Boeing handily defeats vote on workers’ union
BOEING Co handily defeated a union drive by workers at the company’s aircraft factory in South Carolina as almost three-quarters of workers at the plant who voted rejected union representation.
The secret ballot vote, conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) at polling locations throughout the North Charleston plant, was the first for Boeing and a highprofile test for organised labour in the nation’s most strongly anti-union state.
The NLRB said 74 per cent of the 2,828 workers who cast ballots voted against joining the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).
“We will continue to move forward as one team,” Joan Robinson-Berry, vice president in charge of Boeing South Carolina, said in the post.
In a statement, IAM lead organiser Mike Evans said: “We’re disappointed the workers at Boeing South Carolina will not yet have the opportunity to see all the benefits that come with union representation.”
At a Monday rally in a North Charleston hotel conference room, South Carolina state congressman David Mack looked out on about a hundred supporters of the long-shot campaign to unionise the city’s Boeing plant.
Noting the aggressive opposition from management and the state business lobby, including a battery of anti-union commercials on local TV, Mack quipped, “After seeing some of those commercials, I was almost afraid to come in here.”
Boeing had ample cause for confidence about staying unionfree in South Carolina, the nation’s least unionised state where a previous attempt to organise the aircraft factory fizzled before a vote. But the company isn’t leaving anything to chance Wednesday, when about 3,000 employees are eligible to vote on whether to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
The election was the latest round in a long-running, frequently ugly, unusually politicised struggle between the company and the union, which represents about 30,000 Boeing workers in the Seattle area.
It was freedom from strikes and escalating wages, a Boeing executive said in 2010, that was the overriding motivation for the company to place its new production line for 787 Dreamliners in South Carolina rather than Washington. The union brought a charge to the National Labor Relations Board alleging retaliation. The NLRB’s general counsel issued a complaint, sparking a firestorm of criticism from Republicans including then-Governor Nikki Haley and several presidential candidates. The IAM agreed to drop the case upon reaching a new contract for its Washington members.
Boeing’s southward shift was oft-touted by business and political leaders such as Haley, who saw union-avoidance as such a selling point in luring investment that she said she’d discourage unionised companies from coming to her state, so they didn’t “taint the water” there.
President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit the plant Friday.
“If the machinists won at Boeing, it would be an earthquake in the south,” said University of California, Santa Barbara labour historian Nelson Lichtenstein. So Boeing and its allies are pulling out all the stops to make sure that doesn’t happen.
The airplane giant ran 485 local TV spots between Jan 31 and Feb 6 urging workers to vote against the IAM, according to data from advertising tracker Kantar Media/CMAG. Additional anti-union ads from the South Carolina Manufacturers Institute had aired 350 times by Feb 6, including one that ran locally during the Super Bowl. Boeing has also deployed radio, billboards, YouTube videos, social media, e-mails and mailings to reach its employees, according to the union.
The IAM says Boeing has been pressing its case aggressively in the workplace as well, including through mandatory meetings, casual conversations on the shop floor, TV screens placed in break rooms, free anti-union T-shirts, and a giant stack of food, diapers, and clothing labelled as all the things employees could buy for the same cost as annual union dues. A postcard titled “The Truth About IAM Wage Claims,” one of several the IAM says have been distributed by management at morning meetings, urges employees to “Just say NO to the IAM” and features an image of Pinocchio.