Mayo’s tactics show that bullying works

The admonitions frequently uttered against bullying – whether at schoolyards, classrooms, workplaces, or elsewhere – ring hollow when big, powerful organizations use it effectively to get what they want.

Case in point: The threat by the Mayo Clinic to divert to other states billions of dollars in construction projects planned in Minnesota if the state Legislature enacts certain health care measures, particularly nurse staffing requirements that the facility opposes is a classic form of lobbying by bullying.

Marshall H. Tanick

While the medical Goliath had its team of high-paid personnel engaged in the conventional type of trying to enact, modify or stop prospective legislation, it was the quite public threat by the institution in a letter to Gov. Tim Walz that is seeming to do trick in exempting it from those requirements imposed differentially on other medical facilities. The reason, according to a member of the DFL leadership team attempting to ram through the inequitably indulgence, is that “Mayo is different” since it treats “kings and princes.”

So, Mayo is to be given preferential treatment because it serves royalty while the rest of the medical establishment gets second-rate treatment because they only serve plebeians.

Mayo’s seemingly successful form of economic blackmail represents a reverse version of what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is doing down in Florida in his feud with the Disney organization. He is using government to bully a big, powerful corporation that is the largest employer in the state because it took a stance on LGBTQ issues he reviles. Here, one of the most substantial employers is brandishing its economic might to try to intimidate elected government officials.

What DeSantis is doing down there and Mayo is trying up here are Mickey Mouse maneuvers that ought to be called out for what they are: Goofy.

Marshall H. Tanick is a Twin Cities employment and Constitutional law attorney.