FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ( D-Mich )

Having somehow managed to win re-election by 11 percentage points this fall in her own race for governor, Gretchen Whitmer is understandably eager to exploit what she sees as a mandate.

Like any radical leftist, her wish list includes things like ignoring the Second Amendment and the usual attacks on free enterprise under the guise of “environmental responsibility.”

Democrats also have a majority in both houses of Michigan’s Legislature for the first time in 40 years, but the margins there were much narrower, prompting many of her party members to urge moderation.

Unfortunately for them, Whitmer is a wholly owned subsidiary of the state’s labor unions. Consequently, her top priority is repealing the state’s 10-year-old right-to-work laws.

“No one should be surprised about what my position has been on right-to-work,” Whitmer said, noting Democrats must have “robust conversation” about the law, timing of potential repeal and how to make sure the public “understands what and why we’re pursuing this.”

In fact, it’s because Michigan’s labor unions have lost more than 140,000 members since the state approved right-towork in 2013.

Labor unions are pushing hard to repeal the law, which has cost them at least 140,000 members in the past 10 years.

Repealing the law would also go against public opinion, which shows wide support for it.

That’s the finding of the most recent poll on the issue as well as most of a dozen polls taken over the past 20 years from a variety of Republican and Democratic polling firms and media organizations.

A December 2022 survey commissioned by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy found that voters supported the law overwhelmingly, with 60 percent in support and only 17 percent opposed.

Even union households support the law by a margin of nearly 2-to-1, and Michigan’s business interests ---- anxious to keep the state as competitive as possible in the midst of the Biden economic crisis, are unified in favor of maintaining right-to-work protections.

But when you work for the unions rather than the people who actually elected you to office, your duty is clear.