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This chapter discusses how the institutional developments at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce grew directly from the political and economic upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s and paved the way for effective pan-business lobbying in the years ahead. The tumultuous 1960s had altered the landscape of Congress and party politics, particularly through the rise of public interest liberalism and its demands for greater federal intervention with regard to employment equality, consumer and worker protection, and environmental stewardship. In this new political context, business leaders at the NAM and the Chamber refashioned their public image, refined their approaches to lobbying, and broadened their policy prescriptions.

The Supreme Court in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce upheld the application to the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a nonprofit corporation funded by dues from members, three-quarters of whom are business corporations, of a Michigan law that forbids non-media corporations from using corporate treasury funds to make independent expenditures in connection with state elections for public office. The decision in Austin can be seen as resting on the view that business corporations are constrained in ways that systematically preclude them from cultivating civic virtue. Ironically, despite its often enormous wealth, the corporation is a paradigm of the materially dependent actor that has no choice but to look relentlessly to its self-interest. The modern corporation is operated for the sake of fictional shareholders, who are assumed to care only about maximizing the financial value of their shares, but, given the increasingly broad ownership of shares, shareholders also may well be employees of the company in which they hold stock or members of a community in which the corporation is an important economic presence. Union activity represents an effort at self-governance in the workplace, which requires consideration of and trade-offs among a variety of both material and nonmaterial goods.

This chapter discusses the enormous influence enjoyed by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce (LAACC) over air pollution policy in Los Angeles County. For decades, city and then county officials treated the LAACC as the representative of the public interest. The business organization achieved this status by assisting and supporting public officials as they tackled what became a chronic urban problem. The LAACC anticipated public policy needs and endorsed early proposals for uniform, countywide regulation. The group secured further legitimacy by enforcing voluntary smoke reductions by its members and sponsoring air pollution research and state legislation. Its proactive responses to air pollution were something of an anomaly; in other cities, business and manufacturing organizations had fought soot and smoke reduction on the grounds that reducing smoke would hinder profits and productivity.

This book examines how the most powerful corporate lobbies are working to remake the American economy, society, and politics. It considers the legislative agenda of big business lobbies in all fifty states, including the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Federation of Independent Business, and industry-specific groups such as the National Grocers Association and National Restaurant Association. The book explores how an intentional policy agenda pursued by these lobbies contributes to growing inequality and increased hardship for American workers. It analyzes bills that were enacted with the support of one or more of these organizations across a wide range of labor, employment, and economic policy issues.

In the post-World War II period, business leaders, bankers, and their lawyers decided it was their time to write the rules of the global economy. They felt that the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (in 1951) and of the Suez Canal (in 1956), together with increasing state economic intervention all around the world, warranted a call for action. They formed a coalition to enable and safeguard a world of free enterprise; promoting and protecting foreign private investment was a top priority. This chapter examines who these norm entrepreneurs were, their networks, and how they captured the space of international investment law to advance their world-making project. As individuals and through professional associations, they imagined quite detailed institutions and standards for this legal field. They discussed foreign investor rights, indirect expropriation, fair and equitable treatment, the internationalization of contracts, reliance, the inadequacy of local remedies, and the crucial role of international arbitration.

This chapter focuses on the cultural dimensions of how Mission groups attained neighborhood-based power during the long Progressive Era. The chapter analyzes the discursive strategy in which neighborhood leaders pitted the Mission against “downtown,” a loose collection of business groups including the Chamber of Commerce. It also analyzes the architectural strategies that were employed by the Mission Promotion Association (MPA) and the Mission Merchants, as well as those employed by the local unions, and demonstrates how a politics of ethnicity inflected all of this cultural work. The unions opted for neoclassical architecture in order to communicate Anglo respectability. Mobilizing a heritage politics, the MPA and the merchants opted for a romantic Mission style architecture in order to signal its status as the city's oldest neighborhood, one that deserved special consideration in planning debates.

