Richard B. Campbell

Union Women, the Tobacco Industry, and Excise Taxes: A Lesson in Unintended Consequences

Between 1987 and 1997, the tobacco industry used the issue of cigarette excise tax increases to create a political partnership with the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), a group representing female trade unionists in the U.S. This paper documents how the industry created this relationship and the lessons tobacco-control advocates can learn from the industrys example, in order to mitigate possible unintended consequences of advocating excise tax increases. In 1998, under the terms of the Master Settlement Agreement, the tobacco industry began making documents produced in litigation available publicly. Currently, approximately 50 million pages are available online, including substantial documentation of the industry-CLUW relationship. For this study, a comprehensive search of these documents was conducted. The tobacco industry encouraged CLUWs opposition to excise tax increases by emphasizing the economic regressivity of these taxes, discussing excise taxes generically to deflect attention from cigarettes, and encouraging opposition to earmarking cigarette taxes to pay for specific programs. In addition, CLUW received at least

Mobilising public opinion for the tobacco industry: the consumer tax alliance and excise taxes

221,500 in financial support between 1987 and 1997 and in-kind support for its conferences, membership materials, and other services. Excise tax increases, if pursued without considering the impacts they may have on low-SES populations, may have unintended consequences. In this case, such proposals may have helped to create a relationship between CLUW and the tobacco industry. Because excise taxes are endorsed in the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, tobacco-control advocates must understand how to build relationships with low-SES populations and mitigate potential alliances with the tobacco industry.

Unhealthy Partnerships: The Tobacco Industry and African American and Latino Labor Organizations

Background: Tobacco industry funding was instrumental in creating and financing the Consumer Tax Alliance in 1989 as an organisation that relied upon extensive media outreach to build opposition to excise taxes as a regressive form of taxation. By obscuring its own role in this effort, the tobacco industry undermined the public’s reasonable expectations for transparency in the policy-making process. Aim: To examine the formation and activities of the Consumer Tax Alliance as a “hybrid” form of interest group in order to provide tobacco control and public health advocates with a better understanding of unanticipated tobacco industry coalitions and facilitate appropriate countermeasures. Methods: Document searches through the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and through Tobacco Documents Online and review of background literature. Results: The Tobacco Institute actively sought liberal allies beginning in the mid-1980s in seeking to build public opposition to cigarette excise tax increases by promoting them as a regressive form of taxation. The creation of the Consumer Tax Alliance in 1989 was expressly intended to turn labour and middle-class opinion against prospective excise tax increases in federal budget deficit negotiations, without divulging the tobacco industry’s role in its formation. Conclusion: It is important to understand the dynamic by which trusted organisations can be induced to alter their agendas in response to funding sources. Advocates need to understand this form of interest group behaviour so that they are better able to negotiate the policy arena by diagnosing and exposing this influence where it occurs and, by doing so, be better prepared to take appropriate countermeasures.

Downsizing and social cohesion: the case of downsizing survivors.

The tobacco industry in the 1980s began to form relationships with outside groups for assistance on key policy issues due to its own poor credibility in the policy arena. This strategy allowed the industry to advance its own interests while seeming to match the agendas of very different organizations. Between 1988 and 1998, the tobacco industry developed coalitions with the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), representing African American trade unionists, and the Labor Coalition on Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), representing Latino trade unionists. APRI and LCLAA each adopted resolutions supporting industry positions on smokefree worksites and excise taxes, issues on which they had not previously taken positions, and promoted these positions to their members, political leaders and the public. They also supported the industry’s youth programs. This research relied upon a review of background literature and document searches through the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and Tobacco Documents Online to examine the development of the excise tax coalition. The tobacco industry built support with APRI and LCLAA by framing policy positions in line with the organizations’ interests, creating institutional arrangements that circumvented direct funding from the industry, and enhancing the industry’s ability to influence excise tax debates indirectly. Although tobacco control advocates do not have the financial resources of the tobacco industry at their disposal, they can learn from tobacco industry techniques as they seek to build coalitions with people of color in the labor movement. Tobacco control advocates can both counter tobacco industry issue frames and also align their interests with those of working people of color by working on other issues of interest to this population, including health care and worker health and safety.

Clearing the air: the evolution of organized labor's role in tobacco control in the United States.

Organizational downsizing was a pervasive feature of the U.S. economy during the 1980s and 1990s. A long-standing public health literature recognizes that unemployment and job loss may adversely affect health, but there has been little attention to date on the impact of downsizing upon those who survive job cuts and continue to work in downsized firms. Drawing on research with survivors of downsizing carried out by the U.S. Department of Energy, this article identifies a variety of social and psychological consequences of downsizing that fundamentally destabilize the work environment and work experience for remaining employees. Evidence from this research suggests that the work climate of the post-downsizing environment is laden with suspicion and conflict, and that survivors show feelings of demoralization, sadness, anxiety, and disorientation. A critical factor influencing these responses, we argue, is not downsizing—which is the exposure faced by those who lose their jobs—but the loss of social cohesion that downsizing ultimately represents to survivors. We conclude that addressing the trauma of downsizing for survivors will require providing employees with more genuine opportunities to participate in workplace governance.

