Last month, businessman Richard DeVos, one of the most important forces in conservative politics for more than four decades, passed away at the age of 92. Since November 2016, he’s been most well known as the father-in-law of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Although she dismissed the notion at her confirmation, it is undeniable that Betsy DeVos owes her position at least in part to the hundreds of millions of dollars that she and her family have given to the Republican Party and conservative advocacy groups. Thanks to these donations, the Center for Responsive Politics has dubbed the DeVos family — which boasts an estimated net worth of $5.4 billion — “GOP royalty.”

The source of the family fortune: Amway. The name might not be familiar to some Americans, for a good reason. While Amway sells an array of household cleaning items, vitamins and nutritional supplements and cosmetics, you can’t buy them in stores. Indeed, the company’s innovation is its use of a business model known as multilevel marketing, or MLM. Consumers must purchase products directly from individual “distributors” — salespeople who operate as “independent business owners” by selling products and recruiting new sellers to do the same.

While this model sounded alluring to people drawn to a life free of a desk and a boss, Amway’s promise turned out to be hollow. In the early 1970s, Amway salespeople earned somewhere between $20 to $30 a month on average. By 2010, that had crept up to $115 — barely enough to cover a cellphone bill, let alone a full wage. But Amway itself — and the DeVos family — profited handsomely, to the tune of $8.8 billion in sales in 2016.

Amway padded the pocketbooks of the DeVos family at the expense of its workers. But it was not simply the DeVoses who got rich off this type of business. President Trump did, too. Indeed, the bigger threat to American workers today may not just be these businesses that have used economic anxieties and false promises of prosperity to undermine worker benefits, but the fact that this type of businessman is now our president.

Richard DeVos founded the company in 1959 with his childhood friend Jay Van Andel. He spelled out their vision in his 2014 memoir “Simply Rich,” writing, “We thought everyone who wanted to should be able to own their own business!” ...