When he was elected in 2008, Obama thought his job as president was to rule, not to govern. It came as no surprise, then, when his (and incidentally, Obama refers to all government agencies as “his”) FCC tried to shanghai the Internet under the cockamamie doctrine of net neutrality. And it should come as no surprise now that his National Labor Relations Board has taken onto themselves the power to tell privately-owned companies where they may locate and thus how they may operate their business.
Obama, whose empire has been the majority owner of privately-owned Chrysler, General Motors, and AIG and owner of a controlling interest in Citigroup, told Boeing that it cannot build its new 787 Dreamliner in a North Charleston, SC plant that Boeing has spent nearly $2 billion and 17 months to construct. (Well, OK, technically the NLRB issued the order, but Obama appointees fill four of the five positions on the Board and General Counsel, Lafe Solomon, is his unconfirmed nominee.)
Two years ago, Boeing announced its plans to build a new plant to assemble the new 787 Dreamliner – a state-of-the-art airplane. It would be an understatement to say that Boeing is unionized. The Boeing union, the International Association of Machinist and Aerospace Workers, is the poster child for everything that is wrong with unions. The IAM (not a bad acronym because the union thinks it’s all about them) has shut down Boeing’s commercial aircraft production line four times since 1989, and a 2008 strike lasted 58 days, causing the company a revenue loss of $1.8 billion.
Yet, even though it was not a requirement of Boeing’s union agreement, the company attempted to negotiate a no-strike pledge in return for locating the 787 assembly plant near Seattle. Negotiations broke down because of the union’s insistence (I AM!) that it get a seat on the Boeing board and a commitment from the company that all future airplanes would be built in Seattle.
Boeing senior management decided that another location away from the strike-happy IAM was therefore in the best interests of their shareholders and customers, and it chose South Carolina, which is one of 23 right-to-work states in the country. Boeing currently has a sub-assembly plant in Charleston that is not represented by the IAM, because the workers threw out the union in an election (I’M NOT?) in September 2009. The plan for the 787 was to assemble seven per month in Seattle and three per month in Charleston.
Boeing has added 2,000 Seattle union jobs since announcing in October 2009 that it would expand its operations in SC to build some of the 787s. So it’s not like Boeing is taking work from the I AMs. Yet the union waited for 18 months before deciding it didn’t want those three 787s per month built by non-union labor in SC, and two weeks ago it filed a complaint with the NLRB alleging that Boeing is unlawfully transferring work to a non-union facility in Charleston. The NLRB happily agreed with the union (surprise!) and issued this statement:
To remedy the alleged unfair labor practices, the Acting General Counsel seeks an order that would require Boeing to maintain the second production line in Washington state. The complaint does not seek closure of the South Carolina facility, nor does it prohibit Boeing from assembling planes there.
The NLRB cited “repeated statements to employees and the media” by Boeing executives that past strike activity and the possibility of future strikes was a deciding factor in locating the second line in a non-union facility. Well, no kidding, Dick Tracy!
Failing to get a no-strike pledge out of the IAM the "overriding factor," said Jim Albaugh, CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, "was that we can't afford to have a work stoppage every three years."
Yet, the NLRB decided:
Boeing had violated two sections of the National Labor Relations Act because its statements were coercive to employees and its actions were motivated by a desire to retaliate for past strikes and chill future strike activity.
Coercive? A desire to retaliate? When did making a statement of fact become coercive? When is attempting to remain competitive against Boeing’s most aggressive competitor – Airbus – and possible competition from China in the future “a desire to retaliate”?
Over the past 25 years job growth in right-to-work states like South Carolina has been over twice as high as in unionized states. Between 2000 and 2010 employment has grown by 2% in right-to-work states and declined by 4% in unionized states. That’s the bumble bee in the IAM’s Fruit of the Looms. After peaking in the 1950s at 36%, private sector union membership has been declining for 50 years and now represents only 7% of private sector employees. It doesn’t require clairvoyance to see that the American union movement is facing extinction – at least in the private sector. And it’s why the all-out fight was waged last month in the Wisconsin teacher strike.
Boeing rightfully criticized the IAM for waiting 18 months to make its complaint. It comes a month after a fellow union spent $3.5 million and failed to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And it comes just as Obama is ramping up his reelection race and will desperately need union votes, money, and organization to buy him four more years to help resuscitate the union movement. Like he did when he appointed all but one key position in the NLRB. The labor movement is looking for a scalp. Obama’s NLRB is trying to give it one with Boeing.
The NLRB is one of the many bad things which came out of the first Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration and is essentially a wholly-owned subsidiary of the nation’s labor unions. One of Obama’s appointees to the board was such an awful choice that even the Democrats wouldn’t vote to approve him – Craig Becker. So, as he has done before when the Senate fails to rubber-stamp his decisions, Obama waited for the Senate to leave town and gave Becker a recess appointment.
Becker was formerly a lawyer for the Service Employees International Union – the union which figured heavily in Obama’s 2008 election. Becker’s writings include his opinion that the NLRB could impose "card check" rules for union organizing without an act of Congress. You can see why Obama took a shine to him: they think alike. Congress is a constitutional abstraction to both of them.
Card check denies workers from casting secret ballots in union elections. The NLRB is currently suing Arizona and South Dakota to invalidate their constitutional amendments banning card-check, and the NLRB has threatened two other states with similar amendments: Utah and, ah yes, South Carolina.
Becker also wrote an opinion that employers (like Boeing) should have no right to be heard in either a union representation case or an unfair labor practice case. In other words, employers have no rights before the NLRB to give their side of the story.
Becker is bad news for democracy.
Senate Republicans were rightfully concerned about putting a top labor lawyer in the position to mediate disputes between companies and unionized employees. During Becker’s failed confirmation, John McCain commented that Becker was “the first person nominated” for the board “who comes directly from a labor organization.” I’m surprised that McCain was surprised. Becker was nominated by Obama – also a lawyer and a community organizer, which is the first cousin of a union organizer.
The National Labor Relations Act is a terrible law. The NLRB’s general counsel acts as a prosecutor, the board itself acts as a panel of judges, and federal courts review the board’s decisions on appeal. According to the law, it is an “unfair labor practice” for an employer to “interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise” of their right to participate in protected union activities, which include striking. It is also an unfair labor practice if a business discriminates “in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization.” These are defined so broadly by the NLRB in its decisions, that they can mean anything – and everything.
According to the US Supreme Court, the act “did not undertake the impossible task of specifying in precise and unmistakable language each incident that would constitute an unfair labor practice” — which is to say, it failed to offer companies a way to predict which of their actions would later be considered illegal, leaving that decision to people who are appointed by the president (who is often elected with great help from unions). It should not surprise anyone that, given the highly contentious nature of labor disputes, this hasn’t worked out so well. In the years since the NLRA’s enactment, the board and the courts have been making up law as they go along.
Under the NLRA as it’s been interpreted, the first step for the general counsel in the Boeing case will be to prove that the company’s actions interfered with or discouraged union activities in some way. Boeing points out that the expansion into South Carolina didn’t actually cost the Washington plant jobs — in fact, employment at the unionized plant has grown in recent years as I mentioned earlier. However, the decision not to put the production line in Puget Sound certainly does mean that Boeing will have fewer jobs in the Seattle area than it would otherwise. The pro-union NLRB will no doubt fail to see any difference in Boeing’s decision to add new capacity in another part of the country versus destroying existing capacity or firing unionized workers.
The next step will be to prove that Boeing acted out of “anti-union animus,” or to show the Boeing’s decision to assemble airplanes in SC so patently destroys the protected rights of workers that Boeing’s motives are obvious and don’t have to be proven in trial. The general counsel’s complaint claims that Boeing’s behavior is bad enough in itself to demonstrate motive, and therefore Mr. Lafe Solomon offers no proof for “anti-union animus.” The fact that Boeing’s existing collective-bargaining agreement with the union gives it the right to locate new capacity wherever it wants will be fobbed off as a “so what?” by the NLRB.
Yes, the IAM’s strike history was quite likely a factor in Boeing’s decision to locate a back-up plant in SC – a right to work state. Yes, Boeing officials have stated as much in public statements about the new plants. Mr. Lafe Solomon will try to make that a confession in his argument before the administrative law judge who hears this case, and I hope that Boeing reminds the court that we still have the quaint notions expressed and protected by the First Amendment.
There is a precedent case by the Supreme Court that argues in favor of Boeing. In 1965 the court said a company could “transfer work from one plant to another” to “blunt the effectiveness of an anticipated strike.” In today’s case, Boeing wasn’t transferring work; it was adding new work and it was doing so within an existing agreement that Boeing had with the union. Moreover, Boeing offered to put that new capacity in the Seattle area where it would have been unionized, but the Neanderthals who run unions were too piggish to trade that for a no strike pledge.
The next step in this opéra bouffe is a hearing June 14 in Seattle before an administrative law judge who works for the NLRB. That ought to be a fair and balanced hearing. The full NLRB board will then review that judge's decision, a process that could take months, prolonged no doubt by debates over how an arm of government can take away a right of a private enterprise business and get away with it.
If Boeing contests the NLRB ruling, the case will thankfully be transferred to the federal appeals court system where the union holds less sway, and it possibly could make it all the way to the Supreme Court. If so, this landmark case could see two years before it’s settled during which, I hope, union-free 787s will be rolling off the line in SC, unless the IAM is able to get a restraining order. If a TRO is issued, let’s hope that somewhere in the federal judicial system there is a judge with enough years past puberty to agree that it’s plain stupid not to let Boeing use a facility it has built at great expense in SC while this ridiculous case is being litigated.
By the way, the Boeing case has gotten the attention of nine state attorneys general. They have collectively signed a letter to the National Labor Relations Board, calling the Boeing suit a de facto assault on their states' economies. Which it assuredly is. Beyond crass labor politics, an adverse NLRB ruling against Boeing that is upheld by the federal court will set a terrible precedent for the flow of jobs and investment within the US. It will give unions a veto over management decisions about where to build future plants. And it would undercut the right-to-work statutes in 23 American states. No doubt that’s the real union agenda here.
With a Republican House, Obama's pro-union legislation is dead in Congress. But it looks like his appointees are determined to impose his agenda by regulatory fiat – as they have repeatedly since this guy became president – no matter what damage is done to investment decisions and job creation in the private economy.
Maybe the next time Boeing will build its plants in Bulgaria!
Obama, whose empire has been the majority owner of privately-owned Chrysler, General Motors, and AIG and owner of a controlling interest in Citigroup, told Boeing that it cannot build its new 787 Dreamliner in a North Charleston, SC plant that Boeing has spent nearly $2 billion and 17 months to construct. (Well, OK, technically the NLRB issued the order, but Obama appointees fill four of the five positions on the Board and General Counsel, Lafe Solomon, is his unconfirmed nominee.)
Two years ago, Boeing announced its plans to build a new plant to assemble the new 787 Dreamliner – a state-of-the-art airplane. It would be an understatement to say that Boeing is unionized. The Boeing union, the International Association of Machinist and Aerospace Workers, is the poster child for everything that is wrong with unions. The IAM (not a bad acronym because the union thinks it’s all about them) has shut down Boeing’s commercial aircraft production line four times since 1989, and a 2008 strike lasted 58 days, causing the company a revenue loss of $1.8 billion.
Yet, even though it was not a requirement of Boeing’s union agreement, the company attempted to negotiate a no-strike pledge in return for locating the 787 assembly plant near Seattle. Negotiations broke down because of the union’s insistence (I AM!) that it get a seat on the Boeing board and a commitment from the company that all future airplanes would be built in Seattle.
Boeing senior management decided that another location away from the strike-happy IAM was therefore in the best interests of their shareholders and customers, and it chose South Carolina, which is one of 23 right-to-work states in the country. Boeing currently has a sub-assembly plant in Charleston that is not represented by the IAM, because the workers threw out the union in an election (I’M NOT?) in September 2009. The plan for the 787 was to assemble seven per month in Seattle and three per month in Charleston.
