Lobbying Group Scrubs Page Listing Corporate Backers After Mother Jones Article

But the internet never forgets.


In late 2013, major corporations such as Walmart, Nordstrom, Lowe’s, Macy’s, and Safeway began bankrolling the Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers’ Compensation (ARAWC), a group that pushes legislation aimed at making it harder for workers hurt on the job to access lost wages and medical care.

But you wouldn’t know it by looking at ARAWC’s website. Sometime after Thursday, when Mother Jones published an article naming the major corporations financing ARAWC, the lobbying group removed a page from its site that listed its current members. Mother Jones recovered a version of the page that was cached earlier this month:

ARAWC's corporate backers

ARAWC’s “Current Members” page: Click to enlarge. Yahoo Cache

According to ARAWC’s membership application, full and founding members pay $25,000 a year to join. Sponsoring members, such as Whole Foods and the Great American Insurance Company, pay $10,000 a year.

We’ve asked a spokesman for ARAWC why the group removed its “current members” page and will update this post with any response.

Update March 30, 6:20 p.m. EDT: A spokesman for ARAWC wrote the following in an email: “The Current Members page on the ARAWC website was previously scheduled to be taken down, because it did not reflect our current membership. It is not a big issue like some are making it into. Many lobbying organizations do not list their members at all. I expect the page to be re-posted at a later date.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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