Think the United Auto Workers group does more good than harm? New York Post columnist Matt Patterson offers a different perspective.
Everyone knows the United Auto Workers helped bankrupt General Motors and the entire Detroit auto industry, helping pull what was once America’s greatest city into decay and poverty.
That legacy is, of course, one reason why Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., resisted the union’s overtures: The UAW lost its February election bid at the plant 53 percent to 47 percent.
But the union’s post-election actions have shown it to be something more malevolent than just a misguided organization trying to fit an early 20th-century labor model over a 21st-century industry.
The UAW is a threat not just to prosperity, but to liberty.
As a journalist I have written much on these issues that the union has disliked. And so I find myself subject to a legal attack: Last week I was issued a subpoena by the National Labor Relations Board (at the behest of UAW lawyers), commanding me to appear at a hearing today in which the union is asking the board to invalidate the Chattanooga election due to “outside” interference. (The demand also names my colleague Grover Norquist and my assistant, Tucker Clare Nelson.)
The subpoena also demands that I hand over all documents and communications relating to the UAW going back to January. Were I to comply, it would jeopardize the sources of information that allow me to report on this issue.
It amounts to an assault on the freedom of press: The union is actually asking the government to shut us up.
In fact, the UAW is mounting attacks on every clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits restrictions on “freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”
