Media scolds NLRB for inventing labor law in Boeing case

Labor strikes are damaging to companies--which is obvious, so it's only natural for a corporation to avoid them by utilizing the workforce of a right-to-work state. That's what Boeing did when it chose to build its 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina. But President Obama's radicalized National Labor Relations Board ruled that business decision as illegal. It invented a law.

Major media outlets have blasted this move. Here are a few of them.

Fox News:

The former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board told FoxNews.com that a board attorney's bid to stop Boeing from opening a production line at a non-union site in South Carolina is "unprecedented" and could have serious implications for companies looking to expand.

The comments Tuesday from Peter Schaumber add to the roiling debate over the complaint filed last week against the aerospace giant. NLRB's acting general counsel, taking up allegations from union workers at a Puget Sound plant in Washington state, had accused Boeing of violating federal labor law by moving to open a second 787 Dreamliner airplane production line in South Carolina.

The complaint hinged on claims that Boeing made "coercive statements" regarding union-led strikes, and then retaliated by transferring its second line to a non-union facility. As evidence, the NLRB noted that a Boeing executive said in an interview that the overriding factor in going to South Carolina -- a right-to-work state where unions cannot force employees to join -- was a desire to avoid disruptions. The union in Washington state has led several strikes against Boeing since the 1970s, most recently in 2005 and 2008.

But Schaumber said the complaint is a big stretch and would mark a departure. He said that if the claim is upheld, it could jeopardize any company with unionized workers that wants to expand to a right-to-work state.

The Washington Examiner runs down the Democrats' push for union card check, then moves on to the NLRB:

Instead, card check is a dead letter, and about all that labor has left is a bunch of Obama appointees who are determined to grab as much power as possible via the federal bureaucracy. Nowhere is this more evident than at NLRB, where board member and former union lawyer Craig Becker has pushed the union regulatory agenda to radical new extremes. "Obama placed Becker on the NLRB with a recess appointment. Within three months, the National Right to Work Foundation had filed 13 motions noting Becker's conflicts of interest in decisions before the NLRB," The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway recently noted. "Oblivious, Becker has participated in handing down rulings in at least 17 cases involving unions he represented as a lawyer. In each of those cases save one, Becker ruled in favor of the unions," Hemingway said.

As a result, NLRB in recent months has exceeded its authority beyond anything recognizable in its enabling law, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Just last week, NLRB presumed to tell Boeing that it cannot build a new plant in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, but must instead do so in Washington state, which is not. The Becker board has also sought to implement card check via regulation by suing Arizona and South Dakota, where voters in November approved state constitutional amendments designed to protect secret ballots in the workplace.

Clearly the time has come for Congress to rethink federal labor law using a clean sheet of paper. The NLRA and the NLRB were designed for an industrial economy that no longer exists. As relics of 1930s-style top-down command-economy thinking, the NLRA and NLRB simply cannot adapt to a decentralized digital economy in which fewer than one in 10 private-sector workers carry union cards. And with Obama appointees like Becker in charge, they have become obstacles to freedom and progress in America's workplace.

Investor's Business Daily:

Hell hath no fury like unions whose power is being challenged, and unions are not happy after Gov. Scott Walker's victory for democracy over angry union mobs in Wisconsin and similar moves by governors in other states such as John Kasich's Ohio. They want their pound of capitalist flesh.

So they, in the form of the International Association of Machinists, have called upon their wholly owned subsidiary, the National Labor Relations Board — whose job it is to bully business on labor's behalf — to file a complaint against Boeing for expanding into the right-to-work state of South Carolina.

"We absolutely will not accept the bullying. This is a direct assault on right-to-work states," South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley told National Review Online. "I want to ask (President Obama) why he is allowing unelected bureaucrats to come in and do the unions' dirty work on the backs of our businesses."

The answer is simple: This is not about jobs or even workers' rights. It's about creating more union jobs to pay dues, money that can be spent electing Democrats.

From the Arizona Republic:

Mind you, Boeing hasn't closed any of its Washington operations. In fact, it has hired 2,000 additional workers there since its decision to build the second plant in South Carolina. But the Obama NLRB has become so aggressively proactive on behalf of union interests that it is taking action that even the union-friendly New York Times admits is "highly unusual."

Unusual though it may be, it's only the beginning of the NLRB's activism. Last Friday, the agency alerted the Arizona Attorney General's Office that it soon will sue Arizona and South Dakota, as well as two other states to be sued later, for enacting laws requiring secret-ballot elections before a union can form. The laws are designed to counter union efforts to pass a "card check" law through Congress, which would allow unions to form after a majority of employees had signed a card declaring an interest in organizing.

The NLRB's mandate to protect workers' interests does not extend to dictating where a company can open new operations. Further, its effort to flex muscles by suing the states suggests a growing "Congress" complex at the agency. Federal dominion over the states extends to acts of Congress, not the whims and preferences of agency regulators.

In an era of anemic job growth, the NLRB's attacks upon Boeing and the states will only generate greater uncertainty and greater reluctance by private industry to make the enormous investments necessary to create jobs.

Related post:

Two newspapers sound off on NLRB overreach in Boeing case

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