Marathon Pundit: NLRB overreach, hanging around edition

Look who is hanging around Charleston, South Carolina. Why it's the IAM!

From the Daily Caller:

Though workers in South Carolina's new Boeing Company plant recently booted out union bosses trying to organize them, local representatives from the International Association of Machinists (IAM) still linger around Charleston.

"Well, pretty much, they've been around for a few months now," said Anthony Riedel of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. Sources tell TheDC that union bosses have even showed up at Boeing’s new workers’ homes in attempts to pitch their cases for unionization.

Congressman Trey Gowdy, South Carolina Republican, told The Daily Caller he thinks it's "bitterly ironic" for Charleston IAM reps to try to organize the same workers their Seattle counterparts hope will be out of a job, if the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rules against Boeing in a union-led pending case.

"The same general entity, that being Big Labor, which is threatening the economic death penalty on the Boeing plant, which would mothball it and discharge the 1,000 employees, now wants to rush to their defense," Gowdy said in phone interview.

National Review Online:

Legislation recently introduced by Rep. Tim Scott (R., S.C.), the Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act, is an apt congressional response to an agency that has lost any pretense of neutrality on the question of unionization and that is chilling business investment in the United States by trying to dictate to an American manufacturer where it can produce additional aircraft to meet surging world demand.

The proposed legislation does not change the law as to what is and what is not a violation under the National Labor Relations Act. It also leaves intact severe consequences the NLRB can order to remedy a violation and protect workers. If, for example, the employer relocates to a non-union facility solely to avoid its employees’ decision to unionize, what is known as the "runaway shop," the board can order the employer to re-hire its former employees and pay their relocation expenses, award the employees back pay until they have found substantially equivalent work, and, depending on the circumstances, grant the union access to the new facility to assist it in organizing the employer/s new employees.

The Wall Street Journal:

Teenagers in the 1960s listened to Beatles records backwards in search of hidden meanings—a trick akin to the task of deciphering President Obama's statements on the battle between Boeing and the National Labor Relations Board. Since the NLRB sued the airplane company in April to prevent it from building a new plant in South Carolina, Mr. Obama's position has alternated between silent and incomprehensible.

At a press conference in June, the mellifluous one said he felt that "as a general proposition, companies need to have the freedom to relocate." In case anyone mistook that as a full-throated defense of a business's right to expand its operations and hire workers in any state it likes, Mr. Obama also emphasized that the NLRB is an "independent" agency and that the issue is being decided by a judge.

Finally on Tuesday, we got the straight story. In a formal statement of Administration policy, the White House opposed a bill sponsored by South Carolina Rep. Tim Scott that would reduce the power of the NLRB and prohibit it "from ordering any employer to relocate, shut down, or transfer employment under any circumstance." Translation: Mr. Obama intends to guard the NLRB for his union allies, but if no one notices, all the better.

In opposing the bill, the White House says "The [National Labor Relations Act] does not restrict the location of company operations, provided companies comply with the law." But companies don't live in this land of hypotheticals. The NLRB lawsuit is an explicit attempt to block Boeing from opening its new South Carolina factory, and either the Administration believes the NLRB is appropriately enforcing the law, or it believes the NLRB has exceeded its mandate and needs to be reined in. Now we know it's on the side of the NLRB, which is run by Mr. Obama's appointees.

The American Spectator:

Unions thrive on workplace conflict. The AFL-CIO, for example, sponsors a "Bad Boss Contest," which awards the employee who submits the best story about a horrible boss a "seven-night vacation escape" from his or her workplace travails. But aggressive union tactics are no laughing matter, as a recently unveiled playbook distributed by one of America's biggest unions reveals.

Over the last decade, aggressive campaigns against employers have enabled the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to grow into one of the country's biggest labor organizations. Now, its campaign manual -- which the union recently had to file during discovery in a federal court proceeding -- offers an unprecedented glimpse of how the union operates. It's not a pretty picture.

The SEIU manual instructs union activists on how to conduct a "corporate campaign." This consists of a union pressuring an employer to give in to worker demands by employing aggressive methods, including generating negative media coverage, filing complaints with regulators, and disrupting relationships between businesses and their customers, vendors, and lenders.

A union conducting a corporate campaign will often enlist the help of third parties sympathetic to the broader progressive agenda -- environmental activists, consumer groups, "human rights" advocates, and the like. For instance, an environmental group sympathetic to the union might accuse the company which the union is targeting of polluting, while the union itself might go after the firm's access to capital by attacking its creditworthiness.

And finally, from Forbes:

So why use such an inflammatory term, "The President's job Killers," if these are the problems in the jobs market? Because there is an “elephant in the room” which is a far greater, and longer lasting factor than any one of the others: a huge and growing government bureaucracy, which has become more and more oppressive.

Many critics, myself included, have called Barack Obama the most anti-business president in modern history, but he doesn't do all the anti-business things himself. He has "minions" called czars, cabinet secretaries and commissioners to do his dirty work. Obama's philosophy is that he, and the government. knows what's best for Americans, so he will build a "Big Brother" society in which more and more of Americans' lives are run by, controlled by and funded by the government.

There is a problem with that—in fact there are several. First, Obama and the government don't always know what’s best. Case in point is the "Stimulus Package" that didn't work. Second, Americans are accustomed to being free to do many things the way they want, and that doesn't fit with the way the government might want. Third, big government means lots of government employees, most of them in public unions earning pay and benefits 1-1/2 times their (tax-paying) private sector counterparts and with much greater job security.

The very job-security-enhancing efforts of all these bureaucrats, who work for the president and the government is what is killing jobs. I mentioned Obama's "minions." The president wields great power; he can appoint people to boards and commissions. Even when they are supposed to be reviewed and approved by Congress, he can bypass that by using recess appointments (appointing them while Congress is in recess, forcing the appointment approval to wait for months.)