Sometimes it is difficult to see the forest through the trees. Such seems to be the case of the media’s reporting on the matter of the union appointees at President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board and their prosecution of Boeing. This latest example of the media being blinded is the alleged ‘smoking gun‘ that was reported on Friday. However, if the media were to actually look at the timeline in the Boeing  drama against the ’smoking gun,’ it appears they’re being duped by just another well-orchestrated smoke screen to cover the Machinists own potentially unlawful retaliatory actions against the Boeing employees in South Carolina.

On Friday, various media outlets echoed the union story line that there has been a smoking gun somewhere buried deep in the far recesses of some corporate filing cabinet in Boeing headquarters.

According to the union’s story line, the smoking gun is the content of slides on several PowerPoint presentations (view here) given to executives, beginning in April of 2009. The plot, according to the Machinists, are revealed by the ‘Project Gemini’—Boeing’s slides weighing the pros and cons of opening a second assembly line outside of Puget Sound. These slides, according to the union, ’prove’ Boeing’s intent was to ‘punish’ Machinists union members.

The union even goes so far as to state on its website:

“The Project Gemini documents prove what we’ve suspected all along – that Boeing moved to Charleston to punish our members for exercising their union rights,” said Connie Kelliher, a spokeswoman for District 751.

While ‘Project Gemini’ clearly shows that the company was interested in a second source of production in South Carolina because of “lower labor costs” and its “current hostage situation,” the problem with the union’s (and NLRB’s) entire evil corporate conspiracy theory is in the actual time line of events.

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It is axiomatic—a given, if you will—that unions do not like workers to work overtime. Sure, they’ll do it, but if unions had their druthers, the work week would be limited to 40 hours—in some cases unions prefer 35 hours. The reasoning is simple, the fewer hours worked, the more employees an employer must employ and, in a workplace where unions can require dues, the union makes more money.

How serious are unions about restricting overtime? Consider this:

According to the constitution of the International Association of Machinists, “Members shall discourage the working of overtime, in order to further the opportunities for full employment, a living wage, and a 40-hour workweek [Art. K, Sec. 3].” Translated: More members equals more dues.

Here’s a simple example: Say a company has four employees and each works an average of 10 overtime hours per week and time and one half. If a union has the ability to restrict those four employees from working overtime, the employer has to hire one more employee (at 40 hours).

For the employer, rather than paying the four workers at time and one half, it may be a break even (depending on the other ‘loaded labor costs’ such as benefits and fringe benefits).

For the union, it is a win, as the union suddenly gets a new member, plus his dues and initiation fees (which can run in the hundreds or thousands of dollars).

For the employees who lose their overtime, they get to spend more time with their families…trying to figure out how to pay the bills. (more…)

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Within the next several months (perhaps sooner), the odds are President Obama’s National Mediation Board will find that Delta Air committed unforgivable sins during multiple union election campaigns last fall, causing the unions to lose the elections.  As a result, employees at Delta will be subjected to more union elections until they—in the minds of union bosses—vote the right way (to unionize). It doesn’t matter what the facts are—Delta’s conduct could have been as pure as virgin snow—the NMB will rule that (at least several) of the elections must be rerun.

Why? Because that is the goal and has been the goal all along (at least since 2009). In other words, the NMB “investigations” into Delta’s conduct is nothing more than a show—a sham—a kangaroo court in the vein of Fidel Castro’s trials of political opponents before the firing squads.

Following last November’s defeat of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) attempt at unionizing Delta’s flight attendants (the third union failure in ten years), the AFA-CWA filed “interference” charges against the airline, alleging the carrier improperly influenced flight attendants decision. The Machinists union (which is currently in a pitched battle against the AFA-CWA at United) also alleged interference in the elections it lost at Delta.  In all, unions lost at least nine known elections at Delta in 2009. (more…)

In a labor law system created by the National Labor Relations Act and overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), hardworking employees are typically the pawns in battles between Big Labor and management. It is rare when the livelihoods of individual employees are even considered by the NLRB, and its recent action of attempting to close Boeing’s South Carolina expansion is no exception to the harm that the NLRB has been known to cause employees.

But, three people have stood up to the NLRB and demanded to be heard by the NLRB with regard to its wrongheaded actions against Boeing’s South Carolina workers. Dennis Murray, Cynthia Ramaker and Meredith Going, Sr. with the legal assistance of the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation (Foundation) have filed as interveners in the NLRB’s Boeing case. (click here to download their motion).

Finally, as with the Chris Mosquera v. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, individual Americans tired of waiting for others have begun to grasp for liberty in attempt pull it back from the clutches of President Obama’s Big Labor controlled Administration.

Will there be more legal challenges to this Administration’s assaults on individual liberty and worker rights? You betcha.

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On Wednesday, when President Obama’s union-controlled National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against the Boeing Company for making a sound business decision to “dual source” its 787 production, it was another blatant example of a government agency run amok. However, while most of the nuts and bolts behind the dispute were detailed here, there are several other, more intricate details behind the NLRB’s legally tenuous prosecution of Boeing that are deserving of closer examination—most notably, the union’s own culpability behind the decision.

A Union With a Bone to Pick.

Even before the decision was made by Boeing to locate the second assembly line in South Carolina, Boeing’s union (the International Association of Machinists) had a problem in South Carolina. Namely, workers at the facility had voted the Machinists’ union out shortly after Boeing bought the facility in 2009 from Vought Aircraft because of workers believed the union poorly represented them.

What brought the workers to the point of decertifying the union an interesting story that is both part irony and part poor representation by the union. (more…)

Just keep voting until you get the desired results and we will change the rules along the way to help advance policy changes that could not pass through Congress.

This is the message the National Mediation Board (NMB) has transmitted on behalf of Team Obama to union bosses who lost ground in the private sector. Only 11.9 percent of all wage and salary workers, public and private, are union members, and the percentage of union members in the private sector is a mere 6.9 percent. Unions lost over 612,000 members in 2010, most of them in private sector unions.

Although they helped to elect a Democratic president and Democratic Congress in 2008, organized labor failed to secure its top legislative priorities. This would include replacing the secret ballot in unionization elections with a card check system and binding arbitration that would allow federal mediators to impose guidelines on business. The strategy now is to reshape public policy through unelected agencies that typically elude media scrutiny.

In 2009, the NMB radically reworked a long-standing workplace rule at the behest of the AFL-CIO that governed the way airline and railroad workers unionized. Prior to making the change, a majority of a company’s workforce was necessary to vote in favor of representation. But now that the rule has been modified only a majority of votes received as opposed to the majority of entire workforce is sufficient to force unionization on an entire company. This reverses 75 years of labor policy upheld under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Moreover, there is no realistic or attainable option for decertification meaning employees are permanently stuck with a union even if they no longer want it.

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