State-versus-state competition is unhealthy
Editor, The Times:
Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon lays out a case for Washington being more business friendly to create jobs [“How to keep Washington jobs from flying south — again,” Opinion, Jan. 3]. To do this he suggests less costly unemployment insurance for businesses.
Thank goodness the state Legislature repealed such reductions in 2005 or the many using that insurance now would be in far more desperate circumstances. I challenge Reardon to work federally and to not enlarge the already toxic state-against-state competition.
He says Washington ought to be the cheapest state for business and not the most expensive. That’s an untenable moving target! What if the thinking got bigger? What if federal law started to end the South Carolina versus Washington kind of battles for business?
Maybe relocating businesses ought to pay the state they threaten to depart — perhaps reinvesting tax credits accrued — the way a baseball team must compensate a competitor when it acquires a player from that team. Maybe what business is already doing ought to influence how to level the playing field so that no state, and I mean no state, is left adrift.
— Rev. Bill Kirlin-Hackett, Bellevue
Federal statute worsens problems
Why is it that all of the public officials who get media space or time to decry what Aaron Reardon refers to as “Washington jobs from flying south,” without exception, neglect to even mention the transcendent federal statutory abomination that provides corporate management with the irresistible motivation to move south? The fact that Reardon uses the word “south” in the headline of his article suggests that perhaps he does not understand that the phrase he should use is “right-to-work state.”
Section 14(b) of the Taft Hartley Act is a 44 word provision that was inserted into the act in 1947 by a group of conservative Republicans and Dixiecrat Democrats whose motives were merely to inhibit the growth of the American Labor Movement. Since 1947, 14(b) has morphed into a terribly unfair advantage that allows each state to enact a law that guarantees to employers an employment environment where compensation will be low, benefits minuscule and employees will have no enforceable rights.
It is urgent that a debate be ignited to illuminate the harmfulness of Section 14(b) and the feasibility of its repeal.
— Daniel M. Mahoney, Mercer Island