Our piece, Justifying WGA’s Washington Office, focused on the fact that most regional associations won’t spend the kind of money involved in opening and staffing an office in the nation’s capital unless they had an agenda distinct from that pushed by the national associations.
One knowledgeable regional executive shared our concern:
Good job on the WGA piece — at least from where I sit. I totally agree with the Pundit. We probably could make a lot of money taking bets on when the public split with United will burst upon us. My guess is, not long.
This is not a minor problem for the industry. The way Washington works is that competing “factions,” as James Madison explained in Federalist Number 10, would vie against each other. In a continental scale republic, these factions would be diverse enough that there would be no permanent majority to oppress a permanent minority.
Of course, if the produce industry starts to war against itself, with WGA articulating a vision different from that of United, what will happen is that legislators will feel more free to dismiss the pleadings of the produce industry all together and pay attention to other, more united, interest groups.
This doesn’t seem like a scenario likely to advance the interests of the produce trade.
