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This from the NYT:
In what may be the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, the agency filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to force Boeing to bring an airplane production line back to its unionized facilities in Washington State instead of moving the work to a nonunion plant in South Carolina.
In its complaint, the labor board said that Boeing’s decision to transfer a second production line for its new 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina was motivated by an unlawful desire to retaliate against union workers for their past strikes in Washington and to discourage future strikes. The agency’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said it was illegal for companies to take actions in retaliation against workers for exercising the right to strike.
Although manufacturers have long moved plants to nonunion states, the board noted that Boeing officials had, in internal documents and news interviews, specifically cited the strikes and potential future strikes as a reason for their 2009 decision to expand in South Carolina.
Boeing said it would “vigorously contest” the labor board’s complaint. “This claim is legally frivolous and represents a radical departure from both N.L.R.B. and Supreme Court precedent,” said J. Michael Luttig, a Boeing executive vice president and its general counsel. “Boeing has every right under both federal law and its collective bargaining agreement to build additional U.S. production capacity outside of the Puget Sound region.”
It is highly unusual for the federal government to seek to reverse a corporate decision as important as the location of plant.
But ever since a Democratic majority took control of the five-member board after Mr. Obama’s election, the board has signaled that it would seek to adopt a more liberal, pro-union tilt after years of pro-employer decisions under President Bush. . . .
This is such a vast overreach by Labor and its cronies in the Obama administration - it is such a fundamental attack on capitalism - it is difficult to know where to begin. As a threshold matter, the anti-retaliation provisions of the NLRA protect individuals from being fired or demoted for their union activities. The Obama radicals on the NLRB now seek to vastly expand the scope of those provisions to a point that corporations would become captives of unionized, closed shop states.
Unions are an anachronism of the communist movement near two centuries old - which itself was a response to inequities that arose early in the Industrial Age, something that has long been consigned to the history books. There is a reason unions are drastically declining in the private sector in the U.S.. They do not make economic sense in an age of vast national wealth where competition for labor and the mobility of labor insures that laborers will be able to receive fair market value.
It is beyond any form of contention that, where unions exist, the end product is at best, substantially more expensive than that produced by non-union labor, such as with automakers, or in the worst case, substantially lessens the quality of the service being delivered, as is the case with teachers unions and public education. Further, the reality is that in "closed shop" states, unions create a form of indentured servitude, where to even work in a desired field, a laborer must pay a union for the privilege. The laborer then has no say in how the union uses those dues. Whatever justification for unions existed in 1848, when Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, described unions as the building blocks of his Communist utopia, those justifications do not exist in America today.
The only thing that can possibly save private sector unions in the U.S. is the point of the gun by the government. And indeed, that is what we are seeing today with Obama's NLRB outrageously trying to use the police power of our government to force Boeing to keep all production in Washington.
The only reason unions still exist in America, both public sector and private sector, is that they are economic base of the Democratic party. It is hard to think of a more corrupt or malign situation. When the administrations change in 2012, it is time to go to war on unions - outlawing public sector unions and changing the rules for private sector unions. No place in America should be subject to a "closed shop," the U.S. government should never favor unions in its contracting, and the NLRB should be disbanded.
