Marathon Pundit: Post-brownout NLRB overreach report

Friday, June 24, 2011

Post-brownout NLRB overreach report

Because of the brownout at my home yesterday, there was no NLRB overreach report.

But my electricity is back, and so is the round-up of stories.

From USA Today:

All hell has broken loose in the two months since the complaint by the board's general counsel. Republicans attacked the Obama administration for siding with labor and tried to cut off funding for the NLRB. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., accused the administration of acting "like a bunch of thugs," and GOP presidential candidates joined the attack. The legal fight, which could take years to wind through the NLRB and the courts unless the company and the union settle, is emerging as the defining labor issue of the 2012 presidential campaign.

Cut through the over-the-top rhetoric and inappropriate threats to defund an independent agency, though, and the issue is pretty simple. Boeing tried to do the right thing by keeping jobs in the USA and is getting punished for it. In the legal sense, its "mistake" appears to have been giving its workers a choice instead of just ignoring them.

After the no-strike contract was rejected, Boeing made a sound business decision to put some of its new airliner production in a place where it could avoid disruptive labor stoppages. It spent about $1 billion or more building the South Carolina plant and hiring 1,000 workers, who are to start turning out Dreamliners in August. Shutting the plant down now would be ridiculous. It would play to the interests of Boeing's European competitor, Airbus.

Labor law prohibits "runaway shops," where a company shuts down a unionized plant and re-opens a non-union one somewhere else to avoid or punish the union. But that's not what happened here. Boeing kept most of its Dreamliner production in Washington state, where union workers will build seven planes a month, compared with three a month at the new plant in South Carolina.

Red State:

Over the last year, the Obama administration, through its regulatory agencies, has been conducting a quiet war on American business—those enterprises that are the nation's job creators. Earlier this week, the union extremists in Obama's Department of Labor and the "independent" National Labor Relations Board (the same agency that may cause 1,000 Boeing employees in South Carolina to lose their jobs) launched an all-out offensive designed to maximize unions' ability to unionize the 93.1% of America’s private-sector employees who are union free.

The Department of Labor writes its own DISCLOSE Act.
On Monday, using retread and biased psuedo-studies, the Department of Labor issued an expansive 160-page notice for proposed rule-making; request for comments. It is, in sum, a radical overhaul of the reporting requirements for employers who wish to remain union free and the consultants, lawyers, and firms that provide human resources, employee and labor relations services.

Since 1959, under a little known law called the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, labor relations consultants who 'persuade' employees in the exercise of their Section Seven Rights (the right to unionize or not) have been required to file financial disclosure statements, as do the employers who hire labor relations consultants.

Now, the Department of Labor wants any person who is contracted to directly or indirectly persuades employees to file be required to file reports. To the union zealots at the Department of Labor, any person, lawyer or firm who trains supervisors on how to lawfully communicate with employees about unions, any company that produces videos, conducts seminars, or vulnerability audits (like employee opinion surveys) would be required to file and disclose their earnings which then become made public.

Washington Times:

South Carolina Republican Rep. Tim Scott said Wednesday the complaints of organized labor over the opening of a $750 million non-union Boeing airline assembly plant in South Carolina were "ludicrous."

The National Labor Relations Board has filed suit claiming the aerospace giant opened the plant in right-to-work South Carolina to punish unions in its manufacturing base of Washington state.

The case has become a flashpoint between the NLRB, now dominated by appointees of President Obama, and the business community.

"If someone was punished, at least one — one — union worker should have lost their job. But not a single union worker in Puget Sound, Washington state, has lost a job because of the opening of the [South Carolina] plant. They’ve actually had to hire another 2,000 employees," the freshman Republican said Wednesday on The Washington Times-affiliated "America's Morning News" radio program.

In an op-ed for The State, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman:

We also have a "right-to-work" law in my home state of Utah. Like most Americans, the people of Utah believe they have a fundamental right to earn a living without being required to pay dues to a union as a condition of their employment.

Delicate Arch, Arches Nat'l Park, Utah

In a nation where the freedom of individuals to live and seek work according to their own interests and beliefs is considered sacrosanct and not subject to abridgement by government, a company's decision to locate a facility in any state that welcomes it should be not just beyond the purview of the NLRB, but wholly outside the legal jurisdiction of the federal government. The federal government has no more a right to tell a business where it may operate than to tell a private citizen what religion he or she may practice.

The administration argues that Boeing has breached established labor practices by denying employment opportunities to workers in Washington in retaliation for that state's failure to adopt a right-to-work law. Yet, in testimony before a congressional committee, the NLRB's general counsel could not cite any evidence for the charge, exposing the extent to which the case is a purely political exercise intended to reward an important source of support for the president's re-election.

As a former state governor and business executive, I understand how important it is that states offer sensible regulatory and tax climates to attract new capital investment. Businesses and workers have been migrating for years to states with pro-growth policies. Capital and labor always will leave environments with heavy regulatory and tax burdens for places with favorable climates for growth. It's not a political or retaliatory decision. It's a rational, bottom-line judgment about where the best conditions exist that allow them to succeed and create jobs. That's how freedom and free markets work.

The Daily Caller:

New emails obtained by The Daily Caller contradict claims by the Obama administration that the Treasury Department would avoid "intervening in the day-to-day management" of General Motors post-auto bailout.

These messages reveal that Treasury officials were involved in decision-making that led to more than 20,000 non-union workers losing their pensions.

Republican Reps. Dan Burton and Mike Turner say that during the GM bailout, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner decided to cut pensions for salaried non-union employees at Delphi, a GM spinoff, to expedite GM's emergence from bankruptcy.

At a Wednesday hearing, the House Oversight Committee's Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight and Government Spending started pushing the Treasury Department for answers on the effects of the bailout and on how much of a role the department played in picking winners and losers.