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At a June community hearing in South Carolina, workers spoke in support of the NLRB complaint against Boeing. |
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) threatened to come out with “full guns a blazing” against the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) if NLRB acting-General Counsel Lafe Solomon issued a complaint against the Boeing Co., charging it with moving production away from its Washington State facility in retaliation for the workers exercising their right to strike. The call occurred nine days before the NLRB issued the complaint April 20.
Graham’s threats were revealed in Solomon’s notes on the phone call that The Hill newspaper obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. In those notes Solomon writes:
He said that if a complaint was filed, it will be very, very, nasty.…He said that if a complaint was issued he was going “full guns a-blazing.”
Since the complaint was issued, Republican lawmakers have threatened to cut the NLRB’s funding, block nominations to the board and impose new laws to curtail its authority. Click here for more on the Republican attacks against the NLRB on the attacks.
Solomon’s notes on the case also reveal that Boeing General Counsel Mike Luttig threatened to bring congressional pressure if the NLRB issued a complaint.
He told me…he would go to the Hill to prevent me from litigating the case….I said that I had the CEO on tape saying that the move to SC was not because of economics but because the Machinists strike. I said I had a triable case and that I would do whatever I thought was right under the NLRA [National Labor Relations Act].
In a letter released yesterday about Graham’s and Boeing’s threats, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says:
No corporation should be able to discriminate against American workers and then avoid accountability for its actions by using its political influence in Congress to seek to undermine the rule of law. These new documents raise serious concerns that this may be exactly what happened in this case.
source=http://blog.aflcio.org/wp-rss2.php
