Minimum wage fight illustrates web of industry ties
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON, D.C. – The recent battle over raising the minimum wage illustrates how deep-pocketed interests wield ostensibly research-focused nonprofit groups to shape the public discussion on contentious political issues, writes The New York Times. The campaigns illustrates how groups — conservative & liberal — are again working in opaque ways to shape hot-button political debates.
“The vast majority of economic research shows there are serious consequences,” Michael Saltsman, the Employment Policies Institute’s research director, said in an interview, before he declined to list the restaurant chains that were among its contributors.
Like the battle surrounding the Obama Administration’s push for a minimum wage hike, organizations with 
benign-sounding names can mask the intentions of their deep-pocketed patrons.
They do their advocacy with the gloss of research, and play a critical and often underappreciated role in multilevel lobbying campaigns, backed by corporate lobbyists and labor unions, with a potential payoff that can be in the millions of dollars for the interests they represent.
“It is the way of Washington now — and that is unfortunate,” said John Weaver, a Republican political consultant who has helped run several presidential campaigns. “Because if it’s not dishonest, it’s at least disingenuous.”
While The New York Times focused on what they determined to be more “right-leaning” business oriented groups, “left-leaning” organizations that are financially supported by labor unions are also prominent in the debate, producing papers that consistently conclude that a higher minimum wage makes economic sense.
Says the Times:
Even if the legislation never passes — and it is unlikely to, given the political divide in Congress — millions of dollars will be spent this year on lobbying firms, nonprofit research organizations and advertising campaigns, as industry groups like the National Restaurant Association and the National Retail Federation try to bury it. Liberal groups, in turn, will be spending lots of money as they try to make the debate a political issue for the midterm elections.
The left has its own prominent groups, like the Center for American Progress and the Economic Policy Institute, whose donors include nearly 20 labor unions, and
whose reports, with their own aura of objectivity, consistently conclude that raising the minimum wage makes good economic sense. But none has played such a prominent and multifaceted role in recent months as the conservative Employment Policies Institute.
The Employment Policies Institute, founded two decades ago, is led by the advertising and public relations executive Richard B. Berman, who has made millions of dollars in Washington by taking up the causes of corporate America.
In recent months, Mr. Berman’s firm has taken out full-page advertisements in The New York Times (right) and The Wall Street Journal and plastered a Metro station near the Capitol with advertisements, including one featuring a giant photograph of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is a proponent of the minimum wage increase, that read,
“Teens Who Can’t Find a Job Should Blame Her.”
The Employment Policies Institute, a Washington-based economics think tank whose widely quoted reports warn that raising the minimum wage would increase poverty and unemployment, is affiliated with public relations executive Richard B. Berman, who has formed numerous nonprofits to campaign on conservative and corporate causes, notably for the restaurant industry, which opposes the wage hike.
Left-leaning groups financially supported by labor unions are prominent in the debate as well, and produce papers consistently advocating for a higher minimum wage, concluding it makes economic sense.
What is most important, said Lisa Graves, the executive director of an organization responsible for the online publication PR Watch, is that newspapers detail corporate ties when they cite research published by such 
groups. Such disclosure happened in less than 20% of the cases over a three-year period, an analysis by PR Watch found.
“They are trying to peddle an industry wish list, but mask it as if they are independent experts,” she said. “They are little more than phony experts on retainer.”
