Boeing

By Jeffrey M. Hirsch, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. This is a cross-post from Workplace Prof Blog.

Since the initial uproar over the Boeing complaint, I've been sitting back and waiting for the hearing and ALJ recommended decision stage to wrap up. But a recent column by the NY Times' Joe Nocera has prompted me to post something yet again. When a columnist whose most recent notoriety was calling Tea Partiers "terrorists" writes a column that looks like it was written by Boeing, I just can't resist. I won't comment on his positive descriptions of Boeing, which many in the labor field might take issue with, but instead focus on his erroneous description of the case and the NLRB.

Nocera starts by claiming that he is "mildly obsessed" over the issue. I'd suggest that he make the obsession stronger, because it's apparent that he hasn't taken the time to read the complaint, read the NLRB's statements on the complaint, talk to anyone who knows the law, or even spent five minutes on the NLRB website to determine its basic structure and function.

Nocera at least said there was a "complaint" at issue rather than a decision, although he doesn't seem to understand the difference between the NLRB and the NLRB's General Counsel. Indeed, he states that most of the Board's "top executives" were nominated by Obama, without recognizing that the GC is the only political appointee who has looked at this case.

Nocera also messes up the GC's proposed order. The GC did not say that all the South Carolina jobs have to be moved back to Washington. As the NLRB's press release clearly stated: "To remedy the alleged unfair labor practices, the Acting General Counsel seeks an order that would require Boeing to maintain the second production line in Washington state. The complaint does not seek closure of the South Carolina facility, nor does it prohibit Boeing from assembling planes there." That may seem like splitting hairs given the economics involved, but Nocera and others are wrong to say that the NLRB is trying to take jobs away from a certain area. If Boeing wants to keep future work in SC, it can. Besides, the reality is that if Boeing were to lose, the likely result would be to pay the Washington workers backpay (and maybe some frontpay) in lieu of moving the work.

by Jeremy Leaming

Earlier this year Columbia University Business School professor Joseph E. Stiglitz examined, in sharp and incredibly disheartening detail, the efforts of America’s super wealthy to protect their lavish lifestyles at a great cost to the rest of the nation.

The professor noted that the nation’s top 1 percent have seen “their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. All the growth in the recent decades – and more – has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran.”

And the country's wealthiest, Stiglitz continued, have seriously lost touch with “ordinary people,” and are striving to ensure that the federal government does not do anything to change the way things are. (The tired debate over nation’s debt-ceiling and an accompanying agreement to slash spending on programs for the nation’s middle class and poor reveal more evidence of that effort to hold the status quo.)

Congress’s Tea Party-backed politicos are against any effort to raise taxes on the wealthy, and, as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi points out even Democrats are joining the fight for a so-called “tax repatriation holiday,” to allow some of the nation’s largest corporations to repatriate income from overseas at a major tax-break. Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says “the idea of granting a tax holiday for corporations that repatriate income they’ve kept overseas, and on which they have avoided taxes, is one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a long time. (And that’s saying something in these days and times.)”