Marathon Pundit: NLRB overreach: Cancelled vote edition

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

NLRB overreach: Cancelled vote edition

Romney

The rabidly pro-union Obama administration favors card check, which replaces a secret-ballot union elections with a "free-to-peek" petition drive that is ripe for goon intimidation.

The Washington Examiner writes about a workplace where card check unionized workers--against the will of some of them.

Suppressing votes is something we usually associate with Third World dictators. But closer to home, the National Labor Relations Board in Washington is the one calling off elections.

After working at Kaiser Permanente for 21 years, I was abruptly informed that Service Employees International Union organizers were launching a "card check" drive at my workplace.

Following a 13-day campaign, company officials announced that SEIU organizers had collected enough union cards to become the sole bargaining agent at my office.

In Oregon, this means that everyone -- including those of us who did not want to join the SEIU -- will have to pay union dues and accept union bargaining just to keep our jobs.

From New Hampshire Public Radio a few days ago:

At the last Republican debate in Hanover, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney accused a Washington agency of trying to block the opening of a factory in South Carolina. Romney said the National Labor Relations Board opposed the factory because South Carolina is a Right-to-Work state.

Here's what Mitt Romney said.

"You can't have the federal government, through its friends at the National Labor Relations Board, saying to a company like Boeing that you can't build a factory in a non-union state."

Romney’s talking about a complaint filed with the NLRB by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The union said Boeing aimed to punish it for conducting strikes. The punishment? Boeing opened a factory in South Carolina to build the company’s newest passenger jet, the 787 Dreamliner. Most of the jets would still come out of plants near Seattle, but some would come from South Carolina.

Writing for the Deseret News, Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute:

The biggest losers would be unemployed workers in union-dominated states such as Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. New plant and investment is far more likely to come to right-to-work states. The biggest winners will be our foreign competitors like China and India. The NLRB has no jurisdiction overseas.

If Boeing had decided to produce more Dreamliners in Mexico, the NLRB would not have been able to close the plant. General Electric recently transferred the headquarters of its X-ray division to China, without a word of complaint from the NLRB.

Boeing is not asking for federal dollars. It has laid off no employees. It has simply built a plant and wants to hire more American workers. If more companies did the same, our unemployment rate might actually go down.