Nikki Haley to unions: Stay out of South Carolina

To listen to much of the mainstream media, you'd think South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was waging war on unemployed workers, telling those who could have brought them job opportunities to stay out of the state in the service of her ideological predelictions. But Nikki Haley is a lot smarter than that. She can see the destruction wrought by unions in the Rust Belt, not to mention way the federal government tends to put its thumb on the scales to give unions more power once they've shown up.

Haley knows that wouldn't be in South Carolina's economic interests, and she's refreshingly blunt in expressing what's on her mind. Here's how USA Today portrays it:

GOP animosity toward unions grew red-hot in South Carolina during Haley's first year as governor after the National Labor Relations Board went to court to block the Boeing Co. from making its Dreamliner jet at a new factory in North Charleston. The NLRB argued that Boeing had built the plant in right-to-work South Carolina in retaliation for past union strikes at the company's Puget Sound operations but ultimately dropped the complaint. Haley has continued to remind voters of what the agency tried to do and did it again Wednesday while appearing here at the South Carolina Automotive Summit, an annual conference for the state's auto industry.

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The governor urged more than 200 people at the conference, many of them auto industry executives, to keep up their guard against unions. "They're coming into South Carolina. They're trying," Haley warned. "We're hearing it. The good news is it's not working." Haley promised to keep fighting against union penetration. "You've heard me say many times I wear heels. It's not for a fashion statement," she said. "It's because we're kicking them every day, and we'll continue to kick them."

Damn straight, Governor. Take it from someone who lives in Michigan and reports on the economic damage the United Auto Workers has done and is still doing to our state. Unions are like an incurable disease. Once they infest your state that are almost impossible to get rid of. They bloat the cost of labor, they impose insane work rules that reduce your productivity, and they use the dues the collect from workers to bankroll Democrat politicians, who in turn write new labor laws that strengthen unions. In Michigan, the UAW tried in 2012 to pass by ballot initiative a constitutional amendment that would have enshrined the entire agenda of organized labor into the state constitution. Once that effort failed, Michigan's Republican governor and Legislature decided they had finally had enough and made Michigan a right-to-work state. But that will only start the process of de-clawing the UAW. It will take decades to turn Michigan into an economically competitive state, if that can ever happen, given the mindset of the auto companies who seem determined to maintain this relationship of abusive co-dependency. By the way, Haley is absolutely right to want no part of the NLRB's pro-union agenda. South Carolina and the companies who want to do business there can operate just fine without an arm of the federal government forcing unionization where it is neither wanted nor needed. Nikki Haley is smart not to want to see South Carolina go down that road. That doesn't mean South Carolina needs to be a low-wage state, by the way. It just means that employers and employees can negotiate their own wages based on value delivered, resources available, labor supply and labor demand - without a bunch of labor thugs using threats and intimidation to influence the process. Kudos to Gov. Haley for having the guts to say so.