I wanted to write quickly about this issue since it's breaking right now. Mike Allen at Politico reported this morning that after the American Conservative Union (ACU) offered to take FedEx's side on a major labor issue for $2 million to $3 million, it quickly backed rival UPS when FedEx said it wouldn't pay. Allen writes:
"The ACU...took UPS’s side on Wednesday as part of a conservative consortium that accused FedEx of 'misleading the public and legislators'...Just two weeks earlier, ACU had offered its endorsement to FedEx, saying in a letter to the company: 'We stand with FedEx in opposition to this legislation.'"
This shines a serious spotlight on what Allen calls "black-and-white proof of the longtime Washington practice known as 'pay for play.'"
Pay for play is one of those well-suspected, but little-proven tactics in government, PR and marketing (and others) that can be very attractive for the parties involved, but runs completely counter to practicing business with integrity. I have no doubt FedEx would have enjoyed having ACU as a powerful ally in its efforts to persuade stakeholders and legislators to come to their side of the issue. They could have very easily paid ACU to mobilize and nobody would have ever known. Instead, FedEx stood by its values and risked an ACU switch - which they did - to attempt to reach their goal the right way. You can bet they didn't pay for George Will's support in Wednesday's Washington Post. You wonder, though, how much UPS ended up paying ACU for theirs.
