AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka boasted during a February news conference that he’s “at the White House a couple times a week, two, three times a week.” Trumka added that he has “conversations every day with someone at the White House or in the administration.” On Monday, we learned conclusively that when the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka speaks, White House officials listen. His words come as a dog whistle to President Obama, who never misses an opportunity to reward his biggest campaign donors. The evidence became public with the National Labor Relations Board’s announcement of proposed new rules for workplace representation elections in the private sector. This is the same NLRB trying to use Boeing to strike fear in the minds of all corporate leaders who might be thinking of moving some or all of their operations to right-to-work states. The aircraft maker’s sin was to build a new plant in South Carolina to fill orders for its new 787 Dreamliner that couldn’t be handled by its unionized work force in Seattle. If the NLRB succeeds in reversing the Boeing expansion, it will effectively put federal bureaucrats — assisted by union bosses like Trumka — in charge of corporate investment planning across America, as is done in European welfare states with their stagnant, job-killing economies.
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