Whether delivery truck drivers are owed a paid lunch hour might seem the sort of question for labor and management to thrash out and not state lawmakers.
But almost any issue is fair game for the Illinois General Assembly when it has the potential to stir up a flurry of campaign cash from special interests hoping to sway votes.
Months before this summer’s crippling Teamsters strike at United Parcel Service, the company and union fought a little-watched skirmish over lunch benefits. The battleground was in Springfield, and the outcome provided a vivid lesson in how legislators leverage controversy into campaign cash.
Essentially, UPS drivers in Illinois were pushing a class-action lawsuit over back lunch pay they claimed they were owed. A similar suit in Washington state had cost the company $10 million, so the firm sought an unorthodox change in state compensation laws in Illinois that would have effectively undercut the suit.
In the end, the UPS bill never was put to a final vote. But along the way, the campaign war chests of legislators grew fatter as both sides lobbed tens of thousands of dollars into them.
The UPS-Teamsters clash provides a classic illustration of how a good sprinkling of money can ensure that almost any issue gets an airing in Springfield. It does not, however, ensure victory.
A Tribune computer analysis of Illinois campaign finance records shows special interests such as UPS and the Teamsters have become a perpetual wellspring of financial support for increasingly costly battles for legislative control.
Think of the legislative process as a kind of cockeyed poker game. The axiom in poker is that you have to pay to play.
Special interests such as UPS and the Teamsters kick in campaign money just to get dealt a hand. Then, they bid each other up, fearing that failure to do so might cost more in the long run if the other side prevails.
From expanding riverboat gambling to reforming the way taxpayers pay for public schools, the legislature each year is confronted with a broad range of hot-button issues that somehow never seem to be resolved. The reasons driving the inaction are many and diverse.
But one thing is clear: Gridlock is great for fundraising.
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In the most exhaustive study of Illinois campaign finance to date, The Tribune sifted through tens of thousands of campaign transactions by incumbent legislators and challengers in 1995 and 1996.
The study underscores the critical nature of campaign contributions in securing a place for special-interest lobbyists at the brass rail in the Capitol rotunda. It is from that prime perch that lobbyists buttonhole legislators as they come and go from House and Senate chambers.
Lawmakers insist issues are not settled with campaign cash. But they acknowledge that cash sure gets a foot in the door.
“I have always said that I don’t think anybody buys votes with campaign contributions. But they improve their credibility. They get an opportunity to make their case and to have a bill raised,” said state Sen. Steven Rauschenberger (R-Elgin).
As the UPS battle simmered last year, Rauschenberger was the recipient of a $5,000 donation from the company.
The controversy was triggered by the company’s concern over a class-action lawsuit filed in Cook County by a handful of its delivery drivers. The drivers wanted to force UPS to give them back-pay and overtime, in large part because they had repeatedly worked through their lunch hours.
To prevent a repeat of the expensive Washington judgment, UPS asked the legislature to revise a 1994 law that governed compensation for delivery drivers, making it retroactive to 1976. That would have barred drivers who joined the company after that date from joining the suit.
“This is the first time in my experience that I have ever seen a company seek to obtain a change in the law made retroactively so as to eliminate claims against it,” said Irving King, an attorney for the drivers.
The bill passed the House in February 1996 and then percolated for months in the Senate. With the bill still pending, lawmakers left Springfield to run their election campaigns. As the bill sat, UPS donated $68,595 to 58 legislators during the last six months of 1996.
Those contributions included $15,000 to Republican Senate President James “Pate” Philip of Wood Dale less than three weeks before the November election. Another $17,500 was sent to Philip’s assistant GOP leaders to dole out to colleagues facing difficult re-elections.
During the same six-month period, three political action committees of the Teamsters Union, including Local 705, which covers UPS drivers, donated $145,300 to legislative candidates, primarily Democrats. Those contributions included $22,500 to a fund controlled by Senate Democratic leader Emil Jones.
Some of that money would have flowed anyway in a critical election year. Other labor-management issues also were pending in the General Assembly during the campaign season, including a Republican-backed effort to rewrite the state’s worker’s compensation laws.
Still, some lawmakers said privately that there was little doubt the lunch-hour bill led to a surge in campaign contributions.
In the end, Republicans could not deliver for UPS. The bill was brought up for a final Senate vote on Jan. 7 of this year, the last day of the lame-duck 89th General Assembly, but supporters called off the final tally when it became clear they were a few votes shy.
The lawsuit, which is still pending, now involves about 3,000 drivers.
“This kind of came out of the blue and didn’t have anything to do with public policy,” acknowledged Rauschenberger.
