August 23, 2011
Joe Nocera’s NYT columns are usually well worth reading, but he really misses the boat in today’s complaint about the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) costing jobs. The basic story is that the NLRB is obstructing Boeing’s efforts to move production facilities from their unionized facilities in Washington State to non-union South Carolina.
There are several aspects to the issue that are misrepresented in the column. First, this is an issue about the transfer of jobs, not the creation of jobs. The jobs that would be created in South Carolina would come at the expense of jobs in Washington State. Boeing is not becoming less efficient in the production of planes — it will not require more workers per planes. Nor is likely that it will have any boost in orders, or at least not any time soon. This means that we are debating a transfer of jobs, not arguing over job creation.
The second point is that Nocera unduly credits Boeing for keeping jobs in the United States. Like almost all corporations, Boeing sets up its operations where it expects to minimize its costs.
It actually has outsourced a large amount of work to overseas facilities in the last two decades. This has proven to be a problem for Boeing since it has made it difficult to maintain coordination and quality control. News reports have blamed Boeing’s dispersion of production for delays in meeting its delivery schedules. In other words, it has not been patriotism that has led Boeing to keep much of its production in the United States. It was an effort to ensure that it could produce its planes to acceptable standards in a timely manner.
Finally, Nocera misrepresents the issue at hand. No one disputes that Boeing has the right to relocate its operations in a state with few unions and anti-labor laws, like South Carolina. The issue is whether the move to South Carolina was part of an explicit threat directed against the union.
The situation is exactly analogous to moving a plant overseas. A company has the legal right to relocate a facility to Mexico or China in order to reduce its costs. However, it does not have the right to threaten to move if its workers vote to join a union. An explicit threat of this nature would be a violation of labor law, since it would imply that it is punishing its workers for joining a union.
The question in this case is whether the move to South Carolina is part of a threat against its unions. This involves an examination of the record of negotiations and discussions between management and Boeing’s unions. Without knowing this history, it is not possible to make an apriori assumption that the NLRB case has no merit, as Nocera does in his column.
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