In this on-going fight between the National Labor Relations Board and Boeing, what does it all really boil down to?  The fact is that the union that filed the complaint with the National Labor Relations Board isn’t just upset with Boeing as a company … they are frightened by the idea of competition.  That’s right.  For a union member, competition from other workers who are not compelled to join a union is a nightmare.  So what do these unions propose to do about the threat of competition?  Stifle it – shut the competition down, that’s what. In the Boeing case, the union chose to use the police power of government and the sympathies of a board filled with former union appointees.  On the other hand, you can go the route of the United Auto Workers … and try to unionize your competition.  In this case, the competition for the UAW are those pesky foreign auto companies that have established plants in the South: Hyundai in Alabama, Kia in Georgia, Volkswagen in Tennessee, among others.  UAW President Bob King says that his union has launched a $60 million campaign to organize these foreign automakers in southern states.  If he can’t convince the people that they want to be part of a union, then his next step is to pressure these companies by accusing them of violating workers human rights.  Huge yawn.  

The fact is that the jig is up.  Americans are realizing that unions are a jobs killer.  Unions are more likely to destroy the companies who’s workers they represent than business competitors are.  Simply put, unionized companies are damaged goods with a decreased ability to compete in the marketplace.  Business owners know this, of course, but increasingly so do employees.  This means history is not on the unions’ side.  Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg has the ugly facts:

This storyline gets one thing right: Government policy did have a lot to do with the decline of unions. But it wasn’t labor law that mattered. In a study of the decline of unions between 1973 and 1988, economist Henry Farber and sociologist Bruce Western found that the chief reason was that nonunionized companies grew faster than unionized ones. Employment at unionized companies dropped by 2.9 percent per year while employment at nonunionized companies rose by 2.8 percent a year …

You might be thinking that unionized companies shrank mainly because they tended to be in declining industries. But you would be wrong. Economist Barry T. Hirsch has found that only 20 percent of the decline in unions between 1983 and 2002 resulted from shrinking unionized industries. Eighty percent of it resulted from a decline within industries. Take manufacturing: Between 1973 and 2006, the number of unionized workers in that sector dropped by 6 million, but the number of nonunion employees rose by 1.5 million. In short, unions declined because unionized companies couldn’t compete with nonunionized ones.

Now do you see the similarities between Barack Obama and these unions?  Private, competitive companies are the enemy.