President Obama on the NLRB's complaint against Boeing

At his Wednesday press conference, President Obama addressed the NLRB's complaint against Boeing.

I would have liked to hear a stronger general statement about the importance of upholding laws that protect workers; as David Dayen writes:

He concludes that labor and management shouldn?t fight and should ?come to a sensible agreement? before it results in shutting down a plant.

I?ll take the President at his word that he doesn?t know all the facts. Specifically, he must not know the fact that Boeing admitted flat-out that they made the decision to relocate from Washington state to South Carolina, a right-to-work state, because they wanted to avoid unionization. This violates the NLRA explicitly, and the NLRB had to act.

Now, the President may be making a further argument that any American job is a good job, and there?s no value in a union job vis-a-vis a nonunion job at the same company. Freedom of relocation, then, matters more than unionization. That?s at variance with everything we know about the effect of unionization on wages and prosperity, but that could be his opinion.

However, unlike his would-be Republican challengers, Obama gets it right by refusing to politicize this specific case:

"It's an independent agency. It's going before a judge. So I don't want to get into the details of the case. I don't know all the facts. That's going to be for a judge to decide."

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/PebdAFq9jCE/-President-Obama-on-the-NLRBs-complaint-against-Boeing

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