Protecting workers ... or costing jobs?

John Logan

is professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University

The left and right in American politics increasingly inhabit different planets. Perhaps this is nowhere more apparent than when it comes to labor issues.

For the left, there is only one issue worthy of discussion - the no-holds-barred assault on public-sector bargaining rights in Republican-controlled states all across the country. For the right, public-sector unions remain an important target, but the real story lies elsewhere - the "astonishing abuse of power" by President Obama's National Labor Relations Board, which has just issued a complaint against Boeing for expanding production to a nonunion plant in North Charleston, S.C., rather than at a unionized one near Seattle.

Several aspects of the Boeing dispute stand out:

First, there is the fury that the NLRB complaint has aroused in conservative circles. Seldom short of anger, conservative pundits and politicians have gone apoplectic with rage on this in a way not seen for years. Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) fumed that the Obama NLRB was "acting like thugs . . . from a third-world country."

DeMint called the decision a "government-led act of intimidation" against firms that choose to manufacture in the nation's 22 right-to-work states - which outlaw union-security agreements - such as South Carolina. The state's other senator, Lindsey Graham, called the complaint "politics run amok."

Right-wing pundits have also expressed their outrage at the NLRB's action, calling it the "persecution of Boeing" and accusing the board of helping "forced-unionism states" (non-right-to-work states such as Washington) to "build a regulatory Berlin Wall around their borders to keep their businesses from leaving." And they have demanded that the Obama administration act decisively to rein in this "out-of-control" government agency.

None of these commentators has denied that Boeing engaged in the activity that is at the heart of the NLRB complaint.

Boeing made the decision to expand production in South Carolina, the company explained, to avoid the possibility of a strike at its unionized Washington plant. It believes that the law should not apply to a powerful corporation that is creating jobs in America rather than shipping them overseas. Boeing, of course, has already shipped thousands of jobs overseas - particularly to China, which is an increasingly important buyer for its planes - with its factories in Washington and South Carolina acting as final assembly plants for an increasingly complex global supply chain.

Boeing also received enormous economic and tax incentives from South Carolina for agreeing to locate there and will benefit from lower labor costs in its nonunion South Carolina workforce.

One must also put this self-righteous rage in perspective: In a time when unions are in imminent danger of going the way of the dinosaurs, South Carolina has one of the weakest labor movements, with private-sector union membership standing at 2.8 percent.

Even by the extreme standards common in the United States, antiunion sentiment in South Carolina is intense. Nikki Haley - the new governor, Sarah Palin favorite, and possible Republican VP candidate - stated shortly after taking office that she would actively seek to keep unions out of the Palmetto State. Appointing a lawyer from a well-known "union avoidance" firm to head her Labor Department, Haley announced: "We're going to fight the unions, and I needed a partner to help me do it."

Finally, in retaliation against the NLRB's efforts to enforce the law, congressional Republicans are threatening to cut its funding and gearing up to oppose the reappointment of its Democratic members, who are among the most accomplished members of the agency in decades. This is not the first time that Republicans have declared war on a Democratic NLRB, but the vitriol in the "job-destroying" accusations and threats of retaliation are more extreme this time round.

The last few months have witnessed a ferocious assault on public-sector unions at the state level. Now conservatives have extended that attack to the one federal agency that still cares about the violation of fundamental labor rights. If conservatives succeed in cowing the Obama administration on this issue, we may indeed be witnessing the last days of the labor movement in the United States.