Imagine you own a company that just introduced a newly designed widget that sells for $150 million dollars each. This improved widget is designed and manufactured in America. Even better your company has already booked 835 confirmed orders for your new widget. Not surprisingly, your primary production facility does not have the capacity to produce enough of the new widgets while maintaining production of prior generation widgets, which are a cash cow for your company. So naturally you built a new production facility to handle the overflow of new orders. Even better, you built the new facility in the United States, rather than going overseas.
This week, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint over Boeing's plans to open a plant in South Carolina. It plans to open a second production line of its 787 Dreamliner plane there. The plant has been built.
Boeing executives have acknowledged that they were reluctant to expand in Washington state because of the risk of a labor strike. Boeing's workers in Washington belong to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Its plant in South Carolina would be nonunion.
Boeing is not being alarmist. Workers in Washington went on strike for nearly two months in 2008. The company said it couldn't reach a deal with the union to expand operations at Puget Sound, Wash., for the Dreamliner.
Seizing on the words of Boeing executives, the NLRB inferred that the decision to choose South Carolina was retaliation against the union. The labor board demands that Boeing open the second production line in Washington. [Emphasis added]
Appointments by President Barack Obama have given the five-member NLRB a pro-labor tilt.
The plant is ready for about 1,000 workers. The NLRB filed its complaint 18 months after Boeing announced it would expand in South Carolina. The NLRB says Boeing is free to do business there - but its second production line has to run in Washington.
Imagine you own a company and five unelected appointees of a government board, among them two unconfirmed appointees, stipulate where you where must open your new manufacturing plant. What if one of those unconfirmed board members is a recess appointee and was also the Associate General Counsel to both the SEIU and the AFL & CIO? Would you ever consider opening another manufacturing facility in the United States? Is this the tyranny about which Thomas Jefferson warned us?
Karl Marx wrote in 1865, "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." We are there, are we not?
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
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