Big Labor: The Real Hostage Takers

Brett McMahon - Big Labor: The Real Hostage Takers

It took an amazing amount of gall, guile, or both for a former Ted Kennedy political staffer to decry supposed Tea Party “terrorist tactics” in seeking to rein in the debt drowning our nation.

“It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House ‘hostage takers,’” William Yeomans wrote. “But they have now become full-blown terrorists.”

Forget, for a moment, the lack of violence—verbal or physical—coming from Tea Partiers, which would constitute terrorism. Forget, also, that grassroots pressure on politicians to control profligate spending (sure to be followed by tax hikes) is neither an act of hostage takers or terrorists.

Instead, consider for now the actions of President Obama and his key backers from Big Labor. As John Mariotti described this week, the “president’s job killers” include a host of minions enacting harmful regulation and:

It should be no surprise to anyone reading it why the US has a jobs problem. It is governed by an anti-business president, and no matter how many nice speeches he makes about jobs for Americans, his minions are behind the scenes doing the dirty work, killing American jobs and companies everyday—and no one seems to be able to stop them.


For its part, Big Labor—the sine qua non of the Obama administration—has held up vital trade deals that would give a boost to domestic manufacturers, small and large. It continues to demand job-killing card check, first by legislation and now by regulation. Big Labor was, as many will remember, the cornerstone of power for Yeomans’ former employer, Kennedy—making his terrorist allegations all the more shocking.

Perhaps most strange of all is that an anti-business agenda, propelled in part by the various and sundry anti-corporate Left—but primarily by organized labor—represents such a small portion of actual working Americans.

Most are familiar with labor’s decline and that it now represents only about 7 percent of private sector workers. What many haven’t recognized is that only 1.3 percent—a rounding error (or economic error)—of private sector workers in Right To Work states are members of a union. Yet it is organized labor’s lobbyists that relentlessly pressure senators from those states to bend to the will of a small special interest.

It is time to recognize that if there is a supposed “hostage taker” or “terrorist” in American politics it is the constituency of Big Labor bosses. And it is time to remember that America does not negotiate with terrorists.