President Obama says he wants to “win the future,” but his labor policies are losing new jobs.
Last week, the Obama administration filed a lawsuit to prevent a company, Boeing, from creating new jobs in one state rather than another. This is another outrageous overreach by the federal government. Not only do we now have a law forcing people to buy a good or service (i.e. health care), the federal government is now dictating where companies can and can’t do business!
The Obama administration’s National Labor Relations Board filed the lawsuit because Boeing plans to build a new airplane production plant in the right-to-work state of South Carolina. The New York Times called the suit “the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relationship Board under President Obama.”
Politics aside, the economics of the NRLB’s suit could not be worse. Boeing is hiring nearly 1,000 new employees in its new South Carolina plant and has invested $2 billion in the project. Instead of prioritizing jobs and growing the American economy for all hard-working Americans, the Obama administration is now dictating where companies are allowed to create new jobs.
Understand that I have no grudge against private-sector unions. To the contrary, I grew up in a union family in South St. Paul, once the home of the nation’s largest meatpacking plants. I myself was a union member at a grocery store to help pay for school, and I appreciated the job. Unions historically have played an important role in ensuring safety and fairness in American industry. But today, Big Labor has joined arms with Big Government to actually stop job creation.
Private businesses should be allowed build new branches or plants anywhere in America — in fact, we should be encouraging it!
Sadly, President Obama is doing the opposite.
He is giving Big Labor veto power over where American companies can and cannot build their production facilities, and South Carolina doesn’t make the cut for an investment that would provide new jobs and American products to be shipped around the world.
America deserves a president who will support innovation and investment leading to new jobs and economic opportunities everywhere. But today, we have a president beholden to Big Labor, threatening American jobs, and undermining economic growth.
— Tim Pawlenty is a former governor of Minnesota.