It was only a matter of time before Bill Bolling, Republican nominee for Lieutenant Governor, began attacking his Democratic adversary Leslie Byrne for her “liberal extremism.” My only question: What took him so long?
Bolling is running a sound clip on his website from an Aug. 8 meeting between Byrne and the United Mine Workers of America in Castlewood. Someone posed the question: “If you had a chance to do away with the right to work law through legislation would you vote for it?”
Byrne replied: “Absolutely. I call it the right to be poor law.”
For decades, it was political suicide in Virginia to oppose the Right to Work law, which allows employees in a unionized workforce the right to opt out of joining the union. Given the steady erosion of manufacturing employment in Virginia, however, the issue doesn’t resonate like it used to. Labor unions are increasingly irrelevant in Virginia’s service-based knowledge economy. Right to Work still may matter to the few remaining labor unions in Virginia and their die-hard liberal allies like Byrne, but most people see unions as a hindrance to flattening hierarchies, on pushing decision making down to the guys on the factory floor, and dissolving distinctions between “management” and “labor.”
The question is, will Bolling’s attack mean anything to anyone either? Or is the obsession with Right to Work, on both sides of the issue, an artifact of Virginia’s industrial past?
