Labor Union Membership, Right to Work, and Education

Labor unions have been having a tough time competing in the private sector for a long time and now are even shrinking as a percentage of government workers.  In 2015, union workers were 11.1% of the work force.  This fell to 10.7% in 2016 with a loss of 240,000 union members.  Only 6.4% of private sector workers are now union members.  The mainstay of the unions is in the government sector with 29.6% of state government employees being union members and 40.3% of local government employees being members.  The local government union membership is much inflated by the many teachers who pretend to manage 25 or 30 people in the classroom, but are really blue-collar workers unable to negotiate their own work compensation as individuals.  The high percentage of government workers in unions has more recently been falling so that the percentages above are 15-year lows.

Within the last year, West Virginia and Kentucky have become Right to Work states, increasing the number of Right to Work states to 27.  There is a good chance that Missouri will soon become a Right to Work state.  In the 2016 election, a Republican who championed Right to Work hard won the governorship in Missouri despite the unions supplying the Democrat who opposed Right to Work with more than $10 million of campaign funds and other support.  Missouri voters returned every one of the state legislators to office who supported Right to Work.  Missouri, like other states with forced union dues collection, has been losing jobs to states with Right to Work laws.  The bordering states of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky all have Right to Work laws.  Only the basket case state of Illinois still maintains forced unionization on its borders.

You would not know it based on the recent campaign rhetoric, but manufacturing jobs increased by 236,000 in 2016.  Despite that overall growth in manufacturing jobs, union membership decreased by 74,000.  The growth in manufacturing jobs has been in Right to Work states.  In 2016, union membership in the 25 states that were Right to Work states for the full year decreased by 290,000, falling from 7.1% to 6.5%.  Membership in forced unionization states increased by 50,000, making it clear how dependent labor unions are on forced unionization.  Union membership increased in only one-quarter of the states with Right to Work laws, while increasing in 60% of those with forced unionization.  The percentage of Michigan workers in labor unions has fallen by 2.2% since Michigan became a Right to Work state in 2013.  Government worker unions lost their privileged powers in Wisconsin in 2011 and since then union membership has fallen by 136,000 workers or by 40%!

The loss of union power over the school systems in Wisconsin since 2011 and the freeing of school systems to pay teachers on their individual merit, is improving education in those school systems that have moved to the individual merit evaluation and compensation of teachers.  A Stanford University researcher, Barbara Biasi, has found that the school systems that have chosen to stick with union-favored seniority compensation programs rather than individual merit programs are falling behind the individual merit school systems.  Governor Scott Walker's Act 10 collective bargaining reform has allowed the thinking school systems to improve.  Who would think that evaluating and rewarding individual teaching ability would improve education?  Clearly the Democrats who claimed this would undermine the government-run school system would not allow this possibility.  How surprising it is that there is a correlation between being a capable teacher and classroom manager and being capable of negotiating your own working conditions and compensation!

Space and Good Fences Make Good Neighbors -- Good Neighbors Make Limited Government

Once again the overcrowded cities have voted for the more authoritarian Presidential candidate, while the people of "flyover country" and the "Racist South," from the viewpoint of presumptuous Progressive Elitists, have chosen a less authoritarian candidate.  This again proves that space and good fences make good neighbors, while overcrowded conditions lead to bossy people who want ever so badly to push their values on other people and to micromanage their lives.  Somehow, these "educated" Progressive Elitists always manage to presume that they can manage the lives of people they do not know better than said people can do this themselves.  They pretend politically that they respect these people whose lives need to be micromanaged by them, but in their private discussions among one another, they actually despise the people they believe to be incapable of choosing their own values properly and managing their own lives.

In the 2016 election, it is clear that not only did a majority of Americans in Flyover Country and in the South reject the rule of the Progressive Elitists, but so too did a majority in the Rust Belt.  The Obama years of manufacturing industry suppression and of fossil fuel energy suppression took a big toll on the Rust Belt and led to an upheaval with catastrophic and surprising results for the Democrat Socialist Party.  The low percentage of Americans with jobs worth having and the long stagnant wages had finally become too much for many Americans.  The ever-increasing expense and inconveniences of ObamaCare played a significant role also in the rebellion.  Seeing more businesses go out of business than were created for many years under Obama had its consequences.  The loss of jobs due to the vendetta against coal and the threat of a loss of jobs due to the Democrat desire to suppress fracking not only hurt the immediate industries, but hurt those who transported or used the coal, oil, gas, and the products made from them.  It would hurt those in the plastics industry, for instance.  Meanwhile, many a business and resident either had energy bills higher than necessary already or was facing sharp future increases.  Many were sick of the constant stream of Democrat lies and misrepresentations.  Many white Americans, especially men, were sick of being discriminated against in hiring and in contracting work.  A rebellious upheaval was long overdue.

