Glenn Hits Hoekstra on Right to Work at Conservative Confab in South Carolina

Pro-Right to Work Senate candidate addresses business and political leaders in Charleston, site of Boeing plant at center of national debate

Michigan Republican U.S. Senate candidate Gary Glenn, a champion of Right to Work legislation for three decades, Monday will seek campaign support from business and political leaders from throughout the Southeast, telling them they can't trust former nine-term Congressman Pete Hoekstra to support state and national Right to Work laws if elected to the United States Senate.
 

Glenn will address The Charleston Meeting, a conservative conference in Charleston, S.C., the site of a new 1,000-job Boeing jetliner manufacturing facility that became the focal point of a national debate after Obama appointees to the National Labor Relations Board filed an unfair labor practice complaint against Boeing for locating the new plant in a Right to Work state, where compulsory union membership or financial support is prohibited by law.

"In the ten years union-backed Democrat Debbie Stabenow has been in the U.S. Senate, Michigan has lost 800,000 private sector jobs," Glenn said.  "Electing Stabenow or Pete Hoekstra, a Republican who's also against state and national Right to Work laws, threatens to make it harder to create and protect jobs not only in Michigan but in states that already have Right to Work protections."

"American jobs in multiple states will be less secure if Michigan voters' only choice in November 2012 is between Stabenow and Hoekstra, two union-financed politicians with long records of opposing Right to Work and supporting expansion of union officials' compulsory power over American workers," Glenn said.

"Unlike Stabenow or Hoekstra, as U.S. Senator, I will join Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., in cosponsoring a national Right to Work law to protect employee freedom in all fifty states," Glenn said, "and I will support eliminating the NLRB if necessary to stop its recent attempts to dictate to American businesses like Boeing where they can and can't locate new plant sites." 

Glenn led the campaign that succeeded in winning legislative and voter approval of a state Right to Work law in Idaho in the 1980s.  He is a founding member of the recently-launched Michigan Freedom to Work coalition which is pushing for passage of Right to Work in Michigan. In contrast, Hoekstra has been endorsed and funded by Teamsters union president James A. Hoffa and other Teamsters union officials in his past campaigns for Congress and, most recently, in his 2010 GOP primary campaign for governor.

  

Hoffa told ABC News in 2000: “Because of our contact with Hoekstra, he has now taken himself out of any endorsement of national Right to Work laws.”

In 2009, Hoekstra said on public television’s Off the Record with Tim Skubick: “I think it would be a bad idea to put (Right to Work) on the ballot. I don’t know if it would pass or not. I’d probably not vote for it.”

During the 2010 race for governor, the Center for Michigan reported that Hoekstra was the only Republican candidate who — in response to the candidate survey question, “Should Michigan become a Right-to-Work state?” — joined Democrats Virg Bernero and Andy Dillon in answering “no.”

Dome magazine in Lansing reported of Hoekstra: “The Hollander refused to sign a no-tax pledge and declared he wouldn’t vote for a ballot initiative on Right to Work, seen as the holy grail by business groups, a powerful Republican constituency.”

Even worse, Glenn said, Hoekstra in 2007 joined Sen. Debbie Stabenow and then Sen. Barack Obama in cosponsoring legislation that by federal mandate would have forced every state and every county, city, township, and village in America of at least 5,000 in population to unionize its firefighters, police officers, and paramedics.

Opposed by the National Right to Work Committee as well as by the National Association of Counties and the National League of Cities, the legislation would have funneled hundreds of millions of more dues dollars into the coffers of the Teamsters, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and other unions that represent government employees.

According to the Charleston Post and Courier, The Charleston Meeting is "a new invitation only, off-the-record gathering of conservatives from South Carolina and beyond...(whose) organizers hope they can move the needle on all sorts of national and state policy issues of interest to conservatives."