Via Washington Examiner:
International Brotherhood of Teamsters Union President Jim Hoffa told Candy Crowley on “State of the Union” that President Obama should attack American companies in his upcoming speech for being “unpatriotic” by investing on other countries.
Hoffa admitted that it is cheaper for companies to invest in other countries — “we know that,” he said — but maintained that companies “have an obligation to America to build [factories] in America.” Hoffa then called on Obama to attack companies who invest overseas in his upcoming jobs speech:
I think the president should challenge the patriotism of these American corporations that are sitting on the sidelines saying, why do we have high unemployment but I am not going to hire anybody? You know, they have an obligation just like the federal government, just like Obama. We have all got to get into the game. And I don’t see that happening. So the trillions and billions of dollars that they have on the sidelines, they have money, Pfizer and General Electric, they have trillions of dollars overseas, let’s start repatriating that money. Let’s start a program to get America going again.
Hoffa also suggested a tax incentive to get companies “off the sidelines, get into the game and start spending some of that money here in America and put America back to work.”
The problem with the union pushing the President to dangle a carrot to companies is that they also have Obama carrying a huge stick in the form of his National Labor Relations Board, which has sued Boeing to close a non-union factory that the airplane manufacturer built in the right-to-work state of South Carolina.
Hoffa continued by calling Apple “unpatriotic” for considering construction of a factory in Mexico. He argued that labor costs are not too high for companies to succeed in the United States:
You can do it here. But the answer is, you have to have the incentive. And so many companies like Mr. Coffee and all of these other companies that have closed and moved to Mexico, they are wrong. They are unpatriotic.
We have got to turn this around and say, hey, we are an American company, we owe an obligation to America, let’s put America back to work.
And with that, Hoffa walked himself into an absurdity, because simultaneously he denied that labor unions have caused business costs to skyrocket, but then admitted that U.S. companies need more “incentive” to keep their operations in the country.