James Hoffa, Teamsters President, Says Romney 'Wants To Annihilate Organized Labor' [View all]

[highplainsdem]

Source: Huffington Post

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The way Teamsters President James P. Hoffa sees it, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney would be happy if an already weakened American labor movement ceased to exist altogether.

"He wants to annihilate organized labor as we know it," Hoffa told HuffPost outside the Democratic National Convention this week. "It's on his website. I'm not making this up. He's for a national right-to-work law. The Republican Party has veered dangerously to the right. It's rather incredible, in 2012, if you think about it."

Indeed, Romney's official stance on labor isn't kind to unions. His campaign website suggests that unions have outlasted their significance, "driv[ing] up costs and introduc[ing] rigidities that harm competitiveness and frustrate innovation." He supports states pursuing right-to-work laws, which weaken the clout of unions, and his party last week approved a platform pushing for national right-to-work legislation. He'd also like to prohibit automatic union dues-deduction from employee paychecks.

Hoffa isn’t the only labor leader who visited Charlotte this week and sees a hostility toward unions in Romney's positions. Mary Kay Henry, head of the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union, told HuffPost earlier this week that Romney "wants to take us out."

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Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/08/james-hoffa-teamsters-romney_n_1866359.html