Diana Conley sat like a sparrow among eagles as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce kicked off a nationwide “listening tour” billed as a chance to gather the views of small business owners.
As Bloomberg reports, most of the attendees at the chamber’s breakfast meeting in a downtown Chicago hotel came from the area’s biggest employers, businesses including JPMorgan Chase, Allstate and BMO Harris Bank. Conley, whose telecommunications company employs just 10 people, says she wasn’t quite sure what she had to share with the nation’s largest and most powerful corporate lobbying group.
“I have no relation with the national chamber,” says Conley, a member of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce. She views the national group as more in tune with major corporations. “Everyone goes where the big dollars are, and that’s the big corporations.”
US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue acknowledges that the chamber isn’t known for its work with mom-and-pops. “We do a lot of things with and for small business,” he says, “but we haven’t done it well enough.”
Donohue is trying to adjust that image as Donald Trump’s populist presidency gets underway. The group’s small-business listening tour, which began in Chicago Friday—and is slated to stop in Baton Rouge later this spring—represents an echo of Trump’s style that may help enhance the business group’s clout.
Donohue, one of the most influential and well-paid men in Washington, had been critical of Trump before November’s election—especially his views on trade and immigration. The chamber leader went so far as to predict in a December 2015 Bloomberg interview that Trump “won’t be the next president.”
Now though, there are signs that relationship is thawing. One of Vice President Mike Pence’s first meetings after the election was a closed-door session at the chamber’s headquarters, where he promised the group’s directors fewer federal regulations and other business-friendly initiatives, says Rich Studley, chief executive officer of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and a meeting attendee.
The small-business listening tour was conceived the fall election. Along with stops in Baton Rouge—the exact details of which have yet to be released—the tour will also visit Atlanta, Phoenix and Detroit before a final “summit” in Washington to showcase what leaders have learned.
“We’ve worked with small business for a long time,” Donohue says. “But it became very clear to us, with the issues that were in front of us at home and around the world, that we had to use that asset much better and we had to organize ourselves to do it, and we had to spend money, not raise money, to make that happen.”
