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The National Labor Relations Board has set an election date of Sept. 10 for hourly Boeing Charleston employees in response to a petition an employee has filed for union decertification. Representatives from Boeing and Machinists union Local 787 agreed to the date during closed-session talks this morning at the Charleston County Courthouse.
By Molly Parker
mparker@scbiznews.com
Published Aug. 11, 2009
The National Labor Relations Board has set an election date of Sept. 10 for hourly Boeing Charleston employees in response to a petition an employee has filed for union decertification.
Representatives from Boeing and Machinists union Local 787 agreed to the date during closed-session talks this morning at the Charleston County Courthouse.
“We did not contest the vote,” said Bob Wood, spokesman for the 14-state southern district of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
Dennis Murray filed a petition to decertify the 2-year-old Machinists union local on July 30. That same day, Boeing announced it was buying the local fuselage assembly operation from Dallas-based Vought Aircraft Industries, a key supplier for the Dreamliner program.
“It’s time to let the people make up their own minds,” Murray said after the hearing.
It was only within the past two months that the local was officially certified by the national Machinists union, Wood said.
Union campaign starts
Wood, who is based in Dallas, said union officials will spend the next month working to educate workers about the need for union representation in the cyclical aerospace manufacturing industry.
“What the people who are for this (decertification) want is for them (workers) to never again have democratic due process on the job. We are certainly going to work hard to educate and inform everyone at Boeing, at this facility, about how important that democratic due process is.”
Wood criticized Boeing for a memo it distributed to employees — dated Aug. 7 — in which the company says that the NLRB told Boeing that the union plans to contest the decertification election. The memo states: “We have been told that the IAM will oppose the election, arguing that the law allowing this petition should be changed.”
“I will not speak for Boeing, and Boeing does not speak for us,” Wood said.
Boeing supports election
Boeing legal counsel Richard Hankins, of McKenna Long & Aldridge in Atlanta, said the memo was based on the company’s understanding of the union’s intentions. The NLRB informed Boeing last week, and again on Monday, that the union was likely to contest the election process, he said.
“We were here to support the employees’ rights to have an election,” Hankins said.
The vote will take place at the Boeing Charleston facility near Charleston International Airport. Currently, about 280 hourly employees are represented by the union, whether or not they are dues-paying members of the union, Hankins said. In right-to-work South Carolina, union membership cannot be forced, though contract terms are applied uniformly.
The contract agreed upon by the Machinists union and Vought was a three-year deal, but it had to be renegotiated after Boeing acquired the plant. The opening up of the contract allowed for employees to petition for decertification, according to Howard Neidig, assistant to the regional director at the NLRB office in Winston-Salem, N.C.
For a decertification election to take place, at least 30% of the work force must indicate via petition that they “no longer want to be represented,” Neidig said.
The NLRB is charged with oversight of the decertification election and certification of the 30% threshold that triggers a secret-ballot election.
Union promises better communication
Murray, of Summerville, a quality inspector at the Boeing facility, said he filed the petition for the decertification vote because he felt as though the union was representing employees poorly.
A little more than a year after Vought workers voted to join the Machinists union, the union voted to ratify a contract. But several workers were angry about how the contract vote was handled, saying union representatives failed to inform most members of an eleventh-hour meeting prior to Vought’s announcement it would be idling its plant for several months.
Wood called the situation with the Vought contract “unusual” but necessary because Vought was preparing to lay off the majority of its hourly workers to account for a slowdown in production demands.
Without a contract, employees would have been let go without callback rights based on seniority, or a guarantee of the same pay upon return, Wood said.
“It was handled as best as could happen,” Wood said. “Going forward, we are working to ensure that the communication is as clear and pervasive as possible.”
Washington vs. South Carolina
Boeing has said that it is eyeing Charleston and Everett, Wash., among other sites, as potential locations for a second Dreamliner assembly line. Wood called that discussion “pie in the sky.”
“They always play communities against each other, and we will not play that game,” Wood said.
Wood accused S.C. officials of touting the state’s work force as the cheapest and says it does workers here a disservice.
“These workers and this state have a lot more going for them than just being cheaper than everyone else,” he said.
Reach Molly Parker at 843-849-3144.
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