By Rick Manning – In a stunning move well beyond the scope of their legal mandate, the Obama Administration appointee controlled National Labor Relations Board is suing Boeing Corporation for, get this, building a second production line for their new Dreamliner passenger plane in South Carolina rather than in Washington state.
At a time when corporations like General Electric are busily shutting down U.S. production facilities that manufacture items like light bulbs, in favor of Chinese made products, Boeing had the audacity to decide to create jobs in America. Although maybe the Obama appointed NLRB members missed the part of U.S. history class where the Confederacy lost, and South Carolina remained a part of the U.S.?
Rightfully, Boeing is going to fight the NLRB decision to sue them. One irony of the case is that Obama’s recently appointed Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, served as a member of Boeing’s Board of Directors when the company decided to create jobs in South Carolina by building a production line in the right to work state.
And that is the heart of the matter. South Carolina is a right to work state whose voters this past November overwhelmingly amended their state’s constitution to ensure that a worker has the right to vote on whether they want to be represented by a labor union. The workers at the Boeing plant in South Carolina have also taken the bold step of booting out the union that represented them, effectively ending the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers stranglehold on Boeing production.
Now, Obama’s NLRB is attacking Boeing’s job creation in South Carolina as “union retaliation” directly related to a 2008 labor strike which crippled Boeing’s production in Washington state.
This isn’t the first time that the NLRB has targeted South Carolina, as earlier this year they had threatened to use taxpayer dollars to sue the state, along with the states of Utah, South Dakota and Arizona, because their citizens had the audacity to put a workers right to a secret ballot vote in union elections into their respective state constitutions. In direct response to the NLRB lawsuit threat, Congressman Jeff Duncan of South Carolina has introduced legislation prohibiting the NLRB from proceeding with the lawsuit, and has already been joined by 30 co-sponsors.
On top of the dramatic overreach on behalf of the labor union directed board, which was designed by Congress to be a neutral arbiter in labor/management disputes, an astounding 176 members of the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to completely defund the agency in an amendment offered by Rep. Tom Price of Georgia this past February.
The ultimate irony of the NLRB decision is that this government agency is attempting to tell a company where they can locate a plant in the United States. If successful, other U.S. companies will take note, and not make the mistake of building plants in right to work states, instead opting for more desirable overseas locations that are beyond the reach of Obama’s union zealots.
Can anyone wonder why U.S. job creation has been virtually non-existent?
Rick Manning is the Communications Director of Americans for Limited Government and the former Public Affairs Office Chief of Staff within the U.S. Department of Labor, He invites you to follow him on twitter @rmanning957.