Donald Trump was the beneficiary of all this and the fact that Hillary Clinton was a very unappealing opponent.  Not that Trump himself was an appealing Presidential candidate.  He leaves much to be desired as well.  But as I have noted, he does have some good policy positions, which if he carries through with them with a Republican House and Senate, might make him a much less undesirable President than Hillary would have been.  Trump will now be put to the test.

The actions he badly needs to take are these:

• Repeal ObamaCare as pledged.
• Reduce Corporate and Personal Income taxes, as pledged, so American businesses can compete better in the global markets from American plants and facilities and so multinational companies can afford to return $2 trillion of earnings abroad to the states to make a huge investment in America.
• Protect the Right to Work Laws so Americans are not forced to join labor unions they do not want to join.  Also deny unions card check and rapid representation elections.
• Nominate a judge for the open Supreme Court position who has a proper understanding of the broad and many individual rights every one of us has.
• End the federal government role in promoting the false catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  Fire the many employees of the EPA, NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation who have insidiously supported this false science and wasted huge sums of taxpayer money on it, while forcing up energy costs in the entire nation in its name.
• Follow through on his pledge to have a government employee hiring freeze.
• Hire good managers for the Veterans Administration and its hospitals, while allowing many more options for veterans to use private sector medical care.
• Stop the practice of government favoring some groups based on their ethnicity or sex. Everyone has equal individual rights and it is the function of legitimate government to protect everyone's equal rights.
• The purpose of a smaller Department of Education should be to end the government monopoly on K-12 education by advancing the widespread use of vouchers to allow all students school choice.  Trump is on-board to start this process, but should expand its scope.
• Reopen federal lands and offshore areas for the development of fossil fuel mines and drilling.
• Sell off much of the federal land so it can become more productive, provide more jobs, and generate more local and state tax revenue.
• Reduce the number of regulations and their expense, as he has pledged to do.
• Simplify the tax code as pledged.
• End the death tax as pledged.
• End the IRS practice of discriminating against non-profit organizations who support individual rights and limited or constitutional government.
• Limit federal grants to colleges to work with defense potential.  This will largely end taxpayer funding to faculty devoted to expanding the role and size of government.
• End requirements that government pay union level wages.
• End the Obama executive action that raised the salary level at which overtime pay had to be paid.
• Reduce the federal minimum wage so that more Americans of low productivity or in low cost of living areas may be employed.  This will be very helpful in allowing the under-educated to get their first jobs and in promoting businesses in both poor city neighborhoods and low cost of living areas of the country.
• Repeal Dodd-Frank, which was a deception to make Americans think the government had no responsibility for the Great Recession.  It made it difficult for smaller banks to operate, thereby adding to the number of banks too big to fail.
• End the government monopoly on student loans for college.
• Reduce government spending on infra-structure, which seems to be the opposite of what he wants to do.
• Produce a new immigration law which makes it easier to immigrate to the U.S., while insisting that immigrants enter and stay in the U.S. legally.
• Promote senior military officers based on their ability, not based on the political party with which they are registered to vote.  Do not discriminate on the basis of sex or ethnicity.
• Review Obama's Executive Orders and change those which are unconstitutional or wrongheaded.  Some right-headed orders may need enabling laws by Congress.  The Executive Orders of earlier Presidents may also need review.  Mind you, Executive Orders can be a proper exercise of presidential management of the Executive Branch of the government, but they should not affect people outside of the Executive Branch.
• Shut down government-run service organizations.  Their work belongs in the private sector.
• Shut down many of the government agencies which number so many that the government cannot say how many exist and which have the authority to issue regulations for which purposes.  These agencies are often performing no valid function of government, are poorly managed, have overlapping authorities, or are obsolete.

