What impact did President Barack Obama’s positions on employment and labor law have on his reelection? The short answer is: a lot. In fact, the president may owe his reelection to his ability to claim that he saved the American auto industry, and along with it thousands of union jobs in Ohio and elsewhere in the upper Midwest. Governor Mitt Romney may have succeeded in highlighting this issue with his highly criticized series of television advertisements seeking to debunk this claim.
Of course, the president was elected, in 2008, with the broad support of organized labor, and he was determined to help unions regain some of the ground they lost during the Bush (I and II) and Reagan years. And he certainly owes that contingent no less substantial a debt following the results on Tuesday.
