Restoring a fundamental freedom.

• Author: Mix, Mark
• Position: Labor Relations

BOEING IS A GREAT American company. It recently built a second production line--its other is in Washington state--in South Carolina for its 787 Dreamliner airplane, creating 1,000 jobs there so far. Who knows what factors led to its motivation to do this? As with all such business decisions, there were many, but the National Labor Relations Board--a five-member agency created in 1935 by the Wagner Act--has taken exception to this move, ultimately based on the fact that South Carolina is a right-to-work state. That is, South Carolina, like 21 other states today, protects a worker's right not only to join a union, but also to make the choice not to join or financially support a union. Washington state does not.

The general counsel of the NLRB, on behalf of the International Association of Machinists union, has issued a complaint against Boeing, which, if successful, would require it to move its South Carolina operation back to Washington. This would represent an unprecedented act of intervention by the Federal government that appears, on its face, un-American, but it is an act long in the making, and boils down to a fundamental misunderstanding of freedom.

Where does this story begin? In 1935, Congress passed and Pres. Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the National Labor Relations Act, commonly referred to as the Wagner Act after its Senate sponsor Robert Wagner (D.-N.Y.). Section 7 of the Wagner Act states: "Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection."

Union officials such as William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and John L. Lewis, principal founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), hailed this legislation at the time as the "Magna Carta of labor." In actual fact, however, it was far from a charter of liberty for working Americans.

Section 8(3) of the Wagner Act allowed for "agreements" between employers and officers of a union requiring union membership "as a condition of employment" if the union was certified or recognized as the employees' "exclusive" bargaining agent on matters of pay, benefits, and work rules. On its face, this violates the clear principle that the freedom to associate necessarily includes the freedom not to associate. In other words, the Wagner Act did not protect the freedom of workers because it did not allow for them to decide against...