NLRB's top lawyer still feels fallout from Boeing, union case - The Seattle Times

[Joey]

NLRB's top lawyer still feels fallout from Boeing, union case - The Seattle Times

WASHINGTON — Last year, just before the National Labor Relations Board accused Boeing of illegally punishing strike-prone Puget Sound-area Machinists by building a new 787 assembly plant in South Carolina, that state's senior senator privately warned the agency's top lawyer of "nasty, very very nasty" consequences if he didn't yank the complaint.

Otherwise, Sen. Lindsey Graham pledged, he would go "full guns ablazing," according to notes taken at the time by Lafe Solomon, the NLRB's acting general counsel.

Nine days later, in April 2011, Solomon greenlighted the unfair-labor practice case against Boeing. Graham — along with many of his fellow conservatives — was furious.

Republicans in South Carolina and in Congress accused Solomon of colluding with the Machinists union and the White House to undermine employers' rights. Mitt Romney slammed the NLRB as a "rogue agency."

Solomon was compelled to testify in a congressional hearing in North Carolina under threat of subpoena. He was called a job killer and faced a thinly veiled specter of disbarment after he balked at turning over documents to House Republican investigators.

Solomon, a genial Arkansas native, found himself in the center of a maelstrom he did not entirely expect and which continues to dog his agency even now — more than two months after Boeing and the Machinists forged new labor peace with a four-year contract extension.

Solomon had anticipated that the case against Boeing might be explosive, particularly given the NLRB's proposed remedy that the jetliner work be ordered back to Washington state from North Charleston, S.C.

Still, the resulting political furor caught him off guard.

"I never could have imagined the fallout," he said recently in one of his first extended interviews on the topic. Hearing Graham's warning "is not the same thing as experiencing it."

Overnight, Solomon came to personify Republicans' assertions that the NLRB was a pro-union


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