The law allows companies to shift production for economic reasons, but not to retaliate for past strikes or other worker actions. For us, it’s a motive analysis.
- Lafe Solomon, Acting General Counsel, NLRB
If federal regulators base their actions on “motives,” they have assumed unlimited power. Under this regulatory philosophy, regulatory decisions are based on what is presumed going on inside the heads of businesses as they make their decisions.
It seems that NLRB regulators have determined that Boeing’s “motive” in locating a new plant in South Carolina violated the National Labor Relations Act. In coming to this conclusion, the NLRB had thousands of pages of internal Boeing documents relating to its plant location decisions. In these thousands of pages, a large number of reasons were given for Boeing’s decision. Among them were considerations of supply certainty, labor costs, and tens or hundreds of other factors.
