ALEC Founded to Coordinate Corporate Model Legislation Across State Legislatures

Conservative activist Paul Weyrich, with Representatives Henry Hyde and others, founds the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Chicago—the same year Weyrich co-founds the Heritage Foundation with financial backing from beer magnate Joseph Coors. ALEC is established specifically to coordinate corporate-written model legislation across state legislatures, creating a “pay-to-play” platform where corporations fund the organization and draft bills in their own interest, while state legislators introduce those bills as their own work.

ALEC’s founding represents the formalization of corporate state capture: rather than lobbying each state legislature individually, corporations gain access to a coordinated network of conservative legislators willing to introduce pre-written model bills simultaneously across multiple states. The organization operates behind the scenes, allowing corporate-written legislation to appear as locally-generated lawmaker initiatives while obscuring the role of corporate drafters and funders.

Over the following 50 years, ALEC becomes the primary vehicle for coordinating labor suppression across states, developing model legislation including right-to-work laws (1979/1995), paycheck protection acts restricting union political activity (1998), living wage mandate preemption blocking local minimum wage increases (2002), and comprehensive government union reform acts (2016). The 2010 coordinated right-to-work offensive that achieves breakthrough success in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, West Virginia, and Kentucky all uses ALEC word-for-word model language, demonstrating the power of Weyrich’s vision: corporations write laws once, and ALEC’s legislative network passes them in dozens of states. ALEC’s founding marks the beginning of systematic state-level policy coordination that enables the destruction of union power from 24% membership (1979) to 10% (2024).