NLRB meddling pure union payoff

From The Detroit News
JAY AMBROSE
Scripps Howard News Service
 
The Boeing Co., an innovator in the rebuilding of a recession-ravaged America, found a way to proceed efficiently on a project that would help South Carolina with 1,000 employees already hired, but no.

The National Labor Relations Board has decided that fair play and an improved economy must not get in the way of union wishes. The independent agency, nowadays in the grip of pro-labor Democrats, has filed a complaint to make Boeing desert South Carolina and build the planned 787 Dreamliner passenger planes in the state of Washington.

Do this, and union workers will carry out the job, and every now and then, they may well strike. That's something they have been doing repeatedly to Boeing, leading to billion-dollar-plus losses that ultimately help no one. But, as a Wall Street Journal editorial observes, it has ordinarily been possible and a good thing for the country and prosperity that companies can move operations around to where conditions are most favorable.

Nothing doing, says the complaint, which will be heard in June. It contends Boeing is undermining the right of unions to strike by moving away from striking unions, an argument that seems to have more to do with ideology than law.

Boeing's lawyers are outraged, one of them telling the New York Times this move is absolute nonsense, but absolute nonsense has been getting its way quite a bit in this country lately. If it does this time around, it's thought it could be a bad sign for South Carolina and the other right-to-work states that think individual rights should supersede collectivist power plays.

Let's all agree that there was a time when unions helped us get to justice in this land. But let's understand, too, that that the opposite can be more nearly true today. It's not an accident that union membership has dropped to little more than 7 percent in the private sector. Federal and state laws prohibit the kinds of worker abuses that sometimes happened in the past.

The real strength of labor is now in the public sector where, in some states and cities, it has taken advantage of weak-kneed politicians. Rather tame attempts to tamp down on these threats have been greeted by angry protests and have been described in endless news stories as incursions on union "rights." But there is no right of collective bargaining with the government.

Under the Obama administration, which has found a variety of ways to treat unions to special privileges at considerable cost to the public, private unions may be making a comeback. As a wounded South Carolina might testify, that's hardly good news for most of us.