Template:ALEC News

ALEC News The ALEC-Backed War on Local Democracy by Mary Bottari and by Brendan Fischer 350 After the town of Denton, Texas passed a ballot initiative banning fracking in November 2014, the oil and gas industry reacted with outrage and swiftly filed suit. Politicians in the state capitol responded with a fusillade of bills to preempt local authority over public health and safety and to subject local ballot initiatives to pre-approval by the state attorney general. There was even a bill to end local home rule altogether. The tiny town of Denton was not alone. From New Jersey to Oregon, on topics as diverse as minimum wage, paid sick leave, community broadband, e-cigarettes, and GMOs, state politicians are stepping up their efforts to destroy a bedrock principle of U.S. governance--the right of municipal and county authorities to legally and appropriately enact and strengthen laws that reflect local needs and priorities. Read the rest of this item here. ALEC, NFIB Push Prevailing Wage Repeal by Jody Knauss As unions and working people battle "right-to-work" legislation in several states, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and allies have opened another flank in their war on good jobs. Targeted this time are state prevailing wage laws, which require public construction projects to support local wage standards instead of undercutting them. Studies have repeatedly found that prevailing wage laws do not harm taxpayers but are effective in providing something increasingly rare in regional labor markets, upward pressure on wages. Read the rest of this item here. BP Dumps ALEC; Tally at 102 by Mary Bottari BP announced Monday that it was cutting ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, the controversial corporate bill mill. It is the third major fossil fuel company to sever ties with ALEC, after Occidental Petroleum in 2014. ExxonMobil remains on the ALEC private sector board. As of March 2015, at least 102 corporations and 19 non-profits--for a total of 121 private sector members--have publicly announced that they cut ties with ALEC. You can see a full list of companies that have cut ties here. Read the rest of this item here. Wisconsin Introduces Word-for-Word ALEC Right to Work Bill by Brendan Fischer Wisconsin Republicans have called a special session to take up a "right to work" measure attacking private sector unions--and the text of the bill, the Center for Media and Democracy has discovered, is taken word-for-word from American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation. See the side-by-side of the Wisconsin legislation and the ALEC bill here. Read the rest of this item here. “Death by a Thousand Cuts” and ALEC’s Local Strategy for Attacking Unions by Brendan Fischer The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) made headlines last week after Wisconsin Republicans introduced a virtually word-for-word copy of the ALEC “model” Right to Work Act, following on the heels of Michigan and other states that have taken up the ALEC-inspired anti-union measures in recent years. But ALEC and its allies have also been pushing a new and unprecedented approach to defunding unions on a city-by-city basis through an ALEC offshoot, the American City County Exchange (ACCE). Since ACCE’s most recent meeting in December, so-called right to work laws on the local level have been enacted in several Kentucky counties, and discussed in other states such as Illinois and Ohio. Read the rest of this item here.