Harvey Peeler

Boeing chief’s words show the importance of state’s right-to-work laws

Boeing Commercial Airlines chief executive Jim Albaugh said in an interview last week that he didn’t want to build his company’s new Dreamliner assembly line in South Carolina. He said the move is expensive and risky, and he would have preferred to create the additional capacity near Boeing’s Everett, Wash., operation.

But Albaugh is braving the risk and bringing a $750 million investment and an estimated 3,800 jobs to the Charleston area.

In the Seattle Times, Albaugh said, “The overriding factor was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we are paying today. It was that we can’t afford to have a work stoppage every three years. And we can’t afford to continue the rate of escalation of wages.”

Boeing machinists went on strike for the fourth time in two decades in 2008. The stoppage cost the company more than $2 billion.

And that’s why the battle that is being waged over union organizing, in Columbia just as much as in Washington, is so important.

One of the changes President Barack Obama promised to fight for while campaigning for the presidency is the Employee Free Choice Act. Far from offering employees freedom and choices, it would take away a time-honored right: voting by secret ballot on unionization.

Under the proposed law, employees would get a process known as “card-check,” designed to allow union organizers to intimidate employees into signing cards endorsing the union. The checking or not checking of the card, publicly, in front of co-workers and union organizers, would be the whole process. To get a secret ballot vote, employees have to coordinate their efforts and petition the government for a vote.

Today, if enough workers sign the cards, a secret ballot vote is automatically initiated.

The current law is clearly the fairer one, but the labor unions that make up so much of Obama’s political support despise it.

Because federal protection of the secret ballot might disappear, a law was put before the S.C. Legislature protecting the rights of South Carolina workers to a secret ballot. The bill, which would amend the state constitution, moved forward Thursday in the Senate, but not before overcoming a filibuster against it. South Carolina can and should create such a protection. It makes a clear statement as to where the state stands while the issue is garnering so much national attention. That lets prospective employers all over the world know that South Carolina is a place where, while workers have the right to unionize, unions do not have the right to intimidate them into doing so.

If the proposal passes with a two-thirds vote in the Senate, S.C. voters would then get to say, on a secret ballot, whether workers deserve a secret ballot as well.

The irony, and the fact that no one has ever been able to explain how the secret ballot does anything but protect the rights of workers, will likely not be lost on them.

goupstate.com