The campaign coffers of both parties have continually profited from similar standoffs. Privately, a few lawmakers suggest that some controversial issues may be raised merely to gin up contributions, with no real intent to create a new law.
One Republican lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, pointed to several plans that have been floated before the legislature in recent years to authorize feasibility studies of a new airport such as the one Gov. Jim Edgar wants to build near Peotone. United and American Airlines, the biggest carriers at O’Hare International Airport, vehemently oppose any new regional landing strip.
“I don’t know how serious they ever were about Peotone, but every time it came up, it would stir up (contributions from) those two big airlines at O’Hare,” the legislator said.
When it comes to profiting from the status quo, the biggest winner in recent years for both parties was the so-called tort reform issue that pitted doctors against trial lawyers in a fight to limit civil damage awards, including those in medical malpractice cases.
For years, the physician lobby, which favored the change, put their considerable financial might behind Republicans. The lawyers, who opposed it, threw their money to the Democrats.
In 1995, Republicans took control of both legislative chambers and muscled through a damage cap. Even then, money continued to flow from the two groups, with the lawyers poised to seek a repeal of the law if it is not voided by court challenges.
In recent years, gambling interests have surfaced as a new political moneymaker, although the state’s riverboat gaming law remains unchanged.
Gambling interests contributed more than $1.1 million to legislative campaigns in 1995 and 1996, but the money hardly represents a monolith because the interests want different things.
Owners of existing riverboats, who gave $685,654, hope to keep legislators from raising gambling taxes or creating new competition by expanding gaming in any way.
Meanwhile, the horse racing industry, led by Arlington International Racecourse in Arlington Heights, would like to augment betting on the ponies with some legalized games of chance. The racing industry donated $328,595. Forces seeking new riverboat licenses contributed $104,244 to legislative campaigns.
“There are probably as many reasons (to donate) as there are licensees,” said Adrienne Levatino of the Illinois Casino Gaming Association, which represents the interests of seven of the nine active riverboat gambling operations in the state.
“Gaming is an intensely passionate topic about which people have intensely divergent ideas,” she said. “As long as we have the system of campaign financing, as long as campaigns are outrageously expensive, then any industry of any magnitude is going to feel that participating in the process is critical.”
But it is not just industry that pays to play in the legislature. Last spring, the Illinois Education Association and the Illinois Federation of Teachers lobbied heavily for passage of Edgar’s plan to boost personal income taxes to provide property-tax relief and new money for schools.
Both unions, which represent teachers across the state, have a long history of political involvement. Last year, they contributed $1.7 million in campaign cash and services–primarily phone banks and door-to-door get-out-the-vote efforts. That helped return the House to Democratic control and narrowed the Republican majority in the Senate.
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The unions intensely lobbied for Edgar’s plan and made not-so-veiled threats to target opponents for retribution in the 1998 election. Still, the bill passed the House with only a handful of GOP support. It died in a Senate committee, largely because members of the GOP-controlled panel feared union might less than a potential voter backlash if they voted to hike the income tax.
Indeed, no special interest, no matter how much they contribute, can find a willing legislator to advance their cause when it could cost re-election.
“While campaign contributions are important to make sure one can get their message out and get re-elected, nothing is more important than an uprising of actual voters in their districts,” said Sen. Kirk Dillard (R-Hinsdale). “A good grass-roots campaign will always supersede a well-moneyed special interest.”
In some ways, that happened last spring when legislators approved–and Edgar signed– legislation lowering the state’s legal level of intoxication to a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent.
Groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving had lobbied for almost a decade for a lower standard, always encountering powerful and successful opposition from the restaurant and liquor industry. But as public attitudes toward drinking and driving began to change, so did the votes of legislators.
In the last two years alone, the alcohol industry poured $862,233 into legislative campaigns to stave off a tightening of drunken-driving standards. Meanwhile, not-for-profit groups such as MADD risk losing their tax-exempt status if they contribute to political campaigns.
Still, MADD and other advocates of the 0.08 standard managed to convince legislators that it was time for a change.
“Clearly, contributions play a major role in shaping legislation,” said Brad Fralick, executive director of the MADD chapter in Illinois. “But you still have to have some semblance of what is right and wrong, and here it showed that what is right can win out over anything.”
HOW THE TRIBUNE ANALYZED FUNDING
The Tribune’s report on Illinois campaign finance is based on records of more than 88,000 contributions and 23,000 expenditures reported to the Illinois Board of Elections by candidates for state office in 1995 and 1996. The investigation was assisted by computer databases created by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based not-for-profit, non-partisan research group, and Kent Redfield of the Illinois Legislative Studies Center at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The Tribune conducted its own analysis of the data.