President Obama attacked right-to-work laws today while speaking to a union that cheered his administration’
s attempts to close a Boeing factory in a right-to-work state.
“I believe when folks try and take collective bargaining rights away by passing so-called ‘right to work’ laws that might also be called ‘right to work for less,’ laws, that’s not about economics, that’s about politics,” Obama told the AFL-CIO today. “That’s about politics.” He then credited the AFL-CIO for creating American prosperity, saying “unions like yours made sure that everybody had a fair shake, everybody had a fair shot.”
The definition of “everyone” shared by Obama and the AFL-CIO must not include the people who live in right-to-work states. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka cheered the National Labor Relations Board’s attempt to close a Boeing factory in the right-to-work state of South Carolina, arguing that the plant should have built in the union state of Washington.
Trumka described Republican efforts to intercept the NLRB’s campaign against Boeing as “a political and ideological circus.”
When Boeing chose to locate a new plant in South Carolina after a series of strikes by the local International Association of Machinists (IAM) union in Washington, the union charged Boeing with “retaliating” against them.
The NLRB filed a lawsuit to close the South Carolina plant (and put over 1,000 people out of work), but they dropped the lawsuit after Boeing signed a new contract with the machinists union.
