Imagine, if you will, that President Barack Obama was secretly offering businesses taxpayer dollars if they change their business models and encourage workers to join labor unions. Imagine if Obama denied he was doing it, but documents surfaced that proved he was.
Republicans would rightly be outraged.
But Tennessee Republicans in power are defending Gov. Bill Haslam for doing basically the same thing, only with an anti-union tilt, in regard to Volkswagen’s Chattanooga assembly plant and the workers there.
Essentially, the Haslam administration offered Volkswagen $300 million contingent on VW making what the Haslam administration considered the right choice regarding unionization. They later withdrew the offer after it became clear that Volkswagen was not as anti-union as the administration wanted it to be. Yet, before VW workers voted on United Auto Workers representation, Haslam denied his administration was doing any such thing, but documents uncovered by the news media prove otherwise.
Those documents show that the Haslam administration’s offer of incentives to VW to expand the Chattanooga plant and create 1,350 new jobs was contingent on “works council discussions between the State of Tennessee and VW being concluded to the satisfaction of the State of Tennessee.”