Gm 591 - Boeings Job Placement Violations

Boeings Job Placement Violations

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GM591 Leadership and Organizational Behavior

Professor: Todd Weber

05/25/2012

Introduction:

Boeing is an American aerospace and defense corporation founded by William E. Boeing in Seattle Washington in 1916 (The Beginings 1903-1926). Boeing has government customers in over 150 countries leading the way as a top U.S. exporter of airline support. In 1997 Boeing merged with Douglas McDononnell expanding their business units (The Boeing Logbook 1997-2011). They are among the largest global manufactures of aircrafts with their revenue, orders and deliveries. They are also the third largest defense contractor in the world. They are a major company that employs more than 170,000 people who work to build passenger planes, helicopters, war birds and missiles, satellites and spacecraft. With their corporate offices in Chicago, Boeing employs people across the United States and in 70 different countries. They are known for sending astronauts to the moon, bringing cultures together in harmony, and setting the way for today's new technologies. They are the world's largest aerospace company and the leader in manufacturing commercial jetliners, defense, and space and security systems. As of December 2001, Boeing was up in revenue to $68.4 Billion, a 7% increase from 2010 (Boeing, 2011). Even though Boeing is the world's largest contributor to defense contracts in the world, they do not escape the fact that there are some employees who are not happy with the way they are taken care of. For this reason many of the employees are union based and in so enjoy some job security when it comes to pay, medical and other benefits. But because of several strikes, Boeing has been thinking about other alternatives to solve these issues.

This paper is going to discuss one problem Boeing had when they decided that they were going to move a specific production line from Seattle Washington down to South Carolina where it is not a union plant.

Problem Statement:

According to the General Counsel, Boeing has been transferring work from Washington State to South Carolina in retaliation for some strikes in order to avoid future strikes within the plant. This is a clear violation of section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act (Mecham M. , 2011). Boeing has experience fours strikes since 1989 and was looking to move one of their production lines to a state that was nonunion. In doing this they violated the NLRA in that they were refusing to allow employees to be unionized if they so wished. Boeing claimed that they were not however being anti-union, but instead where being pro-growth by expanding the production line in order for more work to be done at another plant (McNerry, 2011). The General Counsel however felt that Boeing should have expanded their Pudget Sound location in Washington to be more accommodating to the extra work. By doing this however, caused the workers to again go on strike and file for an increase in wages, and get the expansion in Washington that the workers wanted

Literature Review:

According to Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times, Kelsey Snell National Journal, Arthur Laffer and Stephan Moore Wall Street Journal, David Kesmodel and Melanie Trottman Wall Street journal, Boeing has been in clear violation of the NLRA. The NLRA also states very clearly in section 7 that "Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities, for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection." In section 8, Boeing has interfered with the employees' rights guaranteed in section 7 (Natioal Labor Relations Act, 2009). Melanie Trottman and Peter Sanders of the Wall Street Journal focus on the closed door meetings that Boeing and the Union in June of 2011 to settle their dispute whether or not Boeing in fact was illegally shifting work to a nonunion factory.

Analysis:

After careful review of the information that was looked at, it would seem that Boeing was in fact transferring work down to South Carolina in order to avoid dealing with the union and a possible strike. The problem is that in making this move, Boeing got exactly what they did not want, another strike and a lawsuit against them for violating the NLRA. Boeing is a worldwide company that employees thousands of employees across the globe and many of those factories are not unionized for one reason or another. But in Seattle Washington, they are unionized and Washington is a union state. Boeing claims that by transferring some work down to South Carolina, they were not taking away