Alexander Says NLRB Complaint Against Boeing “Will Cause the Export of Jobs, Not the Export of Airpl Says complaint will hurt unionized states as well as right-to-work states by sending jobs overseas
“This is an assault on every middle-income American, and especially on the millions of middle-income
President's appointees on the NLRB are following. However, then Boeing expects to win the case when it goes to the U.S. Court of Appeals or, perhaps, even to the Supreme Court. But it will take two to five years for all that to happen.
“I ask: What happens to American jobs in the meantime?
“Well, first, this complaint against Boeing will slow the number of good, new jobs coming into my state of Tennessee, which has a 9 percent unemployment rate, and it has had that for two years. I have watched our state grow over the last 30 years, from the time I was governor. We had a hearing last week that Senator Harkin, chairman of the Health, Education, and Labor Committee, called about middle-class incomes. What I said at the hearing was that the effect on middle-class incomes in Tennessee -- the state I know the most about -- is that 30 years ago we were the third poorest state. Because the auto industry chose to come to our state, partly because it was a central location in the population market and because it is a right-to-work state with a different sort of labor environment than other states, middle incomes have gone up.
“One-third of the manufacturing jobs in our state are now auto jobs. Nissan is there. General Motors is there. Volkswagen just came there. Hundreds of suppliers have come to Tennessee. They like the environment. They like the road system. They like the central location. But they also like the right-to-work law.
“Suddenly, any supplier or any manufacturer who wants to create a new facility in one of the 22 right-to-work states, including Tennessee, according to the National Labor Relations Board’s acting counsel, is going to have to think twice because that company, which could be a small company, may not want to spend two to five years before the National Labor Relations Board. I think the acting counsel knew exactly what he was doing. He was trying to freeze job expansion in the United States at a time when we need job expansion the most.
“There is an unintended consequence to this. If jobs cannot move into Tennessee and other right-to-work states because of the Boeing complaint, they may not move into the states that do not have a right-to-work law. Why is that?
“According to Jim McNerney, the CEO of Boeing: ‘An unintended consequence of the Boeing complaint [is that] forward thinking CEOs also would be reluctant to place new plants in unionized states -- lest they be forever restricted from placing future plants across the country.’
“If you want to put a plant in, say, Michigan, which is a unionized state, you might not do that because you then could not move to South Carolina or Tennessee or Arkansas or any other state with a right-to-work law.
“If you cannot go to a unionized state, and if you cannot go to a right-to-work state, then where do you go if you want to
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