Kyle Wingfield of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution absolutely demolishes a misleading Wall Street Journal op-ed in favor of the NLRB's efforts to shut down Boeing's South Carolina Dreamliner facilities. First, Wingfield addresses the claim that choosing Charleston as a production site hurts Boeing's Seattle-based employees:

The word “move” is key, because pro-labor people like Geoghegan have depicted Boeing’s decision to open a production line for its 787 Dreamliner jet in North Charleston, S.C., as a loss to workers in Seattle. In fact, this is a new production line; the existing production line will remain in place.

I’m sure the workers in Seattle — or, more precisely, the union leaders whom their union dues pay — would have liked for the new jobs to be in Seattle (in addition to the 2,000 jobs Boeing has added there despite its alleged hostility to unions there, but I digress). Geoghegan, however, is trying to suggest workers in Seattle are losing something they never had. That’s never true.

Wingfield also points out that Boeing's Charleston employees have more disposable income than their Seattle counterparts after adjusting for cost-of-living, an advantage that can be partly attributed to South Carolina's popular Right to Work law, which makes union dues and membership strictly voluntary.

Wingfield concludes, "If this is the best argument union allies can make in the Boeing case,
it’s no wonder private-sector labor unions are such dying dinosaurs."

Regular readers are already up to speed on the Obama National Labor Relations Board's attempt to punish Boeing for opening a new production line in Right to Work South Carolina - and the National Right to Work Foundation's efforts to help Boeing employees. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore explain why the NLRB's actions are so pernicious:

The Obama administration's National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint last month against Boeing to block production of the company's 787 Dreamliner at a new assembly plant in South Carolina—a "right to-work" state with a law against compulsory union membership. If the NLRB has its way, Dreamliner assembly will return to Washington, a union-shop state, along with more than 1,000 jobs.

The NLRB's action, which Boeing will challenge at a hearing next month, is a big deal. It's the first time a federal agency has intervened to tell an American company where it can and cannot operate a plant within the U.S. It lays the foundation of a regulatory wall with one express purpose: to prevent the direct competition of right-to-work states with union-shop states. Why, as South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley recently asked on these pages, should Washington have any more right to these jobs than South Carolina?

The National Right to Work Foundation is offering free legal assistance to South Carolina workers affected by this complaint. If you work at Boeing's Charleston Dreamliner plant, we strongly encourage you to contact us today.

In an editorial yesterday, the Wall Street Journal made both the moral and economic case for states to end forced unionism by passing Right to Work laws:

Contrary to much union rhetoric, right-to-work laws don't ban or bust unions. They simply grant individual workers the right to join or not to join, even once a workplace is organized by a union. Workers who decline to join the union can't be forced to have dues taken out of their paycheck and thus used to finance union political campaigns. Most right-to-work states are in the South and West, and only Oklahoma has adopted this freedom to choose in the last 20 years.

Right-to-work states outperform forced-union states in almost every measurable category of worker well-being. A new study in the Cato Journal by economist Richard Vedder finds that from 2000 to 2008 some 4.7 million Americans moved from forced-union to right-to-work states.

The study also found that from 1977 through 2007 there was "a very strong and highly statistically significant relationship between right-to-work laws and economic growth." Right-to-work states experienced a 23% faster rise in per capita income over that period. The two regions that have lost the most jobs in recent years, the once-industrial Northeast and Midwest, are mostly forced-union states.

These arguments demonstrate why poll after poll shows that 80 percent of Americans -- even rank-and-file union members -- support the Right to Work principle. Unfortunately, the Wall Street Journal warns, politicians who claim they agree could instead appease the union bosses:

[Indiana Governor Mitch] Daniels adds that the lack of a right-to-work law "does hold us back economically. There is no doubt about it." He estimates that when competing with Southern states for businesses, "a very large number—perhaps as many as a quarter—of the deals we don't get a shot at are for just this reason."

