinating their efforts more, he adds; AWB and the Washington
Roundtable formed the Washington Alliance for a Competitive Economy to address
common issues, with more than 30 chambers of commerce and trade associations
signing on.
Another longtime participant in the legislative scrum also
sees signs that business might be coming together. “I was buoyed when Boeing
stood up to the plate and said Washington had a bad business climate,” says Tom
McCabe, executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of
Washington (BIAW).
That’s notable coming from McCabe, whose association has been
traditionally the most outspoken business group in Olympia, one willing to go
after other business organizations (it has criticized AWB for not being
forceful enough) as vociferously as it does the governor, Democrats, agency
regulators and labor unions. BIAW once went to the ballot via referendum to
overturn legislation Boeing had pushed on unemployment compensation.
McCabe expresses frustration over the willingness of some
business groups, in the recent debate over taxes, to defend their own breaks while
throwing “others under the bus.” But, he adds, “that happens every year.”
What happened this year, he says, is that Boeing, which had
the reputation of operating on its own, joined with others in the business
community to talk about unhappiness with workers’ compensation and unemployment
compensation, both of which had hefty increases in employer tax bills this
year.
“Maybe the business community is coming together,” McCabe
says. “Sometimes pain and depression bring people together.”
But McCabe adds there will be two tests this year outside
the legislative session on whether that trend is real. One is in the
legislative races; McCabe wonders whether business groups will “stand together
and punish Democrats for raising their taxes.”
“Big business groups tend to go with the status quo, with
who they know,” he says. “Two-thirds of who they know are Democrats.”
The other is an initiative the BIAW hopes to get on the
November ballot to privatize the state’s workers’ compensation system. McCabe
says he’ll be watching “who signs up” among businesses to support it.
If the past is any indication, businesses will take a
variety of positions on that one.