If Trump tackles the job that needs doing, he will need all the energy he has over the next four years. I hope he does take on these tasks and works effectively with Congress to get it largely done.  He will also need to communicate well with the American People about what he is doing and why.  It is critically important that the U.S. economy return to at least its longtime average growth rate of 3%.  It should not be hard to enjoy long-term real growth of 4% actually if the government would only get out of the way.  The compound growth of a healthy economy over 40 years will raise the American standard of living vastly more than will any growth restrictive government regulations, laws, or taxes. Americans badly need the hope, change, and opportunities of a reduced government sector and a rich and robust private sector.

A Crime Syndicate Head, Foreign Agent, Harridan President?

Hillary Clinton is the worst major party presidential candidate in my lifetime, with the possible exception of Obama.  The first election of Obama at least came with a built-in excuse for those of a lame mind and irresponsible nature.  Those who make no real effort to learn about the candidate for whom they vote could claim him as an unknown.  Of course they could not make the same excuse in 2012.

Hillary is a decades long known collectivist, personal power luster, and criminal and crime abettor.   She is now known also as the thief of government e-mails, a paid (through the Clinton Foundation) foreign government lobbyist while Secretary of State, and an effective undercover spy for foreign governments using her highly insecure e-mail server as a drop for our national security information for any foreign government to pick up at their leisure.  Hillary gave up classified documents and much insight into State Department bargaining positions for her convenience in hiding her pay for play schemes through the Clinton Foundation.  Any foreign government, generally friendly to the U.S. or unfriendly, that was not monitoring her e-mails was negligent or incompetent.  It is known that at least five foreign governments did and that some also monitored the e-mails of Hillary's close confidants.  It is likely many more were able to do so without leaving amateurish traces of their snooping.  Hillary truly should be in jail for her effective work as a spy against the national interests of the United States.

Let us not forget that Hillary also defied court orders to turn over the e-mails she stole from the government by destroying them.  Then she testified that she suffered massive memory loss both to the FBI and more importantly to the court when she evaded the answers to many of the Judicial Watch questions the court ordered her to answer.  Can a person with such massive memory loss function as President of the United States of America?  Before her severe memory loss, she failed to take the State Department required course to be able to recognize classified information and to handle it correctly.  Can anyone unable to recognize classified information be entrusted as President, the Commander-in-Chief?

Hillary took a nearly $100,000 payoff engineered through a commodities trading scheme from Tyson Foods and worked for them as a lawyer when Bill Clinton was attorney general and then governor of Arkansas so the state would look the other way as Tyson Foods heavily polluted the state rivers. Tyson Foods was then and still is one of the nation's top polluters.  Then she and Bill contributed to the savings and loan disaster with their Whitewater activities.  As President, Bill Clinton pardoned a top Tyson executive who was imprisoned for trying to bribe the Secretary of Agriculture.  Of course he also pardoned a fugitive from justice, Marc Rich, with the encouragement of Eric Holder.  Rich, a long-time contributor to the Clinton Foundation, was convicted of tax evasion, wire fraud, trading with the enemy, and racketeering.  The Clinton's have also had a long relationship with the billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and have often visited him on his island in the Caribbean Sea, known to many as Lolita Island.  The Clintons are very unusually nasty people.  They have close ties with many other corrupt people, including Hillary's brother.

Hillary Clinton was even later than Obama in continuing to support Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), both of which came out of the Clinton administration and deprived LGBT individuals of their individual rights.  The reason for this may well be that most of the major nations providing contributions of money to the Clinton Foundation have laws making sex between two people of the same sex a crime punished by death.  Most also routinely deny women equal rights.

The Clinton Foundation claims that it is a charitable foundation and says on its website that it spends 87.2% of its money on program services.  But you are in serious error if you assume that this means that needy people are receiving 87.2% of the Foundation's contributions.  Almost all of that money is actually used to promote such causes as the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud and the provision of sub-standard AIDS medications made in India and the jetting around the world of Bill Clinton, Chelsea, and their colleagues as they build their world-wide crime syndicate with close alliances with scam artists and dictators around the world.  Now it appears that the Foundation even paid for Chelsea's wedding and a lavish income for her and her husband, the son of a convicted criminal.

Let us take note of Hillary's bad policy positions:

• A national $15 minimum wage, still higher in high cost of living areas, which she wrongly claims will help grow the economy, but which will increase unemployment and force many businesses out of business
• Support for union card check and the outlawing of Right-to-Work laws in the states, forcing many Americans into unions, dues payments, and making contributions to the Democrats many oppose
• Kill off more coal industry and supporting industry jobs
• Decrease or end fracking which provides us with relatively inexpensive and reliable energy
• A 12-week family and medical leave mandate to be paid by increased taxes
• Higher tax penalties to force more people to use the ObamaCare they hate
• She has said behind closed doors that she wants open immigration
• She wants the government to decide whether equal pay for equal work is the case in companies, but not for her staff.
• Free college education, with taxpayers to pay for young people uninterested in learning, but very interested in four years of play
• Increased business taxes, which will increase the cost of goods and services, decrease business investment, and decrease employee compensation
• Supports the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and the false claims of catastrophic man-made global warming
• Spend more money on Medicaid and induce the states to do so also
• Maintain the government monopoly on education, preventing school choice and anchoring the teachers unions as the prime beneficiary of government-controlled education
• More limitations on the right to bear arms
• Campaign limits on freedom of speech for individuals and companies, but not labor unions or other Democratic Party support organizations
• Have taxpayers provide matching money for first-time home down-payments
• Give preferred status to women and chosen minorities for capital access in starting businesses, thereby making it harder for men not in the preferred minorities to obtain capital
• Force taxpayers to pay for more free Internet
• Block efforts to privatize the VA and its medical services
• Expand national service at taxpayer expense
• Prevent options to save for retirement that by-pass Social Security impoverishment in retirement
• Maintain policy to force Christians and others to violate their conscience

Well, Donald Trump is not a gentleman.  He can be childish and indelicate.  He has paid politicians to favor his business.  But, he is not the head of a major crime syndicate and he has not massively shuttled national security information into a drop to be picked up by any old foreign government.  He did not fail to act in Benghazi to save American lives and he did not lie about why those lives were lost.  He may well prove to be a failed President, but with Hillary's political track record and her massively wrongheaded policies, she will certainly be a failure.  Known failures should not be put in office.  If Trump fails, he should be put out of office in four years.  He does have a some good policies, such as

• Supports the fossil fuel industries
• Repeal of ObamaCare
• Reduction of business taxes, making it much easier to U.S. companies to hire and build facilities and plants again in the U.S. and to bring home $2 trillion of money now kept abroad
• Allow private schools to compete with the generally poor government schools
• Bring order to immigration laws
• Oppose the catastrophic man-made global warming scam, saving tens of billions of taxpayer money and ending distortions to the economic markets through crony mercantilism
• Favors term limits on members of Congress
• Freeze government employee hiring
• Reduction of regulations with active effort to retire many
• Allow energy infrastructure building to provide less expensive, safer, and more reliable energy
• Cancel many of Obama's unconstitutional executive orders
• Allow veterans to see private doctors rather than travel long distances to VA Hospitals and provide them timely service
• Seriously investigate fraud in the VA
• Overhaul the IRS with its attacks on freedom-favoring tax exempt organizations
• Reduction of personal income taxes
• Repeal the death tax
• Supports the right to bear arms

I do not like Trump and since he will not win in Maryland, I may not vote for him.  But, he is clearly the lesser of two evils and it is not even close.  Trump is not a principled defender of individual rights, but neither is he a fully committed collectivist as Hillary Clinton is.  He probably has some respect for productive people operating in the private sector, which Hillary clearly does not.  He may prove a rascal as so many politicians do, but it may also take him time to become so corrupted and to learn the usual political paths to scamming the People.  If he disappoints us, as Hillary surely will, we should be happy to throw him out in 2020.

Hillary says "We are Stronger Together."   What she means is "I am stronger when you jump to it and do what I tell you to."  I for one do not want this not very intelligent, power-hungry person telling me what values I must choose and micromanaging my life.  She is incredibly presumptuous and would be even if she knew me, which she most certainly does not.

I am appalled by the number of Americans supporting her authoritarianism.  I note that this includes the majority of American women, who clearly do not wish to protect the rights of the individual against the force of government.  The use of force should be minimized in our society, not made rampant and placed in the hands of a corrupt, unknowing, uncaring harridan.

The Right to Work: The Economic Advantage

22 states are Right to Work states in which unions cannot make it a condition of work for a worker to join the labor union or pay some fee assessed by the union based on what it claims is its value to the nonmember worker.  Right to Work states since 1990 have demonstrated much greater economic performance in jobs creation and in the growth of state GDP.  Here are the comparisons between highly unionized and union shop states vs. the least unionized and Right to Work states:

The 22 Right to Work states have produced more new private sector jobs than the more populated 28 states fostering the union shop.  The Right to Work states created new jobs in the critical private sector at a rate 2.3 times that of the Union Shop states.  The least unionized states are increasing their state GDPs at much higher rates than the most unionized states. 

Richard Vedder of Ohio University noted in a Cato Journal publication (Winter 2010) that:

In 1970, 28.5 percent of Americans lived in right-to-work states; by 2008, the proportion had risen to nearly 40 percent (to over 121 million).  The population living in right-to-work states more than doubled, compared with a modest 25.7 percent increase in non right-to-work states. Moreover, only a small proportion (about 15 percent) of the increase in the proportion of Americans in right-to-work states is due to states newly enacting right-to-work laws. Indeed, in the last 20 years, only one state (Oklahoma) has adopted a new right-to-work law. Most of the
population gains arose from greater population increases in right-to-work states.

 Professor Vedder made a mistake in his comment about the affect of Oklahoma becoming a Right to Work state in 2001.  Oklahoma only had a population of 3.687 million in 2009.  Using that figure rather than a slightly lower population in 2008, Oklahoma's conversion only produced about 10% of the increase in the  proportion of the U.S. population in Right to Work states. 

Between 2000 and 2008, 4.7 million Americans moved from Union Shop states to Right to Work states.  Moreover, a larger fraction of the population chooses to work in the Right to Work states than in the Union Shop states.  The only four states with over 70% of the working age population working in 2007 were Right to Work states.  The national average then was 63%.  People in Right to Work states appear to prefer working more than those in Union Shop states.  Greater freedom of association on the job should make work more appealing.  That higher work force participation may also be due to the fact that people in the Right to Work states had a 10% greater growth in personal income between 1993 and 2009.  They also gave rise to the creation of 60% of all new businesses, despite having only about 40% of the population at the end of that time period and less earlier.

Public opinion has swung strongly against the unions being empowered to put workers under pressure to join a union as a condition of employment.  Only 11.9% of the work force is now union and the private sector workforce union rate is only 6.9%.  Legislation to become a Right to Work state is being considered in Wisconsin, Indiana, New Hampshire, and Missouri among other states.  For fear of the union hubbub and a desire to emphasize state debt control, Gov. Mitch Daniels decided that the Right to Work bill that had passed the Indiana state lower legislative branch was not a priority.  So it is on hold.

Missouri which was heavily unionized (25%) in 1978 when it last considered becoming a Right to Work state, was only 11.2% union in 2010.  If you count only those who are actually working, only 9.9% are union members.  In other words, if you are a union member, you are more likely than others to be unemployed.  Missouri is largely surrounded by Right to Work states, such as Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee.  Only Illinois and Kentucky of its neighbors are Union Shop states.  The legislature is lining up in favor of becoming a Right to Work state, though the Democrat Governor is expected to veto such a bill.  It is being considered for a statewide referendum to get around that.  Testimony by a company site consultant that 75% of the companies coming to him say they would prefer a site in a Right to Work state and 50% say they will not consider a site in a Union Shop state at all, had a telling effect upon the Republican committee heads.

Unions like to point out that family incomes are higher in Union Shop states, but when union dues are subtracted and the lower cost of living of Right to Work states is taken into account, family income is actually higher in the Right to Work states.  Clearly, the trend is solidly in their direction.  Business growth and jobs creation in the Right to Work states and out-migration from the Union Shop states will continue to put pressure on the Union Shop states to allow more freedom of association in employment.  Of course, many will long continue to be held hostage by unions, but they will pay a huge price.

The Union that did not Represent its Members

Unions that do not represent the interests of their members are common.  This is fundamentally why union membership in the private sector has fallen to only 6.9% in 2010 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The many grossly underfunded union pension funds are another clear proof that the unions pay little attention to the best interests of their members.  The International Association of Machinists (IAM) is involved with the recent Boeing altercation in which they and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) claim Boeing built a production line in the Right to Work state of South Carolina in retaliation for a strike in Washington state by the IAM.  It used to represent the employees at the facility in South Carolina, as well as those in Washington.  It is interesting to see why the South Carolina machinists decertified the IAM.

In 2007, when Vought Aircraft Industries, Inc. owned the facility in North Charleston, South Carolina, the IAM narrowly won an election to represent 200 employees there.  Vought was a Boeing parts supplier and the IAM strike against Boeing forced Vought to close the South Carolina plant temporarily.  The new IAM members were laid off.  Meanwhile, the IAM and Vought spent a year discussing the new labor contract.  The employees were grumbling and there was indication that a decertification attempt was underway.  The IAM quickly put an offer of Vought to a vote, though this surprised Vought which was working up better offers.  Apparently, the IAM wanted some contract to lock in the new members in South Carolina no matter what.  Some employees were unaware of the emergency vote on 7 November 2008 set up by the IAM just as Vought was.  The IAM announced that an overwhelming 92% of membership had approved the new contract.  After some investigation, it was found that of the 200 affected employees, only 13 had voted.  Twelve members out of 200 had committed everyone to a new labor contract.  Many of the relatively new labor union members complained that the 1.5% wage increases would not cover the increased union dues and inflation.

In July 2009, Boeing announced it was buying the South Carolina facility from Vought and completed the purchase that month.  The employees filed to decertify the IAM that month also.  The IAM was thrown out because the workers had concluded that it was not interested in their best interest.  Subsequently, the IAM is furious that Boeing is building a second 787 Dreamliner production line in this South Carolina facility using the now 1000 employees there who are no longer union members.  The Obama-packed NLRB is backing the union vendetta both against Boeing and these dissatisfied former union members.

The Purpose of the National Labor Relations Board is to Deny Cooperation

As I just wrote in my last post, the benefits of society reside in our freedom of association with others of our choosing for purposes of our choosing.  This fundamental right allows us to cooperate with others in exchanges of mutual benefit so that we might all prosper and live more secure and richer lives.  In this process, we are constantly exchanging values, which we must evaluate and rank using our minds.  We succeed in these exchanges best when we think rationally.  Government properly imposes limits on private action to keep individuals from using force to affect these exchanges so that they are voluntary and people are free to only make exchanges they see as beneficial to them.  Unfortunately, governments also commonly use force to force individuals to make exchanges of values they would not make voluntarily.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is an especially egregious actor in forcing involuntary associations and involuntary exchanges of values.  Long-established laws have given this board the power to force individuals and associations of individuals owning companies to enter into labor exchanges with labor unions rather than individual employees whenever a majority of the employees vote to join a union.  In many cases, states force those who do not want to be union members to pay union dues nonetheless.  The states that do not force individuals to join the union when the union wins an election, are called Right to Work states.  The Right to Work states preserve a larger measure of the individual employee's right to associate than do the forced union states.  Some argue that the Right to Work laws interfere with a company's right to force its employees to be union members!  That argument is an example of how crazy things get once one allows the use of force to deprive individuals of their rights.  The NLRB has long been charged with depriving companies and individuals of the right to hire union workers or not and to force them to rehire union workers after strikes.  The NLRB also runs the elections in which the employees of a company vote to join or reject a union or accept a bargaining contract.  It places severe restrictions on the freedom of speech of companies during union elections as well.

The NLRB has been stacked by Obama to make it even more biased towards labor unions.  The NLRB's acting general counsel earlier this year threatened to sue South Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and South Dakota because the people of those states amended their constitutions to give their citizens the right to a secret ballot in unionization elections.  It is amazingly presumptuous that a minor federal agency can sue a state because its citizens have decided to protect their rights in their own state constitution.  The people acted because the Obama administration and unions backed a new law that would allow unionization elections to be performed without secret ballots, using what is called card checks.  This would have allowed union bosses to strong-arm employees one by one into signing up for the union without benefit of a secret ballot.  It would be as if Obama had complete lists of everyone who voted for him or against him and could thereafter award all government contracts only to those who voted for him and give entitlement benefits only to those who voted for him.  In addition, he could use the New Black Panther Party people he has refused to prosecute for polling place intimidation to make people vote for him in the first place.  One of the main reasons the labor unions supported Obama so strongly in his election was because they wanted card check and he had agreed to give it to them.  They were gambling heavily on this to turn around their loss of union membership in the private sector, where most employees have caught on to the fact that unions are very good at killing the companies for which the employees work.

Representative Jeff Duncan of South Carolina has introduced legislation to keep the NLRB from pursuing the threatened lawsuit.  He has 30 co-sponsors of the bill.  The NLRB's purpose is so wrongheaded that 176 members of the House of Representatives voted for an amendment by Tom Price of Georgia to completely defund the NLRB.  The freedom of association will always be impaired by this agency.

The most recent new threat to our freedom to cooperate by the NLRB is its claim that Boeing violated federal labor law by not building a production line for its 787 Dreamliner aircraft in Washington state.  The International Association of Machinists and the NLRB claim that Boeing's decision to build the production line in the Right to Work state of South Carolina was retaliation against the union because of its history of strikes that cost the company many billions of dollars.  The union and Obama's NLRB claim this is an infringement of the worker's right to strike.  That right to strike exists, but so does the right of the company not to hire the striking workers back.  Present law does not let the companies fire the strikers, which infringes the rights of the company owners.  Despite the many absurdities of the present law, the Supreme Court has ruled many times that companies can consider the negative effects of strikes when making their business decisions.  What is more, Boeing's present collective bargaining agreement with the IAM allows Boeing to build new plants outside of Washington without union approval.  This is apparently unusual for such union agreements, which only shows how unions have generally been able to impose themselves into company management.

The corrective action the NLRB is asking for is that Boeing be forced to build a 787 Dreamliner production facility in Washington state at great expense.  Boeing was considering building the facility in Washington, but they wanted a no-strike clause in their labor agreement with the union so they would have production stability in their on-going competition with EADS (Airbus) in Europe, which the union would not give them on any affordable terms.  The request for a ruling against Boeing comes when Boeing has nearly completed a new facility for the 787 in North Charleston, where jobs are much needed.  Boeing has already hired 1,000 workers there.  The announcement of their plan to build this plant was made 17 months ago.  Meanwhile, Boeing has hired 2,000 more workers in Washington state, so the union was not retaliated against in terms of a reduction of employees in Washington.  But the union bosses certainly are disappointed that they cannot collect union dues from the new South Carolina employees, since they voted not to join the union.  The first production of airliners in South Carolina is scheduled for July 2011.

The Obama crew, contrary to some reports, is not calling for the direct shutdown of the new largely built facility in South Carolina.  They are just imposing equal large costs to put a facility into Washington state with an equal number of employees, who will be union members.  They no doubt plan to use this fact to claim they are not killing the jobs in South Carolina or stopping the company from continuing its hiring there.  Despite not calling for the shutdown of the South Carolina facility, Boeing, Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and Sen. Jim Demint are all protesting the interference of the NLRB.  But, the state of Washington is a better bet to give electoral votes to Obama than is the state of South Carolina in his re-election attempt, so Obama does not care.

Whenever government interferes with the individual right of association or the freedom to cooperate, it causes harm to our society.  This is a real social injustice done to many individuals.  The present action of Obama's NLRB is to try to intimidate companies against building new facilities where a union they have an agreement with does not want them to.  It is also an attempt to keep unionized businesses specifically from building new plants and facilities in Right to Work states.  These restrictions only serve to reduce the value a company can offer its customers in exchanges.  This will reduce the growth of the company and may cause it to fail, ending such union jobs as it presently supplies.

In any case, companies come and go and large companies are replaced by more nimble smaller companies all the time.  If the NLRB is allowed to keep unionized companies from expanding in Right to Work states, new companies will find even stronger incentives to plant themselves in Right to Work states and avoid union interference with their plant and facility siting decisions.  Unionized companies will have no choice but to put their new plants overseas, rather than in the United States.  Overseas companies will have reduced reason to establish new facilities in the U.S. and will stay out.  U.S. unemployment will be higher as a result.  Americans will find themselves with a lowered standard of living.

Of course the Obama Democrats have been talking about placing new taxes on companies who expand aboard instead of at home.  The strongest growth in the American economy now is precisely in companies with operations abroad or with high exports, such as many manufacturers.  The Obama taxes will be targeted at those companies and reduce their growth still more than our highest in the world corporate taxes and most onerous regulations have already done.  These wrongheaded Democrat Socialists are just one economic disaster after another.