Former NLRB board member: Boeing complaint should be decided, not settled

Peter Schaumber, who is a former board member of the NLRB, says the Boeing dispute should be decided, not settled.

From The Hill's Congress Blog:

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) should take a break from pressuring the Boeing Company to settle that agency's "loony left" complaint ("The Economist," May 19, 2011), which seeks to prevent Boeing from producing additional 787 aircraft in its non-union plant in South Carolina. A settlement would protect from judicial review the imprudence of the agency's complaint and leave standing a legal theory that it can thereafter use at the behest of organized labor to deprive less financially resourceful employers of the ability to make fundamental business decisions long protected by law.

The loss of 9,000 jobs in South Carolina today is just the beginning. After all, why invest in a country where the government has declared unlawful a business's decision to open a non-union second production line to protect the company's continued production from the economic consequences of union-encouraged strikes?

The complaint is loonier than most thought.

We did not know just how loony the NLRB's complaint was until last Friday's hearing in Charleston of the House Oversight Committee. The agency's Acting General Counsel, Lafe Solomon, first tried to duck questions from Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) as to how opening a new plant could be a "transfer" of work. Solomon's answers were reminiscent of President Clinton's parsing of the word "is," admitting that his definition of the word "transfer" was different from Rep. Scott's—and from the dictionary definition also.

According to Solomon, Boeing's decision to open a new plant in South Carolina was a "transfer" of work because Boeing could have expanded its unionized facility in Washington state to produce additional 787 aircraft but chose not to. Undermining his repeated assertion that the complaint is "routine and not unprecedented," Solomon claims the move was retaliatory because one of the reasons Boeing chose to open a non-union second production line in South Carolina was to avoid the threat of the repeated union strikes it suffered over the last 18 years outside Seattle. The NLRB has never found unlawful discrimination under the National Labor Relations Act that would entitle the general counsel to the relief Solomon seeks unless unit work has not been eliminated, reduced or subcontracted.

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