Washington, D.C. — U.S. Chamber of Commerce Senior Vice President for Labor, Immigration, and Employee Benefits, Randy Johnson, issued the following statement today expressing grave concern over a recent complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against The Boeing Company based on a decision to build a new airplane manufacturing plant in Charleston, South Carolina. Boeing’s plant is nearing completion and will create thousands of new American jobs. Existing construction alone has already created more than 1,000 jobs in South Carolina. The NLRB has alleged that Boeing violated the National Labor Relations Act in discriminating against the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers by not instituting this new manufacturing in Puget Sound, Washington, and has demanded that the work that is, and will be done in Charleston, be ended.

“We would rarely comment on the merits of a case still in its earliest stages. However, the precedent that the NLRB is attempting to establish here is so fundamentally unsound and troublesome that it cannot be ignored. The company here made a decision to begin new operations and a new production line for a wide variety of legitimate business-related reasons allowing it to meet the demands of its customers and therefore, to remain competitive. Boeing and its employees across the country, whether in Charleston or Puget Sound, will benefit. The company’s actions were well within the bounds of the National Labor Relations Act, and the Board appears to be simply attempting to create new rules which would put unions on a pedestal above all other entities in the United States to insulate them from the economic pressures which characterize our marketplace. The Act never contemplated this type of surreal special status and this case appears to be uniquely driven by an agenda directed at promoting the union agenda at all costs. It is a short sighted philosophy which, if allowed to prevail, will ultimately lead to the demise of many of our companies and the jobs they produce.”

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