This chapter reveals how imperial conceptions of regional economic integration lived on in the League of Nations even as the Habsburg successor states, including the Austrian Republic, embraced a national approach to administration. It focuses on an influential Austrian bureaucrat, Richard Riedl, who saw an ethnic German commercial elite as the key unifying force in Central and Eastern Europe. He promoted this vision from the upper echelons of the late-imperial Austrian state and then as an independent expert based in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce in the 1920s. He used the League of Nations to devise an innovative code of trans-border commercial rights that proposed to curtail government authority over international trade networks. The Austrian government ultimately rejected Riedl’s formula, affirming its national regulatory prerogatives. Riedl’s story shows how the League’s sprawling ‘multiverse’ complicated post-imperial state-building by opening direct policy-making channels to business leaders.

Between the later eighteenth century and the end of the Second World War, Ulster experienced not only its most rapid rates of industrialisation but also (after 1920) its most severe structural economic problems. In important respects these problems have endured to the present day. In Ulster, as in some other industrialising regions such as north-west England and west of Scotland, linen and cotton were crucial to the development of factory-based industry. Belfast emerged as a major UK centre of industry, trade and finance with some large, globally-connected enterprises and a whole host of small and medium sized firms in both manufacturing and services. The regional economic base, and the wider UK economy of which it was a constituent part, faced unprecedented challenges between the wars as unemployment and low incomes presented the new devolved government in Belfast with a range of difficulties, most of which it was impossible to overcome

The chapter investigates wide-spread support for colonial medicine and the colonial sciences in Marseille by focusing several institutions including the municipal school of medicine which became a full Faculty of Medicine in 1930. Other institutions examined include the Colonial Institute, the Colonial Museum, the Chamber of Commerce, and the army’s École d’application du service de Santé Colonial, or Pharo, founded in 1905. Key personages include the pathologist and yellow-fever expert Évariste Bertulus, the pharmacologist Édouard Heckel, the politician and businessman Jules Charles-Roux, and the creole physician Albert Clarac. Bertulus’s ideas and Heckel’s research program on kola nuts illustrates how the concerns of naval medicine interpenetrated with the civilian sphere, and how their style of physiology and research differed from that of Paris.

Many critics of class actions claim that they are meritless lawsuits that corporations settle only to avoid the risk of an unexpected outcome and the expense of paying lawyers. But corporations have an inexpensive way to dismiss meritless lawsuits: the motion to dismiss. Empirical studies suggest that a small minority of class action lawsuits can fairly be described as meritless. Moreover, critics like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have never identified more than a few meritless class actions every year out of the hundreds or thousands that are filed. The chapter concludes by giving examples of class actions that even critics would have to concede are worthwhile cases.

This chapter explores the economic exchange across markets and cultures between Central America and the People's Republic of China (PRC). It clarifies how the research was conducted at the 2018 China–Guatemala Expo conducted by the China–Guatemala Chamber of Cooperation and Commerce. Many Guatemalan expo attendees expressed dissatisfaction at the absence of high-profile PRC brands and products such as Huawei. Attendees view Chinese products as cheaper with better efficiency. The promise of new transpacific opportunities increases the need for brokers who can mediate transpacific commercial relations which in turn gave rise to private consultants. Recognizing the value of local Chinese communities to local economic development is vital to the future of transpacific developments.

The Bloomberg–Schumer Report, the Paulson Committee Interim Report, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Report were three major studies that evaluated the decline of capital markets in the United States. This chapter discusses the evidence gathered in these studies, which confirms that there is a growing deterioration of competitiveness of capital markets.

This chapter examines how the fondness of New York City's Italian immigrants for imported foods helped make the food import business crucial to the project of diasporic Italian nationalism. It argues that the Italian state, especially the fascist regime after 1922, and its representatives in New York supported the business of importing food in order to expand the country's economic and political influence in the United States. The chapter first provides an overview of New York's food imports from Italy during the period 1890–1920, along with the food import crisis and the Italian Chamber of Commerce's “Buy Italian!” campaign of 1935–1936. It then considers how food frauds, imitations, and canned symbols sparked a feud between Italian food importers, on the one side, and domestic Italian food producers and grossieri, on the other. It also explains how supplying immigrants with “authentic” Italian food helped strengthen relations between Italy and America and created a tangible economic dimension that complemented ideological and emotional diasporic nationalism.

