South Carolina: Ground Zero for the GOP Candidates' Assault on Working Americans' Rights

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AlterNet / By Josh Eidelson

South Carolina: Ground Zero for the GOP Candidates' Assault on Working Americans' Rights
The little-noticed National Labor Relations Board has somehow become red meat for Republican crowds in South Carolina.

January 19, 2012 |


On the South Carolina campaign trail Tuesday, a questioner at a Chamber of Commerce forum asked Rick Perry what the National Labor Relations Board would look like if he were President. For today’s GOP, that’s the equivalent of a slow pitch over home plate, and Perry knocked it out of the park: “There wouldn’t be one.” As Slate reported, “The crowd lit up at that.”

Perry’s headed back to Texas, having dropped out just days before the primary. But NLRB-hatred is still going strong. Newt Gingrich, who just took the lead in South Carolina polls and received Perry’s endorsement on Thursday, told the same Chamber of Commerce crowd that he would defund the NLRB if he were Speaker again, and is researching whether he could unilaterally eliminate it as president. Supposed moderate Mitt Romney calls the NLRB an “unaccountable and out-of-control agency.” His first South Carolina ad following the Iowa Caucus accused Obama of packing the Board with “union stooges.”

It’s not by accident that South Carolina has become Ground Zero for NLRB-bashing. The South Carolina primary has a reputation as a GOP establishment stronghold, and a hotbed of racial and religious reaction (the two are not exactly contradictory). But Tea-Partying Governor Nikki Haley made clear in April what she’d be judging GOP candidates on. “I would absolutely love to hear what their stance is on the National Labor Relations Board and what they’ve done to Boeing and what they are going to do as head of our country in dealing with these labor unions on right-to-work states,” Haley said after a press conference last April. Expressing “concern” wouldn’t cut it, she warned. “How are you going to stand up for these companies? How are you going to stand up against the unions?” The candidates took the hint. That includes Romney, who made attacks on the NLRB a centerpiece of his successful bid for Haley’s endorsement.

Given South Carolina’s famed success in picking Republican nominees, Haley has played an outsized role in making the NLRB, which has long inspired ambivalence from labor activists and indifference from most Americans, a punching bag for GOP contenders. But that’s not the whole story. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153812/south_carolina%3A_ground_zero_for_the_gop_candidates%27_assault_on_working_americans%27_rights/

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