Methods: Review of tobacco industry documents, other literature on local level strategies in tobacco control, and the broader literature of grassroots political activity

Results: The tobacco industry aggressively opposed federal legislation to stop or curtail smoking in federal worksites in the mid-eighties. One of the ways the industry got labor support on this issue was to frame the legislation as an instance of management unilateralism and thus a violation of union rights to bargain for members. In response, the head of the General Services Administration allowed each federal worksite to set its own rules, subject to bargaining with the local unions. The effect of this was that by 1997, when Clinton signed his executive order, even the head of the Tobacco Institute acknowledged that it would not have much impact because most worksites were already smokefree.

Conclusions: This case represents a major strategy failure on the industry's part. Instead of keeping the issue at the federal level, where it could control policy, it sent the policy decisions to the local level, where it has historically been weakest. By going for the obvious win - defeating federal legislation - the industry set itself up for a slow, steady loss, worksite by worksite. Weak federal legislation that required smoking and nonsmoking areas and preempted local rulemaking might have stopped the smokefree federal worksites movement. By the early 1990s, the industry was actively pursuing of preemption as a legislative strategy.