Marathon Pundit: Late June NLRB overreach roundup

Boeing headquarters, Chicago

The first day of summer has passed, the days are getting shorter, but the NLRB overreach continues.

From Investor's Business Daily:

Unwilling to let a private company freely run its business, the Obama administration, through its appointees on the National Labor Relations Board, is trying to block [Boeing's] South Carolina option. The NLRB has sued Boeing, claiming its North Charleston plant is an illegal retaliation against government-coddled — the last two words are ours — unions.

This is not retaliation; it's self-preservation.

Nonetheless, Boeing has to defend itself from a federal mugging. It has to expend time and precious resources to overcome the hurdle laid down by a shameless political payoff to unions.

It's forced to fight the White House for the opportunity to unleash 1,000 new jobs at a moment when joblessness is crippling so many American families, and to make itself more competitive against government-subsidized Airbus.

Chicago Now:

Currently when a union wants to get itself certified in a new company the NLRB takes between five and six weeks to conduct the elections. Under the NLRB's new rules that time period will be shorted to a scant 10 to 21 days.

Now why is this a big deal? Former Chairman and NLRB member Peter Schaumber, appointed in 2001 by George W. Bush, says that this shortened time will harm businesses, especially small and mid-sized businesses that have little knowledge about unions and no attorneys with specialized union experience with which to protect themselves.

Schaumber recently told reporters to imagine if you were a small business and you had never heard of the NLRB and had no expertise in its arcane practices. He then laid out a scenario by which an employer could become a target of the union after the elections for all sorts of violations that he, the employer, didn't even know existed.

This is precisely the sort of trap that the NLRB hopes to set for the business community.

The Daily Transcript:

It is nothing short of astonishing to think that our president is aggressively working to impede Boeing's ability to self-determine which American citizens are best suited and situated to build its products. Sounds akin to a centrally planned economy to me. Wasn't that business model deemed permanently non-airworthy with the falling of the Berlin Wall?

Obama's unabashed appeasement of labor unions is costing the country hundreds of billions, significantly adding to our growing government debt and undermining global competitiveness in an ever-flattening world. In cozy and corrupt collusion with the very unions that help pave the perpetuation of his own political power, is it really any wonder that the Obama economy remains hopelessly anemic with 9 percent-plus unemployment?

There has been no shortage of Obama actions and inactions during his presidency that clearly define how his love of country pales in comparison to his fealty to the unions.

Fortunately, with quadrennial national elections in the not to distant future, the electorate will soon have the opportunity to vest or veto Obama's guiding manifesto that implies Americans with union cards are somehow more worthy of a bigger paycheck. If he is vested, you can be certain that more severe economic turbulence will befall our Union.

The Charleston Post and Courier:

Two months ago, the National Labor Relations Board's acting general counsel did organized labor's bidding by filing a far-fetched complaint against Boeing. Last week, the board itself revealed a clear pro-union -- and anti-business -- bias.

An NLRB proposal announced Tuesday would greatly strengthen organized labor's hand by reducing the time the agency takes to conduct unionizing elections at workplaces. Currently, that process takes from five to six weeks. Under the new NLRB plan, that could drop to a mere 10 days, giving union forces that had been organizing their campaigns long beforehand a potentially decisive edge.

Former NLRB Chair Peter Schaumber, who was appointed to that post in 2009 by President George W. Bush and served from 2002-09, decried this push for "quickie elections," warning: "The employees will only hear one side of the story. It will eviscerate employers' chance to respond."

Mr. Schaumber also criticized the lack of proper board debate that preceded this proposal. He pointed out that the three Democrats on the four-member NLRB never met together in person while crafting the plan. Instead, they communicated through their offices as a way to dodge the federal open meeting law.

The Wall Street Journal:

It's not just Boeing that the National Labor Relations Board is picking on: For the second time this year, the NLRB has ruled against a Catholic college.

The Chicago office of the NLRB said that St. Xavier University had failed to demonstrate the "substantial religious character" necessary to qualify for exemption from federal labor law. As a result, adjunct professors in its employ will be allowed to organize, even though the school has argued that a faculty union would interfere with the school's autonomy as a religious institution by ceding "jurisdiction over important matters to a third party."

In January, the NLRB's New York office made the same determination about Manhattan College, a Christian Brothers institution, which has since appealed.

Both cases hinge on the Supreme Court's ruling in NLRB v. The Catholic Bishop of Chicago, et al. (1979), which found that the NLRB had violated the First Amendment's free exercise clause by requiring Catholic schools to comply with federal labor laws, thereby possibly interfering with religious decision-making. But that ruling didn't stop the NLRB from claiming authority over most Catholic colleges and universities by arguing that Catholic Bishop protects only "church-controlled" institutions that are "substantially religious," a phrase taken from Chief Justice Warren Burger's majority opinion in the case. Many of the nation's 224 Catholic colleges and universities are legally independent of the Catholic bishops or the religious orders that founded them.

The Washington Examiner:

How far will President Obama go to advance the interests of organized labor? Awfully far. We know this not only from the effort to keep Boeing from building a plane in a right-to-work state, South Carolina, but also from the way Delta Airlines is being railroaded into recognizing unions its employees have repeatedly rejected.

In June alone, the Obama administration adopted rules likely to discourage employers from hiring law firms that specialize in thwarting union organizing drives, and moved to shorten union certification campaigns, long a goal of organized labor.

But the targeting of Delta stands out. Following Delta's merger with Northwest Airlines in 2008, its flight attendants voted against joining the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), and other employees decided against signing on with four separate unions of the International Association of Machinists and Aero-space Workers (IAM).

That didn't end what has become a union crusade against Delta, abetted by Obama. Now, from all appearances, the fix is in—against Delta. It starts with the National Mediation Board, which governs labor relations in the airline and railroad industries. Obama stacked the NMB deck by putting two former union senior executives on the three-member board, Linda Puchala of the AFA and Harry Hoglander of the Air Line Pilots.

Red County:

Should the NLRB prevail in its attempt to tell Boeing where it can and cannot build new plants and direct new work, it will, in the end, only make things worse for places like Washington State, not only for South Carolina.

Obviously, South Carolina would suffer, and while my sympathies for them are somewhat limited at the moment, owing to the results of this evening's College World Series game, the fact is their workers haven't done anything wrong by agreeing to work for a lower wage as opposed to staying unemployed. Success by the NLRB will rob them of livelihoods, and likely force Boeing to swallow the loss and move the work overseas, to the extent possible.

Washington State would suffer, though, as well. The delays - possibly years of them - caused by this frivolous lawsuit, will give their competitors time to catch up and carve away pieces of market share, long-run sales which are extremely difficult to get back. This is especially true in a capital-intensive industry with a long product development cycle. The profits from the 787 sales would not only recoup Boeing's investment in the plane, but fund development of their next generation of jets as well. The workers in Washington, counting on the work that would have gone to South Carolina, will find that work diminished, as well as the work in their existing shops.