The US Chamber of Commerce has been leading the conservative movement’s effort to block a $15 minimum wage and depict jobless workers as overly coddled layabouts who do not deserve a meager $300 of extra unemployment benefits during the pandemic. At the same time, the Chamber has paid millions of dollars to a handful of its top executives, including hundreds of thousands of dollars to some of them for only a few hours of work every week, according to documents reviewed by the Daily Poster.

As Washington’s largest spender on federal lobbying in 2020, the Chamber is widely considered the most powerful influence peddler for large corporations. Last week, the Chamber declared that “paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market” and called for “ending the $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefit.” Sixteen Republican governors have followed that demand after the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform dumped $850,000 into the Republican Governors Association in the last few years.

The Chamber depicted unemployment benefits as overly lavish, asserting — without offering any actual proof — that too many Americans are “taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.”