Associated Press
Former South Carolina Governor and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks during the June 2011 dedication of Boeing’s $750 million final assembly plant in North Charleston.
The political star of former Republican Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley rose in 2010, when she positioned herself as a smart, modern alternative to the blatantly racist good ol’ boys of South Carolina politics. Now she’s hoping to do the same thing again by playing a more palatable alternative to Donald Trump and hoping that corporate money will flow her way.
As I write these words, Haley is ostensibly still in the 2024 presidential race, but one has to assume that she knows she is the longest of long shots and is playing her own long game. (Editor’s note: Haley dropped out of the race on March 6.) Regardless, you may be wondering why your friendly neighborhood labor columnist is talking about her at all. It’s not just because I spent a significant portion of my life living and working in America’s least union-dense state, though that does explain how I first came to write about Haley. That was when she rose from obscurity—with the help of Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor of Alaska—to become the first woman governor of the state and the second-ever governor of Indian descent, after Bobby Jindal of my current home state of Louisiana. It’s because Haley’s favorite hobby, which she repeatedly jokes about, is busting unions. And one of the companies that helped her burnish her anti-union credentials, Boeing, is in the news again as well, after one of its planes lost a door plug in midair, creating a door-sized gaping hole in the side of the plane.
Haley famously boasted that she wears high heels for kicking unions with (though as a fellow wearer of femme footwear, I can’t say I understand the logistics). Even before she became South Carolina’s governor, she was helping Boeing skirt the unions in its home state of Washington by moving production to her state. South Carolina gave Boeing a package of incentives worth more than $900 million in 2009, an arrangement Haley supported as a state legislator. She then signed an additional $120 million expansion for the company as governor.
Boeing executives weren’t shy about citing the militancy of their Washington State workers as a reason for the move. In 2011, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint against the company, saying that it had “found reasonable cause to believe that Boeing had violated two sections of the National Labor Relations Act because its statements were coercive to employees and its actions were motivated by a desire to retaliate for past strikes and chill future strike activity.”
Such in-country outsourcing isn’t new, of course. It’s been going on for a while, accelerated when Operation Dixie, the 1946 campaign to unionize the South, failed. The Congress of Industrial Organizations rightly understood that leaving southern states unorganized would leave space for exploitation to compound on itself and for companies to flee to, but, as political scientist Michael Goldfield, author of The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s, noted, their attempt was “a primer on how not to organize.”
Bureaucratic union officials ran a go-it-alone campaign that played nice with employers and racist politicians and hung Black workers and women out to dry. As a result, Goldfield explained, “The failure to organize the South during the 1930s and 1940s turned out to determine the fate of American politics and society from the post-World War II period up to the present.”
That’s one of the reasons the United Auto Workers (UAW) is gearing up for a massive campaign to unionize Southern auto plants, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has invested in organizing its Union of Southern Service Workers. But they face an uphill battle, as the Boeing workers’ struggles remind us.
In 2018, three Boeing employees in South Carolina filed a complaint against the company with the NLRB, saying they’d been fired as retaliation for their role in a union drive. “It was easy to see it was because we were union members,” Richard Mester, one of the three, told The Guardian’s Michael Sainato. “Boeing has no qualms about squashing any possibility of a union down here. Unfortunately we were the result of that.”
The NLRB’s 2011 complaint was ultimately dropped after the company reached an agreement with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), but that didn’t mean Boeing would let the IAM unionize its Southern workforce easily. The fired workers were part of a small group of 178 flight-readiness technicians and inspectors who succeeded in a union election in 2018, a victory that Boeing continued to contest.
A year earlier, in 2017, the IAM had lost a union vote among the broader workforce of nearly 3,000. Later, in 2020, the company announced it would move more production to South Carolina, a move that workers and industry commentators said was still about trying to avoid unions.
What’s this got to do with pieces falling off planes in flight? Well, ditching experienced workers for new ones working in worse conditions has a “hidden cost,” in the words of one consultant. Institutional knowledge and skills matter, especially when you’re making planes. While the South Carolina plant didn’t make the 737 MAX, the plane in recent catastrophes, the plant has had its own share of safety concerns, and workers have raised concerns that they were pushed to work too quickly and ignore safety issues.
In 2019, according to The New York Times, workers at that plant, which makes the Dreamliner aircraft, “filed nearly a dozen whistleblower claims and safety complaints with federal regulators, describing issues like defective manufacturing, debris left on planes, and pressure to not report violations.” One worker said, “I’ve told my wife that I never plan to fly on it.”
Workers on the 737 MAX had also raised alarms about conditions at the Renton, Washington, plant. Ed Pierson, a former Boeing manager turned aviation safety advocate, worked at the 737 MAX factory and told reporters of a decline in working conditions that drove him to leave the company.