This chapter shows how unions effectively flipped the script on right-to-work. Emboldened by the right-to-work victory in highly unionized Indiana in 1957 and the sensational allegations of union corruption emerging from the McClellan Committee in 1958, business leaders pushed ahead on right-to-work even when their more cautious political allies warned against it. Six states put right-to-work on the ballot, right-to-work organizations formed across the Midwest, and the Ohio campaign was the center of it all. Labor succeeded in Ohio due to solid organization and an unusually broad coalition, a development aided by the more active role of the national labor movement in the conflict. The coalition allowed unions to move away from a purely defensive approach to right-to-work and to keep union leaders from becoming the focus as they had in prior campaigns. By contrast, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce struggled to mobilize some of their closest allies.

The EBCI government recognizes that small- business owners on the Qualla Boundary face very distinctive challenges, and its sovereign status allows it to aid in ways particular to Native Nations. These small- business entrepreneurs have access to a variety of valuable support mechanisms, ranging from intergenerational business advantages (as seen in family enterprises) to federal and Native Nation government interventions, which can enhance opportunities and mitigate challenges. It is in these relationships that we see how Native Nations deploy economic sovereignty in a small- business context. The EBCI government offers support specific to the needs of American Indian businesses located on trust land and for Eastern Band business owners. This includes financial support (e.g., loans – especially those that address the needs of trust land as collateral), the establishment of their own Tribal Employment Rights Commission (TERO) office, small business training (such as the Indianpreneurship course), and the managing of their Chamber of Commerce.

The Arab-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, or Camara de Comercio Arabe Brasiliera (CCAB), an organization of Syro-Lebanese entrepreneurs, is the official intermediary of the Brazilian government in export relations and a variety of business functions related to conducting business with the Arab League states. The chapter illustrates how host-state utilization of diasporas takes place both in military regimes and in democracies, tracing Brazil’s engagement with the Chamber in mutually beneficial commercial endeavors since the 1970s. The chapter also delves into and illustrates how this utilization of diasporas, in this instance of the Brazilian government and Syro-Lebanese entrepreneurs, can also occur in matters of not only politics and security, but also commerce.

Indiana shocked the labor movement in 1957 by becoming the first northern industrialized state to pass right-to-work. This chapter analyzes the campaigns waged by business and labor in order to understand how business succeeded in such a highly unionized state. Poor organization and an effective countermovement combined to sink labor in Indiana. Unions in Indiana were politically weak and disorganized at the height of the capital–labor accord. Labor’s insider and outsider strategies were haphazard in comparison to the sophisticated business-led effort spearheaded by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and the newly formed Indiana Right-to-Work Committee (INRTWC). The outcome of the campaign provided a jolt of confidence to business leaders and led to a surge in right-to-work activity nationally.

This chapter highlights the Franco-Welsh academic partnership that offers industrial-based mobility placements for student and young employees. This project was conceived at a seminar organised by Welsh Higher Education Brussels (WHEB) in November 2009. The principal organisations involved are the Swansea University, Cardiff University, the South Wales Chamber of Commerce, the Welsh Assembly Government and the Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie de Versailles Val-d'Oise/Yvelines (CCIV).

This chapter traces workplace safety laws and regulations from after the Civil War to the passage of the OSHAct. It features the activists, journalists,social scientists and workplace disasters that were instrumental in raising public awareness of the need for worker safety laws that finally resulted in national legislation in 1970, as well as the opposition to the OSHAct that continues today.

The long 1970s was a difficult time for those promoting investment treaties and ISDS. OECD members had not adopted a multilateral convention, and the Global South was demanding a change in the rules of the game. The norm entrepreneurs’ self-confidence was decreasing. In this challenging context, the International Chamber of Commerce took the initiative and put forward a conception of foreign investor obligations consistent with investment treaties and ISDS. This move conceded little to the Global South: the best companions to strong foreign investor rights are weak or even voluntary investor obligations. For a while the outcome was uncertain, as different imaginations competed for the space of international investment law. This chapter examines some of these competitors, including the 1974 UN report on the impact of MNCs, the US position on the topic, and the 1974 UN Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States.