This damage has motivated Indiana Republicans, who now control both legislature chambers, to announce that they want to pass a right-to-work law. Unions immediately went to Defcon 1, Democrats are up in arms, and Republicans could yet buckle under this union pressure. Even Mr. Daniels, who has stood up to union opposition in the past, seems hesitant. He told the Indianapolis Star that right to work "may be worth a look," but he added it "is not on my agenda." He's worried that the issue so antagonizes unions that it could derail the rest of his legislative agenda.

We hope Republicans don't flinch. Right-to-work laws make states more economically competitive, but the bigger issue is about individual rights. Workers should have the right to join a union but also the right not to. Indiana and other states with new Republican majorities have a rare opportunity to pass a major reform that will reduce union power, help to attract new jobs, and liberate workers from union coercion.

Read the rest of the editorial here (subscription required).

The Wall Street Journal slammed Obama recess appointee Craig Becker this week for participating in cases before the National Labor Relations Board involving his former employer, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU):

In his few months at the NLRB, Mr. Becker, former associate general counsel for the Service Employees International Union, has refused to recuse himself from most cases involving his former employer. This despite the fact that Mr. Becker signed the Obama Administration's vaunted ethics pledge, in which he promised to refrain for two years from participating in "any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer."

In true lawyerly fashion, Mr. Becker is now running for the loopholes, arguing that the SEIU proper is a "distinct legal entity" that is different from local SEIU unions. Having liberated himself from that legal barrier, Mr. Becker says he intends to continue judging disputes that feature local SEIU shops. He even convinced the NLRB's inspector general—who was asked to investigate one of the failure-to-recuse cases—to buy the separate legal entity line.

From a technical legal standpoint, SEIU locals may well be distinct from Mr. Becker's former employer. Yet the clear intention of President Obama's ethics pledge was to eliminate obvious political conflicts of interest. The example of a former SEIU lawyer like Mr. Becker sitting in judgment on cases featuring SEIU locals is Conflict 101.

No one understands better than Mr. Becker the deep organizational and financial ties between the SEIU and its locals, having been the attorney who crafted national legal strategies for use by SEIU locals everywhere. NLRB Chairwoman Wilma Liebman (another Obama appointee) has applied a more rigorous and appropriate standard of recusal for herself in cases involving her former employer, the Teamsters.

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which is representing workers in several cases involving SEIU locals, sent a letter Monday requesting that the Department of Justice investigate whether Mr. Becker has violated his pledge. Let's hope Attorney General Eric Holder isn't as cavalier about that request as President Obama was with Mr. Becker's appointment.

Read more about the Foundation's letter to Attorney General Holder.

Last month, the Senate rejected an attempt to confirm President Barack Obama's nomination of pro-compulsory unionism radical Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The Wall Street Journal reports that with the Senate now taking it's Easter recess, Becker could be appointed via a recess appointment "as early as today."

As the Journal notes, a Craig Becker NLRB appointment resurrection would be disastrous to employee rights:

Mr. Becker has written extensively about the National Labor Relations Act, the law that the NLRB interprets and enforces. In a 1993 Minnesota Law Review article, he said that the "core defect in union election law . . . is the employer's status as a party to labor representation proceedings" and that "employers should be stripped of any legally cognizable interest in their employees' election of representatives."

In other words, you can forget about employees getting truthful and non-coercive information about the downsides of unionization.

But there's more.  Becker has publicly argued union goons should have the privilege to repeatedly harass workers at home until the workers sign "card check" union authorization cards; advocated allowing government arbiters impose contracts on workers without even allowing the workers to vote on the contract; and has even compared union organizing elections to US Congressional elections, stating that the only question decided in such elections should be which union gets monopoly control over workers, not whether they wish to remain independent and union free. 

Or as the Journal puts it, "the modern union movement is bloody-minded about the will to power and Mr. Becker is one of its fiercest partisans."

Meanwhile, Mark Mix, President of National Right to Work, expressed some additional concerns regarding Becker's extreme forced unionism record in this morning's Washington Times:

Mark Mix of the National Right to Work organization reports that in 2007 alone, Mr. Becker's lawyering forced 63,000 California workers to pay union dues even after rejecting union membership. He [encouraged] repeated "home visits" for union backers, designed to pressure workers to sign public union-organizing petitions. Unions were "formed to escape the evils of individualism and individual competition. ... Their actions necessarily involve coercion," Mr. Becker once explained.

