Right to work states, particularly those to the south of Maryland are partly to blame for today's rioting in Baltimore, Hardball host Chris Matthews suggested tonight as he wrapped an interview via satellite with former NAACP president and former Congressman Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.).
I wish the jobs hadn't first gone south, Congressman, because that's where they went first. And they went to the right-to-work states, you know where they went, where the unions didn't have any power. You could get people to work for nothing and the stuff wasn't that good that was made down there. But that was the first stop on the trip away [of jobs leaving the country].
Is Chris not aware that BMW, Boeing, Volkwagen, Toyota, and Honda, just to name a few, are major companies with significant manufacturing operations in right-to-work states? Those companies don't come to mind when you think crappy products, and I'm pretty sure their blue-collar employees, many of whom repeatedly vote AGAINST unionization, are perfectly happy with their wages and benefits.
Moments earlier in the interview, Matthews lamented that the lack of plentiful blue-collar factory jobs in Charm City was "behind all of" the rioting:
Where are we going to find manufacturing jobs, good old boys jobs, young men's jobs where you go to work, you come back a little dirty, a little sweaty, but you're proud of yourself for a hard day at the plant. My uncle, my grandfather grew up in north Philly. I was living there, the neighborhood's now African-American. But none of those jobs are there. They were there when I was there. You get on the subway, two stops away you had a real job.
You get into Baltimore, you can't find a job with a short commute. And that's, to me, the problem that's behind all of this.
