Possible delay of Boeing union vote reverberates at Greenville manufacturing conference

Even as the prospect of a delay in next week’s vote on unioning Boeing’s North Charleston airliner plant made its way into a manufacturing conference here, echoes of organized labor’s future in South Carolina still were heard Tuesday.

“There’s been a very effective manufacturing state largely without unions,” said Mikee Johnson, state Chamber of Commerce board chairman. “The state has a good relationship with the (International Brotherhood of) Longshoremen, a very effective workforce out here.”

Johnson said South Carolina is trying to build a comprehensive workforce and unionizing the aerospace giant would be “a shock to the system – would certainly be disruptive.”

Reuters news service reported Monday that union officials say they could seek a postponement of the April 22 vote to organize some 3,000 production and maintenance workers. Union officials told Reuters if their campaign does not get enough traction, a delay might be requested.

Frank Larkin, a spokeman for the International Association of Machinists told the news service that by withdrawing the petition for a vote, the union could reschedule the ballot after six months. Should the matter come to a vote and it fails, a second balloting would take at least a year, Larkin said.

Boeing’s chief legal counsel, Mark C. Fava, was to have been a keynote speaker at the opening day of the S.C. Manufacturing Conference and Expo that attracted some 1,300 attendees. But Fava pulled out of the appearance over the weekend, conference organizers said.

Jobs, wages and the future of manufacturing were the focus on the first day of the two-day meeting rather than the commercially and politically jarring issue of a union vote that looms large over labor relations in the Palmetto State where about 2.2 percent of the state’s workforce is made up of union members.

Johnson, who spoke instead of Fava, said he had heard rumblings about a delay for the machinists’ vote.

Union organizers have been going door to door this week in an attempt to gauge support for the vote that union supporters say would mean better pay and work schedules.

“It wouldn’t be surrender,” IAM organizer Mike Evans, who is working in North Charleston, told the news service. “The campaign would continue.”

The union has strong support in Boeing’s organized Seattle plants, where it has called for two strikes in the past decade, Reuters reported.

Boeing has aggressively fought the North Charleston effort. It was blanketing Lowcountry radio airwaves last week with ads that tout “our teammates” and lambased the union for “trying to get into your wallet.”

The voice in the ads speaks in a soft Southern drawl about “our state” and also feature Gov. Nikki Haley and Charleston Mayor Joe Riley making the case against unionization.

Haley told the conference outright she thinks the IAM will lose the union vote, but she acknowledged new efforts to bring unions into the state also are ahead.

In a statement that sounded like an applause line, but which drew no response from the lunchtime audience, the governor noted she wears heels, but not for a fashion statement. “It’s because we’ve kicked the unions out every day of the week ever since I’ve been here,” she said, noting that continuing to keep unions out is critical to the state’s continued success in manufacturing.

“We are now in a situation where we are under attack by the IAM,” Haley said. “This is not a Boeing problem. It will start to happen all over South Carolina.”

Thomas Kurfess, a mechanical engineering professor at Georgia Tech who spoke to the conference on the future of manufacturing, said a pro-union vote would mean a change in the state.

“What that change looks like, I am not sure, but it depends on the relationship,” Kurfess said. “Take a look, for example, at BMW. They have unions in their German plants, and they have very good relationships. So, I think it all depends on how things come together.

“But the change issue is, I think, the biggest question. Because anytime you have change, there is risk and there is uncertainty involved.”

Boeing operates a six-year-old, $6 billion operation in the Lowcountry with a 7,500-person workforce that build’s the 787 Dreamliner. Company critics say it moved some of its operations to South Carolina with its anti-union history to ease the machinists’ union grip.

The vote is being watched closely by both sides of the debate.

Some conference attendees said the facts point to further unionization in the Palmetto State, including because a younger generation might not be as opposed to unions as their elders, according to some surveys.

This story was originally published April 14, 2015 at 11:06 PM with the headline "Possible delay of Boeing union vote reverberates at Greenville manufacturing conference."