Wisconsin shoppers thinking of buying Angel Soft tissue, Johnsonville Brats or Coors beer should carefully examine packages of those products on grocery shelves for vandalism. Those products are being singled out by anonymous vandals who damage them, then leave stickers on them bearing messages critical of Gov. Scott Walker. As Examiner columnist Michelle Malkin reports on Page 35, suspicion focuses on members of a local chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union. That’s the same union chapter that recently threatened retaliation against Wisconsin businesses that failed to support protests against Walker’s reforms in public employee pensions, benefits and collective bargaining privileges. It would be one thing for a union representing workers at a privately owned company to threaten retaliation against other private businesses. When public employee unionists do so, it raises the specter of government power being hijacked to serve a special interest agenda. Hijacking the power of the state to advance liberal special interest agendas by intimidating opponents — implicitly or otherwise — has become commonplace in recent years. Most recently at the federal level, for example, President Obama is considering an executive order requiring companies bidding on federal contracts to disclose contributions by their executives to political candidates and to political advocacy groups. While it is illegal for federal officials to include partisan considerations in federal contract awards, such a disclosure requirement threatens that successful bidders will only be those companies whose executives have made politically correct contributions.
Similarly, Obama appointees on the National Labor Relations Board have sent a threatening message to the 22 states with right-to-work laws guaranteeing workers that they don’t have to be members of a union as a condition of keeping their jobs. The threat is in the form of an NLRB complaint filed on behalf of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers at Boeing Co.’s Washington state plant. The union, which has struck Boeing multiple times in recent years, costing it an estimated $4 billion since 1989, wants the company to be forced to stop construction on a new plant in South Carolina that is to build the company’s latest commercial airliner, and instead keep the work in Washington. Unlike Washington, South Carolina is a right-to-work state.
The attorneys general of nine states have protested the NLRB action, demanding in a letter to the board that it withdraw the complaint because it “represents an assault upon the constitutional right of free speech, and the ability of our states to create jobs and recruit industry. Your ill-conceived retaliatory action seeks to destroy our citizens’ right to work.” Besides South Carolina, states signing the letter included Virginia, Nebraska, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Arizona and Oklahoma. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, writing in the Wall Street Journal, described the NLRB complaint as “nothing less than a direct assault on the 22 right-to-work states across America … also an unprecedented attack on an iconic American company that is being told by the federal government — which seems to regard its authority as endless — where and how to build airplanes.” This is how gangster government operates.