Manufacturing Credibility: The National Energy Management Institute and the Tobacco Institute's Strategy for Indoor Air Quality

As efforts to make U.S. worksites smoke-free took shape in the 1980s, the tobacco industry sought to defeat them by forming alliances with organized labor. The alliance between the tobacco industry and organized labor was based on framing the regulation of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) as a threat to jobs, an example of management unilateralism, and an issue that divided smoking and nonsmoking union members. The dynamics of organized labor and tobacco control began to change in the late 1980s with attempts to ban smoking on airlines and in the hospitality industry. Flight attendants, bar and restaurant workers, and casino dealers—all subject to ETS in their work environments—confronted ETS as an occupational health issue. Against the backdrop of increasing awareness of the hazards of ETS, and the acceptance of tobacco control policy, this framing changed the basis of organized labors role in tobacco control. Because service workers share the workplace with the general public, their occupational health issues are also public health issues. This fact presents new opportunities for coalition building to protect the health of service workers and the public alike.

Cigarette Excise Taxes in Context Cautionary Lessons from the U.S. Experience

OBJECTIVES We studied tobacco industry efforts during the 1980s and 1990s to promote the National Energy Management Institute (NEMI), a nonprofit organization, as an authority on indoor air quality as part of the industrys strategy to oppose smoke-free worksite policies. METHODS We analyzed tobacco industry documents, conducted literature searches in Lexis-Nexis for background and historical literature, and reviewed relevant public health and policy literature. RESULTS The tobacco industry provided more than US

A delicate diplomatic situation.

6 million to NEMI to establish it as an authority on indoor air quality and to work with it to undermine support for smoke-free air policies by promoting ventilation as a solution to indoor air quality problems. Tobacco industry support for NEMI was not publicly disclosed. CONCLUSIONS NEMI was a valuable ally for the tobacco industry through NEMIs ties to organized labor, its technical background, and its status as a third-party actor. NEMI also helped the industry to portray ventilation to improve overall indoor air quality and smoke-free worksites as an either-or choice; in fact, both can improve worker health.

Low-Hanging Fruit: Social Values and Industry Discretion in Toxics Use Reduction Policy

Cigarette excise taxes are an important tool in the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control strategy for reducing global tobacco consumption. However, contemporary tobacco control efforts also coincide with the proliferation of neoliberal economic programs calling for the withdrawal of state activity from the economy to facilitate trade. In this environment, cigarette excise taxes may be seen less as an instrument of tobacco control than a feature of an economic program that is punitive to lower-income people. This article reviews collaboration between progressive organizations in the United States and the tobacco industry in the 1980s and 1990s, documenting potential sources of unanticipated resistance to excise taxes and highlighting the tobacco industry’s capacity to engage in policy issues through third-party surrogates. It is important for those implementing cigarette excise tax increases to distance tobacco control objectives from larger economic policy measures and for tobacco control advocates to build alliances with organizations working for economic fairness in order to address mutual concerns.

Fire and worker health and safety: an introduction to the special issue.

Since the 1980s, commercial funding of medical research has provoked lively debate on a variety of issues relating to scientific integrity [1e4]. Much of the debate centers on the ability of researchers to maintain objectivity in the face of extramural financial relationships and the role of disclosure as a way of alerting readers to potential conflicts of interest. Concerns over commercial funding generally direct attention to the myriad ways in which a sponsor’s interests may influence the research, its findings, or its conclusions. Increasingly, the disclosure of funding sources is counted on to alert audiences to outside influences, which may help account for the evidence before them [5]. Some contend, however, that the funding source in and of itself presents no particular conflict of interest and that the disclosure requirements represent a new form of McCarthyism, which divert attention from the science, undermine open dialog, and tarnish the reputation of honest investigators [6]. Discussions of commercial sponsorship of scientific research have frequently had an abstract quality, with audiences left to nod over this or that point based on their own perspectives or experiences but little empirical confirmation of the intuited maneuverings that fuel conflict of interest concerns. However, with the entry of previously secret tobacco industry documents into the public domain in 1998 as a result of legal action, there is now a considerable body of evidence to inform these debates, even if areas of ambiguity remain [7]. In the case of the tobacco industry, at least, these documents reveal that commercial support for external scientific research was part of a deliberate effort to undermine evidence of the adverse health effects of cigarettes [8e10]. The documents also suggest that the motives of the individual scientists who accepted tobacco industry funding were just one factor in determining the success of the enterprise for the tobacco industry, which used the sponsored research for its own particular ends [11]. The tobacco industry’s foray into sponsored research was precipitated by influential studies in the early 1950s, which linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer and which