…The United Steelworkers
LaborUnionReport
Big Government
3/31/2011
If you’ve been following the Wisconsin fracas over these past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed that the Left’s enemy du jour has become the American businessmen Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries. As an American company, Koch Industries employs over 50,000 Americans. In total, the number of American jobs that indirectly supported Koch Industries is over 200,000. In Wisconsin, Koch Industries provides nearly 3,000 jobs directly and 11,000 jobs indirectly. More importantly, many of those jobs are good-paying union jobs. So, why all the hate?
The Koch brothers have recently come under fire from the institutional Left due, primarily, to a more than 40-year commitment to economic freedom. In part, the Koch brothers’ advocacy for freedom may stem from their father, Fred C. Koch, who developed a hatred of Communism when he saw the effects of it first-hand, working in Russia during the 1930s.
“Virtually every engineer he worked with [there] was purged,” Charles Koch once explained of his father.
Given the desire of many on the Left, many of whom were protesting in Madison these last few weeks, to ‘fundamentally transform‘ America’s economy, the Koch brothers’ opposition to a nation bankrupting itself (as well as their support of Scott Walkers’ efforts to rein in union power in Wisconsin) represents a direct threat to the Left’s agenda. As a result, some of the more extremist groups on the Left are pushing a boycott of Koch Industries and its companies’ products.
Due to the sheer number of jobs that directly or indirectly benefit from Koch Industries, the Left’s undertaking to topple the Koch brothers and their companies may have the negative consequence of actually hurting those the Left purports to want to help—namely union workers. This has a top official with the United Steelworkers concerned…
Read the rest at BigGovernment.
H/T @TheTwisters
