Boeing Labor Fight Takes Over Harkin Hearing

MAY 12, 2011, 4:47 PM ET

By Melanie Trottman

An effort by Senate Democrats Thursday to highlight the problems of the middle class turned into a partisan debate over the merits of Boeing Co.’s effort to build a nonunion airplane factory – a project now under attack by the National Labor Relations Board.

Boeings’ new 787 Dreamliner takes off from Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport in February. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)

Chicago-based Boeing’s general counsel, invited by Republicans to be a witness at a Senate panel led by Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) , portrayed Boeing as a company that could be frustrated in its effort to create good-paying manufacturing jobs by the Democratic NLRB. The NLRB’s general counsel alleged Boeing violated federal labor law by locating the second production line for its 787 Dreamliner at the nonunion plant in South Carolina, siding with union workers in Washington state who said Boeing’s action was retaliation for past labor strikes.

The NLRB has scheduled a hearing in the matter for June 14 in Seattle – home to Boeing’s unionized production operations. “Presumptively, I do expect to lose,” Boeing’s General CounselMichael Luttig said. If he’s correct, Boeing would appeal to the agency’s majority Democrat board, a process he said he also expects the company would lose. He suggested the case could be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, taking several years and making it “exceedingly difficult” to determine whether to invest more in the South Carolina facility.

“This is not the way to encourage new job creation in the U.S. or even keep the jobs we currently have,” said Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, the ranking Republican on the Help Education Labor and Pensions Committee that convened the hearing. “The NLRB’s complaint is both legally unfounded and it is irresponsible.”

Democrats used much of their time to express support for unions and scold Republicans for making “political” a process that’s in the hands of an independent federal agency.

“This has become a political thing” that “borders almost on unethical activity” involving members of Congress interfering with a judicial process, said Mr. Harkin. He and other Democrats tried several times to steer the debate more toward taxes, infrastructure investment and education, but they couldn’t prevent the Boeing issue from resurfacing.

Mr. Harkin said he didn’t mean for the discussion to get “sidetracked into a narrow chute” and hoped to generate problem-solving ideas at future hearings. “I want to get to the essence of the middle class here,” he said.

Meanwhile, Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), andJim DeMint (R., S.C.) on Thursday introduced a bill that would prohibit the NLRB from ordering employers to relocate jobs and would protect an employer’s freedom to discuss the costs of having a unionized workforce.

Boeing lawyer tells Senate committee NLRB suit could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs
Y: Philip Klein 05/12/11 10:33 AM 
Senior Editorial Writer Follow Him @Philipaklein

If it succeeds, a suit by the National Labor Relations Board seeking to block Boeing from building airplanes in a non-union facility in South Carolina will set a precedent that could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide, the company's vice president and general counsel Michael Lutting said at a Senate hearing on Thursday.

Most directly, if Boeing is forced to shut down its new factory, it would kill thousands of jobs in South Carolina. But it would also have wider-ranging effects, Luttig argued in testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee.

Applied across the economy, Luttig said, it means that many companies that have production lines in unionized states won't be able to build additional facilities in right-to-work states. And on the flip side, companies won't want to open new factories in unionized states, because they'll be worried that they'll be limited in where they can expand in the future. Still other companies, Luttig said, would locate overseas.

The NLRB complaint calls for moving the new production line to the unionized Washington state, which Luttig described as a “breathtaking substitution of the board for management in the running of American company.”

He also dismissed the NLRB's charge that the factory was built to retaliate against the union.

“No company commits billions of dollars of capital to build a production facility out of spite,” Luttig said.