NLGRev 68-2[1].indd - National Lawyers Guild

112 national lawyers guild review
So, while the formal policy of the United States continues to be to support
collective bargaining in order to raise the wages of working people, states like
South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee have pursued their own policies
of discouraging collective bargaining and driving down rank-and-file wages.
Of course, in their effort to compete with each other for business, states do
more than rely upon their anti-union climate. States also offer tax breaks
and other forms of corporate welfare to lure businesses across state lines.
For instance, South Carolina offered Boeing an incentive package that has
been valued at over $900 million in order to secure Boeing’s $750 million
investment in the North Charleston facility. 21
South Carolina’s investment in Boeing points to tension between Republican
talking points and reality regarding this case. Republican politicians
have painted the case as an Obama administration attack on free enterprise.
Leaving aside that Lafe Solomon is actually a career employee who has
worked at the agency for over 35 years, the Republicans have picked an
especially odd poster child for the virtues of free enterprise. Boeing’s very
existence is due in large part to government contracts and billions of dollars
of corporate welfare.
For instance, over a fifteen year period from 1991 to 2005, the Department
of Defense provided Boeing with $45 billion in research, development,
testing and evaluation funding. 22 Earlier this year, the World Trade Organization
issued a report finding that Boeing had received at least $5.3 billion
in government subsidies to develop the 787 Dreamliner—the very aircraft
at issue in the NLRB complaint. 23 It takes a fair amount of chutzpah to take
billions of dollars from the government and then turn around and complain
if the government raises questions about how you run your business.
But, just as there has been a long history in this country of socializing
losses and privatizing gains, we also have socialized investment for private
gain. No one screams about government interference in the free market when
the government is offering subsidies to business. But, if the government is
going to invest in the success of a particular corporation, is it really too much
to ask that the corporation comply with federal labor law?
As Solomon has taken pains to point out, there is nothing particularly
novel or far-fetched about the government’s case against Boeing. The NLRA
makes it illegal for an employer to retaliate against workers because they
struck in the past. Here, Boeing executives announced that they were locating
new production work in South Carolina instead of Washington “due to
strikes happening every three to four years in Puget Sound.”
Boeing executives and the Republicans in Congress are arguing that the
Board is overreaching because the dispute is about new work rather than the