Mike Huckabee presidential campaign, 2016/Labor and employment

Mike Huckabee suspended his presidential campaign on February 1, 2016.^[1]

Mike Huckabee released the following statement regarding the severe market drop on August 24, 2015: “You don’t build a strong economy by empowering Washington-Wall Street elites at the expense of American workers on Main Street and sadly the chickens are now coming home to roost for the Obama administration and its failed economic policies. It’s time to build America’s economy, not China’s or Mexico’s and quit importing cheap labor and exporting jobs overseas, driving the wages of American workers lower than the Dead Sea! As president, I’ll implement the FairTax to let workers keep their entire paycheck and bring trillions of dollars in offshore investment and manufacturing back to the U.S., growing our economy and creating good jobs and real prosperity for American workers.”^[2]

Huckabee, the only 2016 Republican presidential candidate to attend a meeting with AFL-CIO leadership on July 29, 2015, said of the meeting, “I don’t think that it’s fair to think of labor unions as the enemy of the Republican Party — I don’t see them as the enemy. I see them as millions of American workers who want good jobs for their families,” he said.^[3]

During a 2011 roundtable discussion, Huckabee favored reducing the power of public sector unions. He said, "If it's [collective bargaining for public sector unions] not eliminated I think it has to be certainly somehow contained in a reasonable, responsible way. And I don't have a specific proposal other than just to recognize that it is not the same to have collective bargaining at a public employee level as it is at the private sector level."^[4]

During an October 2007 debate, Huckabee said, "The real fact is, unions are going to take a more prominent role in the future for one simple reason: A lot of American workers are finding that their wages continue to get strapped lower and lower while CEO salaries are higher and higher. And the reality is that when you have the average CEO salary 500 times the average worker, and you have the hedge fund manager making 2,200 times that of the average worker, you’re going to create a level of discontent that’s going to create a huge appetite for unions. So unions are the natural result of workers finally saying, 'Look, I can’t go from a $70,000-a-year job to a $15,000-a-year job and feed by family of four.' That’s when unions are going to come back in roaring form."^[5]

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Works, a union with 720,000 members, endorsed Huckabee in August 2007.^[6]

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