Will reluctant union-buster Snyder make Michigan the low-wage competitor to Canada?

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.”