“Every facet of the company inside the factory was a mess,” he told WBUR. “We were rushing planes out the door. Employees were reporting all kinds of issues. My team and other teams were expressing frustration. There was people working ridiculous amounts of overtime and all our performance metrics in the factory were going in the wrong direction.”
The pandemic made everything worse, Jeremy Bogaisky at Forbes pointed out. The company laid off some 28,000 workers in 2020, and hasn’t been able to get its experienced hands back as its wages haven’t kept up with other nearby companies. According to IAM District 751, which represents Boeing workers in the Seattle area, before COVID, more than half its members had six or more years of experience, but now it’s “25 percent or less.” Another consultant noted, “If your percentage of new employees in the factory increases, there is a high likelihood that you’re going to have a quality problem three months down the road.”
It wasn’t enough that politicians like Nikki Haley had helped Boeing break the union. They had also helped to ensure that the company could avoid oversight.
Former Boeing workers told Bogaisky that “they’ve frequently seen new workers who’ve struggled to read blueprints showing where components were supposed to be installed.” More experienced workers, meanwhile, are pressured to work overtime, “something that can lead to fatigue and mistakes.”
Boeing had kept wages down and eliminated pensions for its workers in 2014, with starting pay ranging from $16 to $26 an hour. The union plants, in other words, were also going the way of the non-union ones.
As Luke Goldstein at The American Prospect noted, Boeing’s problems in recent years have been self-inflicted, the result of “financialization, cost-cutting, and outsourcing.” Union busting is one cornerstone of this strategy: Making workers fear for their jobs makes it easier to pressure them to, say, falsify documents, as court filings by employees of the subcontractor that reportedly made the door plug that recently malfunctioned allege. A worker said “he believed it was just a matter of time until a major defect escaped to a customer.”
The two major crashes of Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes in 2018 and 2019, both attributed to a faulty automatic software program that caused the planes to nosedive, were another fatal symptom of rushed production. Certification of the planes as safe to fly was also a rush job that had been delegated under successive presidential administrations from federal regulators—in this case, the Federal Aviation Administration—to the companies themselves.
But with all the trouble—the company also recently had to pay a fine of $51 million for “violating exports controls of military technology”—and the competition for skilled workers, the IAM might be in a stronger position come bargaining its next contract. They’re asking for a big raise, a guarantee that the next airliner will be made by union workers in Washington State, more quality inspections, and less overtime. The union’s fight at Boeing, in other words, could be seen through the lens of “bargaining for the common good”—in this case, bargaining for planes that don’t come apart in the air.
It wasn’t enough that politicians like Nikki Haley had helped Boeing break the union. They had also helped to ensure that the company could avoid oversight. Haley joined Boeing’s board after those 737 MAX crashes, after she’d left the Trump Administration, and after she helped kill an initiative to force the company to disclose more of its spending to influence politicians and regulators. Boeing spends big to ensure that oversight is limited and its workers have little power to complain. And Haley, before she returned to the ostensible pursuit of higher office, was key to the company’s success.
Haley makes a certain kind of Southern voter feel good about themselves. Even I enjoyed watching her make mincemeat out of her male opponents in 2010. But as I noted at the time, there was nothing new, and certainly nothing softer or kinder, about her politics. She was anti-abortion, anti-immigrant (using her own family’s story as a way to justify her harshness), anti-worker in a low-wage state, and perfectly happy to serve in the Trump Administration. She took a leg up in politics from the proto-Trump Sarah Palin. She’s a reminder that American politics has long been about appearances rather than policies. Or rather, that most voters are offered superficial differences while the real policy decisions are made with big donors behind closed doors.
This election season is no different, as the Biden Administration continues to pump money into Israel while its base protests in the streets, and as it offers deals to Republicans to further militarize the border. Meanwhile, Haley proffered herself as an alternative to the people on whom she’s built her career. Anyone who took the bait wasn’t opposed to Trump’s policies; they just wanted someone to carry them out without being so obvious.
The alternative isn’t “anyone but Trump,” whether in a general election or a Republican primary. It’s a broad-based, anti-racist campaign of organizing workers that takes seriously the failures of Operation Dixie and earlier generations of unionists, and organizes workers into a genuine base of political and economic power that can demand results from politicians.
We’re seeing hints of that in the UAW’s campaign to organize the non-union Southern automakers, in the building of a National Labor Network for Ceasefire among unions representing nine million workers, and in the leadership of former rank-and-file Chicago Teachers Union member Brandon Johnson, who is now the mayor of Chicago.
As for Boeing, we should remember, as always, that if the company had listened to its workers, those planes wouldn’t be coming apart at the seams.