Bought And Paid For

The National Labor Relations Board investigated Boeing for moving work from its unionized Seattle facility to its non-union plant in South Carolina and found that yes, Boeing was doing so as retaliation for unions threatening to strike.

Boeing was retaliating illegally against its largest union when it decided in 2009 to put a second 787 Dreamliner assembly line in a nonunion plant in South Carolina, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) charged in a complaint filed Wednesday.

To remedy the alleged violation, the complaint says, Boeing should be ordered to operate the second line at a union plant in Washington.

Boeing said it would "vigorously contest" the case and proceed with plans to start assembling planes in Charleston, S.C., in July. "This doesn't change anything," spokesman Tim Neale said.

The South Carolina plant could be operating for years before the dispute is decided, a labor-law expert said.

So realistically, this will be tied up in the courts for years if not a decade or more while Boeing continues to get exactly what it wanted.  But the reaction on the right is nothing short of full-blown hysteria.

Despite the possibility of political retaliation on the part of the Obama NLRB, as well as the possible job losses in South Carolina an eventual NLRB decision may cause, the core principle at stake is whether or not an employer has the right to move business away from a unionized location that has repeatedly been the victim of extortive strikes, causing the employer hundreds of days of lost production, customer delays and billions in revenue.

Yes, it's nothing short of the death of business in America.

Workers have the ability to collectively bargain for wages, benefits, and working conditions in the private sector if they desire.  If they make their labor too costly and businesses can conduct their operations elsewhere, then they have the right to do so, too.  The government has no legitimate role in forcing business owners to be hostages to their workforce.  If the workers price themselves out of their jobs, then they need to deal with the consequences. The ability to collectively bargain does not include a guarantee of a job.

Otherwise, we all pay higher prices for the same product or service — and for Boeing, which competes against the EU’s Airbus, it will mean lost sales and less work altogether in the US.  Prices of flying will increase, while the taxes that flow from both employment and sales will decrease.  Nor will it end there.  Such a decision will lock businesses in their present locations and give local and state governments carte blanche to hike taxes and fees, secure that business owners won’t be able to vote with their feet — and leave taxpayers holding the bag when businesses go under and capital stops flowing to the US for investment.

Yep, our poor businesses, they're reduced to making record revenues and profits this quarter as reporting season rolls on.  Meanwhile these same businesses are happily moving their jobs away from those horrible unions...and moving them to other countries.

U.S. Commerce Department data released this week show that U.S. multinational companies, which employ a fifth of all Americans, cut their U.S. headcount by 2.9 million during the 2000s, while hiring 2.4 million people overseas.

In 2009,  the companies cut 1.2 million, or 5.3 percent, of their workers in the U.S. and 100,000, or 1.5 percent, of those abroad.

The trend is a switch from a decade earlier in which multinational companies created nearly two jobs in the U.S. for every one job they created overseas.

Why is this happening? The WSJ lists several possible reasons: globalization, rising productivity, a "combination of the U.S. tax code, the declining state of U.S. infrastructure, the quality of the country's education system" or possible a "failure of U.S. policies to counter aggressive foreign governments."

Oh, so then it's okay for the US government to intervene in the free market in order to try to keep jobs in the United States, but if it intervenes on behalf of actual American workers, it's communist state planning and Randian collectivist nightmare time. Keep in mind US multinationals are rolling in the green right now, while US worker wages in real terms have remained stagnant since 1979.  In fact, real wages have started contracting again in the last 18 months.

But any effort for Americans to band together and try to improve their lot?  Socialism that must be expunged in order for us to stay competitive...and despite our increased productivity, jobs are going overseas by the millions.

How dare we look out for the American worker, right?