The National Labor Relations Board’s Wednesday complaint against Boeing for building a non-union airplane factory is an unprecedented interpretation of the law, according to a former chairman of the regulatory panel.
Back in October 2009, Boeing announced plans to build the plant after talks broke down with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. While Boeing maintained its production line in Washington state, they decided to open a second one in the right-to-work state of South Carolina to service a backlog of orders.
The NLRB is arguing that this makes the move to South Carolina retaliatory, and is advocating the extreme remedy of moving the production line to Washington – even though Boeing has already constructed the new facility and hired 1,000 workers.
“There is no precedent to support this,” said Peter Schaumber, who was first appointed to the NLRB by President Bush in 2002 and served for eight years including time as chairman, before his second term expired last year.
Specifically, one of the cases the complaint relies on is the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court decision NLRB v. Gissel Packing Co. which set parameters for employer free speech. In its complaint, the NLRB said that statements made by Boeing executives in which they talked about past strikes in Washington and the threat of future strikes were out of bounds under the Gissel ruling.
However, the context of Gissel was union elections. The idea was that an employer couldn’t make threatening statements about shutting down in the event of unionization that had no economic basis, but merely were meant to coerce workers into voting against a union. In this case, the union already exists and the Washington production line remains open.
“Boeing clearly had a right under its collective bargaining agreement with the union to open the new assembly line elsewhere,” Schaumber explained.
He also said that, “If this this is a violation of the law, then there is something wrong with American labor law. There is something wrong if an employer such as Boeing cannot try to correct a backlog taking into account the likelihood of strikes.”
Here is the relevant section of the Supreme Court’s Gissel decision:
