Estados Unidos de América - Government officials and candidates for office openly attack unions and union-represented workers (2012)

During 2011, a number of high-ranking government officials and candidates for high office openly expressed their hostility to unions and workers’ exercise of freedom of association.

The newly-elected Republican governor of South Carolina, for example, announced to the press that she was appointing a lawyer specialising in “union avoidance” to head the state’s department of labor because “we’re going to fight the unions and I needed a partner to help me do it”. Notwithstanding that there are more than 59,000 union members in South Carolina, she subsequently declared in a televised address to the state legislature that her administration would “make the unions understand they are not needed, not wanted, and not welcome in the state of South Carolina”.

Mitt Romney, the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, ran televised campaign ads in which he referred to the members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the government agency which administers the federal labour law, as “union stooges”. He, and other Republican candidates for the presidency, repeatedly attacked unions and the NLRB during televised candidate debates.

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