Politicized National Labor Relations Board carrying water for unions

When Embarq, the wireless and Internet telecommunications firm, spun off from Sprint in 2006, it inherited 13 call centers with 1,500 phone-based customer service and sales representatives — centers which had been staffed using 13 different hiring processes.

In a considerable understatement, business analysts reported this “created operational inefficiencies.”

Consolidation was inevitable.

So, while Embarq’s recent announcement it was going to close its Las Vegas call center and open a bigger facility in Florida was more bad news for the Silver State’s struggling economy, it was hardly a mystery for the ages.

Nonetheless, a complaint was filed with the National Labor Relations Board, contending Embarq should have offered its Nevada union a chance to offer wage concessions to keep the facility here.

Despite the fact the Obama-era NLRB leans heavily toward organized labor — the current chairwoman is former union lawyer Wilma Liebman — the board in March consulted its precedents and held the relocation was not a mandatory subject for collective bargaining, and that Embarq therefore had not broken the law by refusing to explain its relocation decision to the union.

But those who view employers — particularly employers with the freedom to relocate — as the enemy, don’t appear satisfied to leave it at that.

“The Board’s task would be easier, and more importantly, the (National Labor Relations) Act’s policy of promoting collective bargaining might well be better served, if employers were required to provide unions with requested information about relocation decisions whenever there was a reasonable likelihood that labor-cost concessions might affect the decision,” Ms. Liebman wrote in her concurrence on the Embarq case.

Hm. And here we thought Washington was supposed to be an independent referee in such matters. That’s not the case if the NLRB’s goal is to “promote collective bargaining,” clearly.

The Wall Street Journal offered this plain-English translation on its editorial page Monday:

“Translation: Ms. Liebman wants to force far more companies to consult unions when they want to relocate, because unions might theoretically be able to offer concessions to avert a move. … Never mind that such a rule change would be an unprecedented intrusion into boardrooms, or that unions might use collective bargaining to request reams of data … to increase their negotiating leverage.”

And now comes a May 10 memo from NLRB Associate General Counsel Richard Siegel, advising the outfit’s regional directors: “The general counsel wishes to examine the concerns raised by Chairman Liebman in Embarq, and determine whether to propose a new standard in cases involving these kinds of information requests.”

One of the reasons America’s economy has remained vibrant, not calcified, is that firms are free to shift their operations elsewhere if labor costs are too high, setting a ceiling on wage and benefit demands. In fact, given the competitiveness of world markets, firms sometimes have no choice. This is a big reason the percentage of private-sector American workers who belong to unions has been shrivelling for decades.

But the NLRB continues to charge at its favorite windmills. In April, NLRB acting general counsel Lafe Solomon challenged Boeing’s right to build a new factory in South Carolina, on grounds that such a move might hurt the company’s existing union work force in Washington state.

“As more private workers shun union membership, Big Labor wants government to rig the rules on its behalf,” the Journal concludes. “The current NLRB, the most politicized in memory, is obliging with an unprecedented attack on the free movement of business and capital in America. If it succeeds, the result will be a flight of jobs overseas. …”

Indeed. If setting up, acquiring or maintaining a job site with a union work force means an employer will never be able to move — or even to stay open while expanding elsewhere, as would be the case with Boeing’s South Carolina plans … then why would any sane employer take on a unionized American work force, at all?