To view more information on Big Labor sycophant Craig Becker's radical views, check out this National Right to Work Committee special video report:

True to form, compulsory unionism advocates are exploiting a serious situation to try to force more workers into union monopoly control. In this case, union bosses have long set their sights on forcing America's airport screeners into union ranks. From the Wall Street Journal:

The notion that unionized airport baggage screeners in Detroit could have prevented Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding a plane in Amsterdam or Lagos doesn't make much sense. But sure enough, some in Congress are using the thwarted Christmas Day terrorist attack to argue that a new leader for the Transportation Security Administration could have saved the day.

Rahm Emanuel's famous declaration that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste seems to have become a way of Washington life.

That's the meaning of the political and media beatdown now being visited on Republican Senator Jim DeMint for the high crime of putting a hold on the nomination of Erroll Southers to head TSA, which runs the 50,000 airport screeners. Mr. DeMint objects because Mr. Southers has refused to say whether he would reverse current policy and back collective bargaining for baggage and passenger screeners, which the Obama Administration and Democrats on Capitol Hill support.

...Mr. DeMint's objection is rooted in a substantive concern that union practices and work rules will compromise security. TSA uses a performance pay system that tries to reward ability and effort, with the goal of recruiting and retaining the best employees. Unions prefer seniority-based pay that puts a premium on time served rather than performance.

TSA also needs to be able to change its procedures or move personnel to high-risk locations on short notice. Agency managers now have the ability to do that, but under union work rules they might need to get the permission of union leaders, who won't want to upset the rank-and-file.

In other words, Congressman Thompson has it exactly backwards. If the goal is to have a "nimble, responsive" TSA, a non-union work force makes more sense.

The Journal correctly points out that union boss work rules can hamper TSA's efforts to keep our skies safe. But also, union bosses often put the expansion of their forced unionism empire before the safety of the public and even the very employees they claim to represent.

But it doesn't stop at airport screeners, Big Labor is actively pushing to subject America's first responders to union monopoly control as well. 

The alarming trend of politicians forcing workers into union ranks continues in Illinois as Governor Pat Quinn -- in order to win Big Labor's political support -- is resurrecting the sordid legacy of disgraced Governor Rod Blagojevich (and Gray Davis of California) subverting workers' rights to benefit forced dues-hungry union bosses.

Quinn recently signed an executive order arbitrarily reclassifying state-reimbursed in-home health-care providers as state employees -- thereby opening them up to forced unionism under state law.  Service Employee International Union (SEIU) and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union organizers, armed by the state with the addresses of Illinois's nearly 3,500 in-home health-care providers, are competing to corral home health-care providers into compulsory union membership by going door-to-door to solicit support for their respective unions.

Pam Harris, a mother who stays home to take care of her son with special needs, was visited by two aggressive out-of-state SEIU organizers at her front door.  Understandably, Ms. Harris is worried that the Detroit-style labor relations that destroyed America's auto industry could also destroy her right to care for her son as she wants. (To say nothing of the union dues she will be forced to pay for the "privilege.")

Because she does not live in a state with Right to Work protections, if SEIU union bosses are successful in corralling all home health-care providers into forced dues membership, Ms. Harris will be forced to pay tribute to union bosses just to continue to take care of her own son -- even if she refrains from formal union membership.

However, as many Freedom@Work readers may already be aware, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Just last month, National Right to Work President Mark Mix reiterated in the Wall Street Journal NRTW's previous warnings that union bosses are working to unionize the health-care industry and that under Obamacare, the very thing that is happening in Illinois will happen nationwide:

Following [the Davis/Blagojevich] playbook, pending government-run health care bills create a "personal care attendants workforce advisory panel" that will likely impose union affiliation on hundreds of thousands of folks like Ms. Harris to qualify for a newly created "community living assistance services and support (CLASS)" reimbursement plan.

Ms. Sebelius will be taking her marching orders from the numerous union officials who are guaranteed seats on the various federal panels (such as the personal care panel mentioned above) charged with recommending health-care policies. Big Labor will play a central role in directing federal health-care policy...