Boeing has added 2,000 Seattle union jobs since announcing in October 2009 that it would expand its operations in SC to build some of the 787s. So it’s not like Boeing is taking work from the I AMs. Yet the union waited for 18 months before deciding it didn’t want those three 787s per month built by non-union labor in SC, and two weeks ago it filed a complaint with the NLRB alleging that Boeing is unlawfully transferring work to a non-union facility in Charleston. The NLRB happily agreed with the union (surprise!) and issued this statement:
To remedy the alleged unfair labor practices, the Acting General Counsel seeks an order that would require Boeing to maintain the second production line in Washington state. The complaint does not seek closure of the South Carolina facility, nor does it prohibit Boeing from assembling planes there.
The NLRB cited “repeated statements to employees and the media” by Boeing executives that past strike activity and the possibility of future strikes was a deciding factor in locating the second line in a non-union facility. Well, no kidding, Dick Tracy!
Failing to get a no-strike pledge out of the IAM the "overriding factor," said Jim Albaugh, CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, "was that we can't afford to have a work stoppage every three years."
Yet, the NLRB decided:
Boeing had violated two sections of the National Labor Relations Act because its statements were coercive to employees and its actions were motivated by a desire to retaliate for past strikes and chill future strike activity.
Coercive? A desire to retaliate? When did making a statement of fact become coercive? When is attempting to remain competitive against Boeing’s most aggressive competitor – Airbus – and possible competition from China in the future “a desire to retaliate”?
Over the past 25 years job growth in right-to-work states like South Carolina has been over twice as high as in unionized states. Between 2000 and 2010 employment has grown by 2% in right-to-work states and declined by 4% in unionized states. That’s the bumble bee in the IAM’s Fruit of the Looms. After peaking in the 1950s at 36%, private sector union membership has been declining for 50 years and now represents only 7% of private sector employees. It doesn’t require clairvoyance to see that the American union movement is facing extinction – at least in the private sector. And it’s why the all-out fight was waged last month in the Wisconsin teacher strike.
Boeing rightfully criticized the IAM for waiting 18 months to make its complaint. It comes a month after a fellow union spent $3.5 million and failed to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And it comes just as Obama is ramping up his reelection race and will desperately need union votes, money, and organization to buy him four more years to help resuscitate the union movement. Like he did when he appointed all but one key position in the NLRB. The labor movement is looking for a scalp. Obama’s NLRB is trying to give it one with Boeing.
The NLRB is one of the many bad things which came out of the first Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration and is essentially a wholly-owned subsidiary of the nation’s labor unions. One of Obama’s appointees to the board was such an awful choice that even the Democrats wouldn’t vote to approve him – Craig Becker. So, as he has done before when the Senate fails to rubber-stamp his decisions, Obama waited for the Senate to leave town and gave Becker a recess appointment.
Becker was formerly a lawyer for the Service Employees International Union – the union which figured heavily in Obama’s 2008 election. Becker’s writings include his opinion that the NLRB could impose "card check" rules for union organizing without an act of Congress. You can see why Obama took a shine to him: they think alike. Congress is a constitutional abstraction to both of them.
Card check denies workers from casting secret ballots in union elections. The NLRB is currently suing Arizona and South Dakota to invalidate their constitutional amendments banning card-check, and the NLRB has threatened two other states with similar amendments: Utah and, ah yes, South Carolina.
Becker also wrote an opinion that employers (like Boeing) should have no right to be heard in either a union representation case or an unfair labor practice case. In other words, employers have no rights before the NLRB to give their side of the story.
Becker is bad news for democracy.
Senate Republicans were rightfully concerned about putting a top labor lawyer in the position to mediate disputes between companies and unionized employees. During Becker’s failed confirmation, John McCain commented that Becker was “the first person nominated” for the board “who comes directly from a labor organization.” I’m surprised that McCain was surprised. Becker was nominated by Obama – also a lawyer and a community organizer, which is the first cousin of a union organizer.
The National Labor Relations Act is a terrible law. The NLRB’s general counsel acts as a prosecutor, the board itself acts as a panel of judges, and federal courts review the board’s decisions on appeal. According to the law, it is an “unfair labor practice” for an employer to “interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise” of their right to participate in protected union activities, which include striking. It is also an unfair labor practice if a business discriminates “in regard to hire or tenure of employment or any term or condition of employment to encourage or discourage membership in any labor organization.” These are defined so broadly by the NLRB in its decisions, that they can mean anything – and everything.
