Scott Walker slammed Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump within minutes of the second GOP debate Wednesday evening, with the help of Trump’s old TV show. He became the national face for the right-to-work movement after winning a 2012 recall election prompted in part by his move to strip Wisconsin unions of their collective bargaining rights.
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One of Walker’s Republican rivals challenged the plan, too, saying it is the wrong message for the GOP to send to unionized workers.
In the Las Vegas speech, Walker said the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union-management relations for most US industries, is a problem, as are unions.
Las Vegas is home to casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire and long-time Republican donor who has spent tens of millions dollars to weaken unions. As Noam Scheiber writes for the New York Times, “Their most interesting explanation is that unions are effective at pushing the political system to deliver policies-like a higher minimum wage and greater spending on schools and other government programs-that broadly benefit workers”.
“We won in a blue state like Wisconsin, and not just on the ballot three times, but if our ideas can win and they actually work there, in a blue state, then I believe there’s no doubt we can apply that same measure to America.”
“I fear what happened when he decided to run for president is he decided to act like a politician instead of a leader”, said Rick Esenberg, founder of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative think tank and legal organization based in Milwaukee.
Walker, who has spent about five days a month campaigning in Iowa, will ramp those appearances up towards an “aggressive” goal, aides said. With his experience in hopeless campaigns, the Wisconsin governor might just have what it takes to wait out the storm and gain the nomination. “He attacks workers”.
On Monday, Walker released an eight-page plan to take on unions, titled “My Plan to Give Power to the People, Not the Union Bosses”.
“It appears to me that Scott Walker is pretty much desperate in his campaign right now as he’s sinking to the bottom of the polls”, Cox said.
Clinton said on Twitter that unions make families strong. Union bosses are very fond of claiming that they’re responsible for everything good about the American workplace, even for people who have never worked in a union shop – in fact, they’re not shy about charging workers who don’t belong to unions for their “services”, when the opportunity presents itself.
“We don’t need an Apprentice in the White House; we have one right now”. States that want to take this freedom away from their workers would have to affirmatively vote to opt out of right-to-work status.
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Walker’s plan also calls for prohibiting the automatic withdrawal of union dues to be used for political purposes and forbidding union organizers from accessing employees’ personal information, such as their phone numbers.