Though it doesn't get nearly as much attention as other high-profile appointments, President Obama has recently nominated several new members to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency which oversees private sector labor relations and the federal policy of forced unionism.

These appointments have far-reaching implications for employee freedom, so it's important that NLRB nominees are thoroughly vetted before they take office.

Unfortunately, Obama's latest choice for the NLRB, Craig Becker, has radical views on the extent of union coercive power, and he comes directly out of the all-powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) whose bosses have been as thick as thieves with the notoriously corrupt Big Labor front group ACORN. Here's The Wall Street Journal on Becker's troubling history and his role in drafting Obama executive orders while on the SEIU union payroll:

One of Big Labor's priorities in Washington is to place allies in key government jobs where they can overturn existing labor policy without battles in Congress. This is a very good reason for the Senate to hold a hearing on the nomination of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Mr. Becker is associate general counsel at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is most recently in the news for its close ties to Acorn, the disgraced housing shakedown operation. President Obama nominated Mr. Becker in April to the five-member NLRB, which has the critical job of supervising union elections, investigating labor practices, and interpreting the National Labor Relations Act. In a 1993 Minnesota Law Review article, written when he was a UCLA professor, Mr. Becker argued for rewriting current union-election rules in favor of labor. And he suggested the NLRB could do this by regulatory fiat, without a vote of Congress.

Read the whole thing here. As a member of the NLRB, Becker will be in a position to rewrite American labor law and achieve his stated goals of marginalizing employees from the process of deciding whether they are unionized. Allies of worker freedom should be extremely concerned about this nomination.

--

Previous Foundation coverage of Becker's radical views can be found here, here and here. 

Last Tuesday, Health Care for American Now (HCAN) - a radical coalition that includes bosses from the all-powerful SEIU union, the AFL-CIO, the humilated United Auto Workers (UAW) union and dozens of other unions, along with forced unionism-allies such as the corrupt ACORN group - declared a national day of action.

The expressed goal of this Big Labor/ACORN axis? To create "political villains" by demonizing health care providers across the country.

Every health care proposal proposed by the Congressional Majority is loaded down with Big Labor giveaways that will expand forced unionism, so union boss enthusiasm for health care "reform" shouldn't surprise anyone. To achieve this forced unionism takeover of American health care, union bosses are pulling out all the stops, including an astro-turfed campaign in collaboration with ACORN.

A Foundation source (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of union retaliation) filled us in on some interesting details about HCAN's "grassroots activism" in California. Apparently, SEIU bosses from the corruption-riddled "United Long-Term Care Workers" local bused in 300 purple-shirted protesters to harass Blue Cross employees at their offices in downtown Los Angeles.  (The corrupt SEIU Local 434(b) struck it rich in 1999 when Gov. Gray Davis approved a scheme to forcibly unionize home health care independent contractors.  This local union alone saw its revenues rise 5-fold to more than $25 million in forced union dues each year.)

Media reports missed it, but according to our on-scene sources, protesters admitted they were paid and actually promised a free lunch to participate in HCAN's theatrics.

Paying people to protest on behalf of the union bosses isn't uncommon, either. Big Labor frequently buses in paid operatives for vicious corporate campaigns supporting efforts underway across America to impose unions on more workers.

This time, however, union bosses have set their sights quite high -- indeed, on the entire American health care field, or roughly 16 percent of the country's struggling economy.

For more about how Big Labor hopes to impose union affiliation and forced dues on America's unsuspecting health care workers, check out Right to Work President Mark Mix's op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

Foundation President Mark Mix's latest op-ed takes aim at Obamacare's forced unionism provisions. From the introduction:

In the heated debates on health-care reform, not enough attention is being paid to the huge financial windfalls ObamaCare will dole out to unions—or to the provisions in the various bills in Congress that will help bring about the forced unionization of the health-care industry.

Tucked away in thousands of pages of complex new rules, regulations and mandates are special privileges and giveaways that could have devastating consequences for the health-care sector and the American economy at large.

Read the whole thing here. For more information, check out Mix's interview on Lou Dobbs Radio. Click here to listen or use the embeddable player below: