Union Busting Made Easy.. Boeing to Move 787 to South Carolina

[lib2DaBone]

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/10/29/boeing-opens-787-facility-in-south-carolina-as-struggle-with-uni/

Boeing opens 787 facility in South Carolina as union woes persist

The economic competition between the North and the South continues, 144 years after the end of the Civil War. As The Seattle Times is reporting, Boeing (BA) is opening a second final assembly line in Charleston, South Carolina, for its 787 -- the 850-order, $150 billion-backlog passenger jet whose production schedule has been delayed six times in the last two years.

One reason for the delay was a 52-day strike last fall by Boeing's machinists union, largely based in Washington state. But South Carolina, which Bloomberg reports is a right-to-work state, meaning workers there can't be forced to join a union, offers Boeing some leverage against the union; it can threaten to shift more work there if the union in Washington doesn't play ball.

Boeing isn't alone in using this tactic. The economic competition between North and South also plays an important role in the automobile industry. States like Michigan, which hosts General Motors and other big U.S. manufacturers, have powerful unions which demand high wages and health care for workers. Southern states like Kentucky make it harder for unions to operate, and thus attract manufacturers like Toyota (TM). This helps explains why senators from Kentucky and Alabama objected to the GM and Chrysler bailouts.

Will this move help Boeing get the 787 back on track? Not really. It has yet to demonstrate that the aircraft can even fly. And when it does get the 787 to the point where it passes FAA test requirements, those South Carolina workers that Boeing will hire are going to require training and expertise that its Washington workers may already possess.
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But If we had universal health care, would the unions have to fight so hard to to cover double-digit increases every year? Why do they always make the Unions the bad guy?

Why do Conservatives fight both health care and a living wage? The American worker is 4 times more productive than the Chinese worker. http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/09/02/productivity-up-employment-down-is-squeezing-workers-good-for/

:shrug:

The flogging will continue until the morale improves.

[Captain Hilts]

1. Yep. Nothing like a good ol' Right to Work state to ensure low wages!

[Wapsie B]

3. Yeah, and in a place like South Carolina there have to be legions

of low-income repugs down there voting against their own best interests, listening to anything the Chamber of Commerce types spew out of their mouths.

[Kalyke]

8. Well, in the right to work states' defense, it's also cheaper to live down here.

Not that I'm defending what I call "Right To Be Fired" laws, mind you. I hate those laws.

I just wanted to point out that, while, yes, right-to-work states have lower wages, most of them also have lower costs of living.

[Sirveri]

18. CA is right to work, it is NOT cheap to live here.

The real travesty of right to work is that the people put up with it because of all the ridiculous 'socialism' scare mongering tactics against unions.

[Xicano]

19. CA right to work? When? Did I miss something?

Because as a member of the ILWU I can tell you that you won't be working on the docks unless you're a member of the ILWU. The only exception is if you're a "casual" worker who picks up any "left-over" work not done for the day by union members, and, when any of them manage to get a job they have to observe all the rules laid down by the union labor contract.

Prior to being a member of the ILWU, I was a member of the United Aerospace Workers Union working at McDonnell Douglas, and, the same thing. If you worked at McDonnell Douglas here in California you had no choice but to be a member of the various unions representing the various trades.

The is true if you work in groceries stores here in California. If your store is unionized, you have to be a member of that union. Below is a map on wiki highlighting the right-to-work states.

I am very happy of course that California is not a union busting right-to-work sate.



Peace,
Xicano





Right-to-work states:

[Sirveri]

24. F@#&... This makes it even worse, I was basically lied to by my employer.

They kept saying right to work blah blah blah. This was back in '03, shitty cashier job I had, company isn't even around anymore. But it's still a total eye opener to me. Got 'fired' for no apparent reason one week before my health benefits were about to kick in.

[Xicano]

25. Damn, that sucks. I'd be mad as hell too.

Too bad there isn't proof of their lie. It would serve them, and you and your co-workers, right to sue the hell out of them for violating your rights.

I am sorry to hear that happened to you Sirveri.


Peace,
Xicano

[Wapsie B]

2. I just have to think that this mindset will come back to haunt Korporate Amerika big time.

It won't be pretty.

[Nikki Stone1]

4. That is why they are union busting through the West Coast.

Clear Channel (KFI's John and Ken who are heard throughout the state) are vilifying public employee unions and their pensions. Public employee unions will change over the next few years thanks to the super wealthy's complete inability to part with a nickel so that others might live better.

[lib2DaBone]

14. Well said..

[Nikki Stone1]

17. I wish it weren't happening.

I'm scared of what is coming for California.

[AllentownJake]

6. It already is

You can't sell things to people with no income and the credit card well has run dry.

Less people with good wages, less people traveling, less need for Boeing 787 to ferry them around places.

[Wapsie B]

10. Less people with good wages.........you'd think the masters in a consumer-driven economy

would understand this simple fact. Drive wages down and guess what? Less new cars sold, houses, luxury items, and on and on.
Those at the top of the food chain will still get their money and be handsomely rewarded for their ownership of corporations. What part of this are they not getting?

[AllentownJake]

11. Well you see you have a race to the bottom

Because you don't want everyone's workers to be underpaid and overworked. Just yours and once one does it, well they all have to do it.

So it is like the prisoner's dilemma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

If I don't wage war on my employees my competetion might and drive me out of business. So you have a system that encourages the system to destroy itself.

Another name is Locust Capitalism where the system devours and destroys everything in its path till there is nothing left to devour.

[Wapsie B]

12. So what do these people see as the end result of all this madness?

It's absolute lunacy. They drive home the point of needing to stay competitive but lose all site of the bigger picture. Even if your company is the survivor there's fewer and fewer consumers out there able to buy whatever you're selling.

[AllentownJake]

16. They operate quarter to quarter

not even year to year.

There is very little long term outlook to their madness. It is a side effect of the obsession with the stock market we all have now due to the culture and hopes of getting rich and quick.

There used to be buy and hold investment strategies. There are none anymore. Talk to most people in the market and they essentially day trade. Taking bets on who will be up and which will go down.

Look at it this way, there was a celebration over DOW 10,000. The first time the DOW hit 10,000 was 1999. If you had done a buy and hold strategy on DOW spiders right now you would be at a loss because of inflation.

The entire system is set up to crash. They new very well that the housing market was unsustainable but as long as the music is playing...they will dance.

If you build your house on a foundation of sand, which is what we are built on. The system will crash.

What you need to be asking is what is the "change" that is going on to build a stronger foundation.

[high density]

21. Companies can't see beyond the next quarter it seems

It's all about getting maximum profits for the short term. The long term result of cutting jobs and driving down wages seems obvious to you and me, but these companies just recently seem to act shocked to find out that consumers can't buy $30k cars, $250k houses, and $100/mo phone service when we are earning $12/hr (or worse, without a job). Wall St doesn't see it either. If the stock market is supposed to be based on the value of future profits, where is that money coming from in America? Our job market has been killed over three decades, if not longer, with everything since the dot com pop being fueled by mortgage borrowing and ridiculous speculation.

[AllentownJake]

5. That's it I'm not buying a 787 this year

Just be happy they have government contracts. Otherwise this plant would be in Mexico.

[DainBramaged]

7. Cheap labor Cons and apologists

they'll be here in this thread stinking it up in no time......

[Ichingcarpenter]

9. I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uhmmm, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and uh, I believe that our, I, education like such as uh, South Africa, and uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uhhh, our education over here in the US should help the US, uh, should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for us.”


They will obviously build one hell of a plane down there!

[lib2DaBone]

15. LOL.. from the lips of Faux News to ears of U.S. Amerikans...

[Mari333]

13. good reason now not to fly anymore....

planes made by unskilled non union workers??? no thanks! I will take the train or drive from now on.

[Are_grits_groceries]

20. SC has a bloody labor union history. PLEASE read this and see what happened!

SC site of bloody labor strike violence crumbles

I
nstead of focusing on stable conservatism, some emphasize episodic radicalism and periods of dramatic upheaval. Rather than view southern workers as actively pro-capitalist, it sees them as defeated, passive because they have been forced to submit to capitalist rule. Their real nature has been revealed only on a few occasions when they rose up in failed rebellions.

Perhaps the most spectacular of these rebellions came in September, 1934 when for three weeks nearly 200,000 southern textile workers, two-thirds of the total workforce, conducted the largest single strike in southern industrial history. Spreading their message with 'flying squadrons' of car-borne strikers, these textile workers showed none of the conservatism and docility associated with southern labor.

They were the cutting edge of 1930s labor unrest that in Michigan, Pennsylvania, California and elsewhere in the North led to the establishment of strong labor unions and stable collective bargaining. But in Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas strike defeats led to the nearly complete eradication of independent unionism.

Janet Irons tells the story of this strike to make a larger point about southern exceptionalism. In her account, southern deunionization does not reflect the wishes of southern workers. Instead, it was created by relations of power favoring employers and conservative politicians.

Given opportunities, southern workers rushed to join unions and to support working-class based movements for social change. During World War I, for example, southern workers formed unions under the protection of the War Labor Board. But, once the war ended, the withdrawal of government support allowed employers to crush these independent unions quickly.

These struggles suggest to Irons "that workers would willingly join unions if afforded the opportunity." But, "in the absence of some countervailing power, such as that of the federal government . . . state officials did not hesitate to use state militia to eliminate" unions. "If southern textile unions were to succeed," she concludes, "it would be necessary for the balance of power to shift. Textile workers needed allies, constituencies in the larger society who would be willing to weigh in against the power of the mill owners" (p. 22).

The union boom and the strike of 1934 are the core of Irons's study, the substance of her argument that conflict, power, and repression are the keys to understanding southern labor. Southern textile workers wanted collective representation, she argues, but southern textile unions grew after 1928 because there were new opportunities created. Facing declining real wages and increased workloads at the end of the 1920s, southern textile workers joined strikes and, again, looked to form independent unions.

The support of northern unions after the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the enactment of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), gave them a fresh opportunity, which they seized to form unions. To increase their own economic and political influence, northern textile unionists (in the United Textile Workers) sent paid organizers into the South and provided advice, research, and encouragement for union organization.

Labor's enhanced status in the Roosevelt administration encouraged workers to join unions. "It is impossible," Irons writes, "to overestimate the sense of hope mill workers felt because of the Code. It legitimized their sense of place in society. It also created an intense loyalty to the New Deal and to President and Mrs. Roosevelt" (p. 77).

Union membership jumped sharply with the enactment of the NIRA. Some mills achieving universal membership even while others remained completely nonunion. Again, Irons concludes that the difference reflected "the divided mindset among southern manufacturers about how to respond to Section 7(a) . . ." Many mills "brazenly ignored 7(a), others did not attempt to interfere with union organizing; some even explicitly recognized their workers' unions" (p. 69).

But workers quickly grew disenchanted with the NIRA when it failed to protect workers' right to organize or to provide higher wages or better working conditions. They concluded that either through delay or design, the NIRA bureaucracy was more responsive to employers than to workers. "Out of several hundred cases on the stretchout we have placed before the Board," UTW president Thomas McMahon complained, "we haven't received one adjustment" (page 119).

Desperate for protection from anti-union employers and to get help in improving conditions but convinced that management had no "notion of living up to Article 7a," UTW locals throughout the South moved to take direct action and to strike. The UTW voted nearly unanimously for a general strike in August 1934.

The UTW entered the strike with no money and minimal staff. Nonetheless, the strike attracted wide support throughout the South and was supported with a missionary spirit by workers who saw themselves as righteous agents of New Deal justice. "The first strike on record," Roy Lawrence, president of the North Carolina Federation of Labor, said, "was the strike in which Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. They too struck against intolerable conditions" (p. 121).

But despite widespread support and innovative tactics, employer resistance overwhelmed the strike. Irons describes the often brutal tactics of anti-union southern employers, the beatings and discriminatory firings, the evictions from company-owned towns, and the murders. State governors in North and South Carolina promptly deployed militia to drive away pickets and to help private mill guards; Georgia's governor waited till after the state's primary to declare martial law and arrest strike leaders throughout the state.

At Duneen Mill in Greenville, South Carolina, for example, 425 national guardsmen were deployed to break up pickets. These guardsmen never acted on their instructions to 'shoot to kill,' but nearby, in Honea Mill, private mill guards killed seven strikers (p. 133).

Southern textile workers could not overcome such powerful repression on their own. Their only hope was to arouse enough northern support to force their employers to negotiate. But, as at the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the North had little patience for southern strife.

Rather than condemn the guards and their employers for the murders at Honea Mill, for example, Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins called the affair 'an unfortunate situation" (p. 149). Such words were hardly designed to galvanize public sympathy for the textile workers. Instead, news of the killings validated what many in Washington thought they knew: that the strike was a foolhardy enterprise.

Denied northern support, southern textile workers lost their strike and their union, a failure that unleashed a flood of recriminations and employer retaliation that would undermine any renewed organizing drive for decades. Southern exceptionalism was created in 1934 when national politicians and northern unions abandoned southern workers' attempt at win union status.

Through the rest of the twentieth century, low southern wages and nonunion working conditions would undermine northern unions and liberal politics. Perhaps, Irons implies, rather than blaming some mythic southern exceptionalism, it was their own fault.

http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/0476

The workers weren't anti-union. After a point, they had no support and got the shit beaten out of them. Once unionizing was broken in the South, it was always a poorer place. Companies could land here and not worry about competition.

[sentelle]

22. There's a bigger issue here

Boeing has made it clear that the location of all operations are negotiable. They have already alluded to the possibility of moving 737 next gen, and 747/800 operations out of WA state.

I think the 787 move is clearly a move to get rid of the unions.

[Romulox]

23. Just like buying a Toyota made in Mississippi, innit?

:shrug: