By Robb Mandelbaum
Forbes, April 24, 2016
... LuntzGlobal, a communications firm founded by über-GOP pollster Frank Luntz surveyed 1,000 top executives (nearly half were owners) and found that they supported raising the minimum wage 79% - 8%. ...
LuntzGlobal delivered this news in a January webinar to the cohort of Americans perhaps least likely to welcome it: executives from state chambers of commerce. The news evidently took many of the participants by surprise. “When you were talking about raising the minimum wage to the surveyors, does that mean that they are worried about raising it, or do they actually want to see it raised?” asked Bill Kramer, policy director at the Council of State Chambers, ... (Presumably he meant the respondents, not the surveyors.) The council is an umbrella group of state chambers; it hired LuntzGlobal to conduct the survey.
David Merritt, a managing director of LuntzGlobal, backed up to the slide showing the question. “That’s where it’s undeniable that they support the increase,” he responded. ... “We’ve actually looked at this issue a number of different ways. We’ve done focus groups on it, as part of policy discussions, and this is universal. If you’re fighting against the minimum wage increase, you’re fighting an uphill battle, because most Americans, even most Republicans are okay with raising the minimum wage.”
Naturally, the only reason we know about this is because a participant in the webinar leaked it, along with the slide deck and the poll results, to the liberal group Center for Media and Democracy, which gleefully published the exposé earlier in April.
The disclosure put the Council of State Chambers in something of an awkward position, since so many of their members have taken positions of their own against all of these labor policies. Why do chambers oppose policies that their members would appear to support? When the Washington Post, one of the few media outlets to cover this bombshell in any depth, asked this question, the answer seemed to be that the views uncovered by the LuntzGlobal didn’t match the views of their own members, even though 63% of those who were interviewed are current members of one or another chamber. ...
In fact, LuntzGlobal focused on larger small businesses — more than half of those surveyed had revenues exceeding $50 million, and more than half employed more than 100 people. In the real economy, 92 percent of all U.S. employers have fewer than 25 workers. LuntzGlobal did not interview any of these businesses.
Perhaps, then, one reason for the disconnect is that state chamber members tend to be smaller than the LuntzGlobal sample, and smaller employers feel differently about these issues. However, Joe Crosby, the council’s executive director, said in an interview that smaller businesses were excluded because they typically aren’t dues-paying members of their state chamber. And while LuntzGlobal didn’t talk to those smaller companies, other pollsters have. The surveys conducted for those much-maligned advocates talked to far more representative samples, and I was able to get results broken down by company size. While support was not as overwhelming as in the chamber survey, majorities, or at least pluralities, of smaller businesses still backed higher minimum wages.
The Small Business Majority ... found in a July 2015 survey that between 48 and 64 percent of businesses with 25 or fewer employees backed a higher minimum wage. (Interestingly, support was strongest among the smallest businesses.) A July 2014 study by the American Sustainable Business Council and Businesses for a Fair Minimum Wage reported that about 55 percent of businesses with fewer than 20 employees did likewise. Both surveys were conducted by reputable, if Democratic-leaning, pollsters. ...
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