Alec
MacGillis of The New Republic has an excellent piece on how Gov. Rick Snyder’s
national reputation as the moderate of the new Midwestern Republican governors
is now all gone. After the right-to-work coup on Thursday in the Michigan Capitol, Snyder now swims
with the same sharks that have taken a bite out of labor rights – Scott Walker
of Wisconsin, Mitch Daniels of Indiana and John Kasich of Ohio.
The blog post, headlined “Rick Snyder, Michigan’s Reluctant Union-Buster,”
delves into the backstory about the tremendous pressure Snyder faced from the
right, especially from bigtime GOP donors such as the DeVoses, to pave the way
for right-to-work.
With a liberal outsider’s perspective, MacGillis takes
note of the slick rhetoric that Snyder used at Thursday’s press conference and
he also questions the Michigan GOP’s focus on Indiana’s new right-to-work status:
“…Here was
Snyder telling the state its new model was Indiana – the state whose recent
economic victories have included a batch of new Caterpillar jobs in Muncie that
were moved from Ontario, where workers were paid twice as much as they will be in Indiana.”
MacGillis
continues with the so-called “right to work for less” theme by imagining where the
anti-union path which the Midwest is following
will lead:
“Yes, the
low-wage Midwest may become Canada’s
Mexico—who knows, with
global warming, the Great Lakes beaches may
even attain spring-break status in the decades to come.”
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