According to the US Supreme Court, the act “did not undertake the impossible task of specifying in precise and unmistakable language each incident that would constitute an unfair labor practice” — which is to say, it failed to offer companies a way to predict which of their actions would later be considered illegal, leaving that decision to people who are appointed by the president (who is often elected with great help from unions). It should not surprise anyone that, given the highly contentious nature of labor disputes, this hasn’t worked out so well. In the years since the NLRA’s enactment, the board and the courts have been making up law as they go along.
Under the NLRA as it’s been interpreted, the first step for the general counsel in the Boeing case will be to prove that the company’s actions interfered with or discouraged union activities in some way. Boeing points out that the expansion into South Carolina didn’t actually cost the Washington plant jobs — in fact, employment at the unionized plant has grown in recent years as I mentioned earlier. However, the decision not to put the production line in Puget Sound certainly does mean that Boeing will have fewer jobs in the Seattle area than it would otherwise. The pro-union NLRB will no doubt fail to see any difference in Boeing’s decision to add new capacity in another part of the country versus destroying existing capacity or firing unionized workers.
The next step will be to prove that Boeing acted out of “anti-union animus,” or to show the Boeing’s decision to assemble airplanes in SC so patently destroys the protected rights of workers that Boeing’s motives are obvious and don’t have to be proven in trial. The general counsel’s complaint claims that Boeing’s behavior is bad enough in itself to demonstrate motive, and therefore Mr. Lafe Solomon offers no proof for “anti-union animus.” The fact that Boeing’s existing collective-bargaining agreement with the union gives it the right to locate new capacity wherever it wants will be fobbed off as a “so what?” by the NLRB.
Yes, the IAM’s strike history was quite likely a factor in Boeing’s decision to locate a back-up plant in SC – a right to work state. Yes, Boeing officials have stated as much in public statements about the new plants. Mr. Lafe Solomon will try to make that a confession in his argument before the administrative law judge who hears this case, and I hope that Boeing reminds the court that we still have the quaint notions expressed and protected by the First Amendment.
There is a precedent case by the Supreme Court that argues in favor of Boeing. In 1965 the court said a company could “transfer work from one plant to another” to “blunt the effectiveness of an anticipated strike.” In today’s case, Boeing wasn’t transferring work; it was adding new work and it was doing so within an existing agreement that Boeing had with the union. Moreover, Boeing offered to put that new capacity in the Seattle area where it would have been unionized, but the Neanderthals who run unions were too piggish to trade that for a no strike pledge.
The next step in this opéra bouffe is a hearing June 14 in Seattle before an administrative law judge who works for the NLRB. That ought to be a fair and balanced hearing. The full NLRB board will then review that judge's decision, a process that could take months, prolonged no doubt by debates over how an arm of government can take away a right of a private enterprise business and get away with it.
If Boeing contests the NLRB ruling, the case will thankfully be transferred to the federal appeals court system where the union holds less sway, and it possibly could make it all the way to the Supreme Court. If so, this landmark case could see two years before it’s settled during which, I hope, union-free 787s will be rolling off the line in SC, unless the IAM is able to get a restraining order. If a TRO is issued, let’s hope that somewhere in the federal judicial system there is a judge with enough years past puberty to agree that it’s plain stupid not to let Boeing use a facility it has built at great expense in SC while this ridiculous case is being litigated.
By the way, the Boeing case has gotten the attention of nine state attorneys general. They have collectively signed a letter to the National Labor Relations Board, calling the Boeing suit a de facto assault on their states' economies. Which it assuredly is. Beyond crass labor politics, an adverse NLRB ruling against Boeing that is upheld by the federal court will set a terrible precedent for the flow of jobs and investment within the US. It will give unions a veto over management decisions about where to build future plants. And it would undercut the right-to-work statutes in 23 American states. No doubt that’s the real union agenda here.
With a Republican House, Obama's pro-union legislation is dead in Congress. But it looks like his appointees are determined to impose his agenda by regulatory fiat – as they have repeatedly since this guy became president – no matter what damage is done to investment decisions and job creation in the private economy.
Maybe the next time Boeing will build its plants in Bulgaria!
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