Politics at Work

When you think about it, the workplace is inherently political. Many of us spend the majority of our waking time there, government decisions can impact our industry that in turn impact our take-home pay, and our jobs are often tied to our regional and cultural identities .

But beyond these more prosaic concerns, the workplace is also becoming an increasingly intentional site for explicit and formal political activity. That is, we’re getting political messages at work. But what’s the substance of this activity, and how does it affect the employees who simply want to provide for themselves and their families without regard to political affiliation?

The news on this front isn’t too good. Recently, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez gave a talk at New America about his new book Politics at Work: How Employers Use Workers to Promote Their Own Politics, and he described the changes that have been taking place in the American labor force that have had coercive influences on employees across the country.

Employer mobilization, as Hertel-Fernandez describes these changes, is the practice of entire companies using their employees as a political resource. Even though employees should be free of political coercion at the workplace, Hertel-Fernandez finds that this practice is becoming both more pervasive and wider in scope and practice. In 2015, for instance, about 1 in 4 employees received some sort of political contact at work, and 46 percent of managers reported that their firms mobilized workers into politics during that same time period.

But is it fair to say that employer mobilization is inherently, normatively bad, as Hertel-Fernandez does? Employer mobilization can range in substance from Harvard University asking its students, as it did last year, to call Congress on the eve of a debate over a tax bill (which, in some of its earlier forms, would have been terrible for the tax burden placed on graduate students), to a coal baron shutting down a mine to force workers to go to a Mitt Romney rally (on their own, unpaid time).

So what, exactly, are the stakes when we talk about employer mobilization?

Hertel-Fernandez got to the heart of this when he talked about the reasons employer mobilization has increased so much since the end of the 20th century. He described the historical context in which a labor market with stronger labor unions meant that firms had to compete for workers’ attention politically. Related to this, it was also easier for workers to have comparable options in terms of alternative employment, meaning that if they received political requests from their employers they didn’t like, they could reasonably decide to get another job. However, at the current moment, with labor unions (particularly in the private sector) having far less power and certain parts of the country having much less variation in terms of comparable jobs, employers have a lot of coercive power over their employees. In consequence, it’s much harder for employees to reject employers’ demands—political or otherwise.

In addition, Hertel-Fernandez made an unexpected and counterintuitive point: that the law also provides employers with the ability to use their employees as political resources. In 2010, the Citizens United Supreme Court decision dictated that corporate funds could be seen as comparable to protected speech. But more than that, the court’s ruling also means that employers can use their employees’ time and energy as political resources, an interpretation the Federal Elections Commission has apparently found to be acceptable. On top of this, as Hertel-Fernandez noted, there’s no First Amendment right to free speech in private-sector workplaces.

Taken together, the stakes become clear. The different types of employer mobilization matter much less than the fact that the avenues by which employees can push back against their employers’ demands have eroded significantly over time. For instance, while you may be in agreement with your employer over how a political decision made at the federal level affects you, if you feel like you’re unable to express disagreement, this indicates a higher level of overreach. As Mark Schmitt said in his opening remarks at the event, people’s autonomy is deeply threatened by their employers, and they don’t have much ability to reject their employers’ demands.

Hertel-Fernandez, Schmitt, and the other panelist Thea Lee, who’s the president of the Economic Policy Institute, did outline possible solutions. More specifically, Hertel-Fernandez suggested that political viewpoints should be added as a protected right under the Civil Rights Act, so that just as employees are protected from discrimination in the workforce against their race or sexuality, so, too, would they be protected from discrimination against their politics.

But whatever the solution, the panelists agreed on a key point: that when it comes to politics at work, removing the pressure on employees to respond to their employers’ demands is more important than curtailing or limiting the requests themselves.