How far is the Obama administration willing to go to promote
organized labor’s agenda? The National Labor Relations Board’s
(NLRB) recent decisions to pursue legal action against a private
company and some state governments provide an answer to that
question.
On April 20, NLRB Acting Genral Counsel Lafe Solomon (who is
recess-appointed and
has not been confirmed by the Senate) issued a
formal complaint against Boeing for deciding to build some of
its new 787 Dreamliner jets in a new facility in South Carolina, a
right-to-work state.
Only two days later, Solomon wrote to the state attorneys
general (AGs) of Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah,
threatening to sue their states over their enactment of
constitutional amendments protecting the right to a secret ballot
in union elections. Those amendments preclude card check,
which exposes workers to high-pressure tactics by union
organizers who can then ask them to sign union cards out in the
open.
Telling businesses where they may locate their facilities and
states how they may amend their constitutions are, to put it
mildly, highly unusual attempts to stretch federal power. But
such abuse of the NLRB’s remit may be the best vehicle that Obama
now has to reward his union allies — whose suport he will need in
his 2012 reelection effort — following the Republican takeover of
the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections.
Quite simply, this is unionization through regulation, whereby
regulatory agencies circumvent Congress by “reinterpreting” the law
beyond recognition.
Encouraginly, state officials are not taking this federal
assault sitting down. In today’s
Wall Street Journal, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley
denounces the NLRB’s action against Boeing, calling it “a direct
assault on the 22 right-to-work states across America.”
Also this week, the four state AGs whom Solomon threatened
responded to him. In a strongly
worded letter, they unequivocally state their intent to defend
their states’ laws if those are challenged.
In addition to undermining the rule of law — which is bad
enough — the NLRB’s actions are economic insanity. In
Forbes this week, Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the
Consumer Electronics Association of America, explains it
well.
Our federal government has become the enemy of job creators.
Look at the facts here: South Carolina’s Dreamliner production line
would be in addition to, not instead of, Boeing’s production line
in Seattle. Boeing is already facing a backlog of orders for the
plane, and this NLRB action, if not reversed soon, will certainly
cause it to lose orders for these American-built planes. The NLRB
apparently wants the second line to also be produced in the Puget
Sound area - also silly if you see what too much concentration of
production capacity in one venue can do (witness the Sendai area in
Japan). The greatest irony is that if Boeing had put this facility
in Canada or even in China the NLRB probably could not have ordered
its shutdown (but who knows given their perverse interpretation of
the law).
But what are a few thousand destroyed jobs and legal chaos when
there are unions to bail out?
