All the same, we wouldn't say the attempts of trade associations to influence public policy are, by definition, futile or wrong. Lobbying, in fact, was NTMA's original mission back in 1942. Shop owners pleaded that skilled toolmakers be exempt from the draft, on the theory that they were vital to the war effort at home. Congress was so persuaded. Last year NTMA devoted a quarter of a million dollars of its $3.7-million annual budget to lobbying, mainly on issues that affect small business generally: taxes, health insurance, and government mandates in whatever form. "They just don't like government meddling," Cox says of his constituency.
Maybe if Coffey belonged to the trade association for trade-association executives and spent more time with those guys, his attitude toward lobbying would be more macho. ("I don't think of myself in the same context as ASAE thinks of itself," he explains. "I don't think of what I do as building a profession. I think of it as servicing the customer.") As it is, Coffey relegates lobbying to a supporting role, in service to NTMA's larger mission.
"We have to be a center of knowledge on government," Coffey says. "That doesn't mean we need to be a lobbyist. That doesn't mean we need to be a legal intervener. It means we have to know everything that's going on and know what impact it's going to have on the businesses we're trying to serve. It may mean that we actually lobby at some point, but that's not the driver."
Networking
Some blame the Gulf War. Others blame the recession. No matter what the cause, trade-association executives complain that attendance at conventions and seminars is down these past few years.
"In the quality movement so many companies are experiencing, where costs are being cut and productivity and performance are being better monitored and approved, travel is one of the things that takes a hit," says Jon Jenson, president of the Precision Metal Forming Association. "To be effective in the future, we're going to have to deliver closer to home."
The petroleum marketers' group came up against it last August, when a seminar on a topic of proven interest to its members drew only 200 to Chicago, most of them day-trippers. A few months later association executive vice-president Chisholm tried something new: a televised seminar, offered live via satellite to each of the association's 44 state and regional affiliates. The affiliates, in turn, set up centers at which members gathered in small groups to view the proceedings and call in their questions. The technology made Chisholm nervous at first. Then again, he says, "one of our state associations in South Dakota had done a teleconference with its membership. So, it occurred to me, if my South Dakota people were sophisticated enough to do this, then everybody else ought to be." In the end more than 2,000 people participated -- record attendance for a petroleum marketers' seminar.
Coffey is impressed, but he points to surveys that indicate that networking, of the kind that takes place at conventions, is still what his members value most about NTMA. "What's important to them," says Coffey, "is to be able to talk to somebody who's in the business, who's lived their experience."
NTMA holds three conventions a year, in exotic locales like Cancun and Las Vegas. Attendance varies widely, from 5% of the membership up to 30%. "As long as that's what the members want," says Coffey, "we'll keep doing them."
One thing NTMA won't do is trade shows. "Our members have made it very clear to us that they don't want to be sold to," says Coffey. The association's quarterly regional purchasing fairs reverse the equation. Members have the opportunity to meet manufacturers' purchasing agents, review their blueprints, and bid on contracts.
Al Burgess, president of Burgess Brothers, in Canton, Mass., says the purchasing fairs have helped him expand his markets. "If I go to one fair," he says, "and get one customer, the couple thousand dollars I pay each year in dues is worth it."
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International Markets
Few of NTMA's members are exporters, although on average their markets are expanding -- from a 50-mile radius seven years ago to 150 miles today. On the other hand, many of them find themselves competing against lowball quotes from European and Japanese companies. NTMA provides its members with stats and information designed to help them set competitive prices and educate their customers on the true costs of sourcing abroad.
Last January, though, NTMA took steps in a new direction, committing itself to expanding ties with industry counterparts in Mexico and Canada. Coffey admits it was with "some trepidation" that the staff presented members with a draft of NTMA's new long-term goal -- to become the center of knowledge for the tooling and machining industry in all of North America. "We're so used to thinking of ourselves as a national association," Coffey says. "And we thought, 'Oh my god, we'll get in there and they'll America-first us, and we'll get shot for even proposing this.' Instead, what we ran into was all these guys sitting around, saying, 'Well, just do it, guys! Took you long enough!' And here we thought we were going to be breaking all kinds of china."
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Alexis De Tocqueville didn't think trade associations were funny. Not at all. You might even say that Tocqueville, like Bremer, was blown away by "the immense assemblage of associations" he encountered on his travels through early-19th-century America.
"Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations," the young Frenchman observed in Democracy in America. That was true, evidently, long before there was a National Association of Nameplate Manufacturers or a National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, much less a National Organization of Mall Walkers.
Tocqueville pondered that "immense assemblage" and its significance in the context of "the most democratic country on the face of the earth," where "all the citizens were independent and feeble."
He concluded that "governments, therefore, should not be the only active powers: associations ought, in democratic nations, to stand in lieu of those powerful private individuals whom the equality of conditions has swept away."
In European society, he noted, "feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed, only by the reciprocal influence of men upon each other." But in America he saw that "these influences are almost null in democratic countries; they must therefore be artificially created, and this can only be accomplished by associations."
As Tamasi says, "It's meeting up with your peers and making friendships. Surviving as a group. Growing as a group."
