The state’s non-unionized workforce also helped bring Boeing to North Charleston, where it builds the 787 Dreamliner jet, bypassing its union factories in Washington state.
The International Association of Machinists tried to organize it last year. Republican Governor Nikki Haley led the opposition, saying that she wore high heels not for fashion, but to kick out unions.
The machinists canceled a vote at the last minute in April. The union said organizers going door to door to drum up support had been threatened at gunpoint.
While the state’s anti-union stance may please Republicans, its largess to corporations may not. The manufacturing renaissance benefited from government assistance that runs counter to the limited government Tea Party streak woven into the state’s political fabric.
BMW got more than $150 million in infrastructure and training assistance and tax breaks. The price of incentives had soared by the time Boeing’s Dreamliner assembly plant came on line in 2011.
Cruz in particular has blasted “corporate welfare” and “cronyism.” In a July debate over the Export-Important Bank of the U.S., which boosts foreign trade, he singled out Boeing as a user that didn’t need its assistance.
“You know who doesn’t have lobbyists?” he asked in a July speech. “A single mom waiting tables.”
Karen Martin, 54, a Tea Party leader from Spartanburg who is backing Cruz, said she doesn’t think he should pull back on his criticism just because incentives lured jobs. She said he won respect in Iowa when he called for an end to treasured subsidies that helped make the state the biggest producer of the federally mandated corn-based fuel additive ethanol.
“I think that worked really well for him,” she said. Cruz beat Trump to win the Iowa caucuses Feb. 1.
Once a supporter of Haley, Martin said she turned against her specifically over the incentives.