John B. Judis: The Most Radical Thing the Obama Administration Has Done

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic.

On April 20, Lafe Solomon, the acting general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), issued a complaint against Boeing. Two years ago, the company had announced it was transferring the production of 2,000 airplanes from a unionized plant in Puget Sound, Washington, to a non-union plant outside Charleston, South Carolina. According to Solomon’s complaint, what made this decision illegal was the company’s motive. High-level Boeing officials had stated publicly that the move was being made in response to strikes—four over the previous two decades—led by the machinists’ union at the Puget Sound facility. If Boeing had said the move was dictated by costs or by the weather, the NLRB would not have cried foul.

Forty or fifty years ago, these kinds of cases were common. Now, there are fewer of them—but not because companies are better-behaved. Ever since the Reagan administration, which crippled the NLRB, companies have been free to operate with impunity, moving plants or simply threatening to do so in order to quell organizing efforts. That’s why Solomon’s complaint, which might have gone unnoticed a generation ago, may be the most radical thing the Obama administration has done....

The popularity of New Deal liberalism—from the NLRA to Social Security, the minimum wage, and progressive taxation—was rooted in the unionized and primarily white working class of the North. That working class has been decimated by the movement of private manufacturing firms to non-union states and overseas. It has been supplanted politically by a private sector non-union working class more attuned to divisions of race and religion than of class. That, and the white Southern backlash to the civil rights movement, were major factors in the growth of a new Republican conservatism—and in America’s tilt rightward over the last thirty years.

The Boeing case, then, isn’t just about corporate prerogatives. It’s also about the future of American politics. With Solomon’s complaint, the NLRB has taken a small but definite step toward restoring an earlier America—one where politics wasn’t dominated by the Chamber of Commerce or demagogues like Jim DeMint, and workers had rights that mattered.