With an unemployment rate of 9.8 percent, South Carolina is in dire economic straits, and so in desperate need of the 1,000 jobs created by the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner assembly plant in North Charleston. Unfortunately, in April, the Obama administration’s National Labor Relations Board decided that Boeing’s decision to open the Charleston plant was an unlawful retaliation against the company’s unionized work force in Washington State.
Boeing’s decision to relocate some Dreamliner production (the Washington facility will remain open) was driven by the Washington machinists unions’ propensity to strike, a propensity that has cost Boeing a fortune — one 39-day strike in 2008 cost the company an estimated $2 billion.
As Jim Albaugh, CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, told the Seattle Times (March 2, 2010): “[W]e can’t afford to have a work stoppage every three years. And we can’t afford to continue the rate of escalation of wages.”
South Carolina, one of the 22 right-to-work states forbidding compulsory unionization of its work force, therefore looked to Boeing like a prudent insurance policy against future blackmail of their production by Washington’s International Association of Machinists.
The Palmetto State lobbied hard to be home for the new plant, offering the company $170 million in grants for startup costs and tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks, a bargain to the state officials counting on the thousands of jobs the plant would have brought in the coming years.
Now those jobs are in jeopardy. Fortunately, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has announced it will provide gratis legal counsel to three South Carolina Boeing employees whose livelihoods are threatened by the outrageous intervention of Obama’s NLRB.
One of those employees, Dennis Murray, explained: “The current unemployment rate here is high and jobs are scarce. If I lose my job, my family will be devastated. … Thanks to Boeing I am able to keep food on the table and a roof over my head for all of my family.” Not for long, courtesy of your federal government.
The hypocrisy of the administration is stunning. In his first State of the Union address in January 2010, Obama promised his first order of business would be jobs, jobs, jobs, solemnly intoning: “[J]obs must be our number one focus in 2010, and that is why I am calling for a new jobs bill tonight. … People are out of work. They are hurting. They need our help.”
Sadly, the only jobs Obama seems interested in protecting are union jobs. The $787 billion stimulus bill “stimulated” little save the coffers of labor unions; the NLRB Boeing decision is pure government protectionism for the Washington unions at the expense of the liberty of a private company and the economic well-being of South Carolina.
The heavily unionized north has been bleeding jobs for years, as the high cost of dealing with organized labor has forced company after company to relocate some or all operations to the freer labor markets of the South and West.
Unions know they cannot compete, and so need officials in Washington — whom they labored mightily to help elect — to force business back to their crushing embrace.
The precedent that is being set by the NLRB Boeing decision is clear: The government, and the government alone, is arbiter of where and how we can do business. So much for land of the free.
Matt Patterson is senior editor at the Capital Research Center and a contributor to “Proud to be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation “(HarperCollins, 2010).
