National Labor Relations Board Puts Blade to the Throat of Freedom

One of the many freedoms we enjoy as American citizens is freedom of movement. Unlike the Soviet nemesis that threatened us for so many years, our government does not build fences to keep our people from moving one place to another, or at least we didn't until the Obama Administration apparatchiks came along. The Obamacons have placed former Union lawyer Craig Becker onto the board of the National Labor Relations Board. Unable to get him confirmed through the normal mechanisms which would have challenged his impartiality to sit on such a board, he was made a recess appointment. Well, we didn't have long to wait to see how bad this appointment was going to be, as Mr. Becker has saw fit in these difficult economic times to strangle one of the nations major manufacturing firms.

Boeing is building a new jet aircraft, the Dreamliner, which is a mid-sized jet with the fuel efficiency and range of heavy transporters. The airplane will use 20 percent less fuel for comparable missions than today’s similarly sized airplanes. It will also travel at speeds that match today’s fastest wide bodies, Mach 0.85. The Dreamliner takes advantage of a number of design advances, using a unibody main frame that greatly reduces the number of parts to be fastened together and opens up more room in its interior. The plane will have more cargo revenue capacity and will also feature improvements in passenger comforts, such as maintaining higher humidity in its interior. The plane is currently being produced at maximum capacity in Washington. To increase production Boeing chose to expand their facility in South Carolina.

Over a year and half after Boeing announced plans to build a plant in the state of South Carolina, and with the $2 billion plant nearing completion, the NLRB has charged that Boeing’s decision violated the rights of its unionized workers in Washington state. The charge goes straight to the heart of the struggle for freedom against an over-reaching Federal bureacracy.

George Will writes:

"The NLRB has read a 76-year-old statute (the 1935 Wagner Act) perversely, disregarded almost half a century of NLRB and Supreme Court rulings, and patently misrepresented statements by Boeing officials.

South Carolina is one of 22 — so far — right-to-work states, where workers cannot be compelled to join a union. When in September 2009, Boeing’s South Carolina workers — fuselage sections of 787s already are built here — voted to end their representation by IAM, the union did not accuse Boeing of pre-vote misbehavior. Now, however, the NLRB seeks to establish the principle that moving businesses to such states from non-right-to-work states constitutes prima facie evidence of “unfair labor practices,” including intimidation and coercion of labor. This principle would be a powerful incentive for new companies to locate only in right-to-work states.

In the past sixteen years, the International Association of Machinists have brought production at Boeing's Washington plant to a halt three times, once for 58 days that cost the company to miss promised delivery schedules and nearly two billion dollars in actual costs. The IMA were offered an agreement where Boeing would build the new plant in Washington if they would make a commitment not to close the plant down. The union leaders for the machinists refused to accept those conditions.

Locating the new plant in South Carolina does not violate anyone's rights. It is merely good business. That is something this administration should be considering. Either companies like Boeing will succeed here, will ship their production overseas, or they will fail against their international competitors. I, for one, want to see US companies succeed.

Update:
Roxeanna de Luca got a bit of a chuckle out of this comment:

"The south is not stealing business. This is how breakups work. By the time your wife or girlfriend leaves you, she reached her decision a year ago and she’s not changing her mind now. Face it, you beat the snot out of Boeing one too many times and now she’s leaving your sorry A$$ behind."

Nicely put.