The House just passed a bill which would castrate the National Labor Relations Board:

The House voted on Thursday to approve a Republican-backed bill that would prohibit the National Labor Relations Board from trying to block Boeing from operating a new $750 million aircraft assembly line in South Carolina. The largely party-line vote was 238 to 186.

Republicans denounced the labor board’s case against Boeing, asserting that the board was overreaching its authority and should not be dictating where companies can locate their operations. But many Democrats and union leaders condemned the legislation, arguing that it undercut an independent federal agency and favored Boeing, a potent lobbying force and prominent political donor.

Under the bill, an unusual effort to curb a federal agency’s actions in a pending case, the labor board would be barred from seeking to have an employer shut, transfer or relocate employment or operations “under any circumstances.”

The bill, called the “Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act,” is expected to face a battle in the Democratic-controlled Senate. In the House vote, the partisan divide was clear: only eight Democrats voted for the bill and only seven Republicans voted against.

Republicans have repeatedly criticized the board’s acting general counsel for filing a complaint against Boeing last April, accusing the company of building an assembly plant in North Charleston, S.C., as a form of retaliation against unionized employees in Washington State who have engaged in five strikes since 1977, including a 58-day-walkout in 2008.

The National Labor Relations Act prohibits companies from taking any actions, whether firing employees or relocating a factory, against workers for exercising federally protected rights that include forming a union or going on strike.

“F%$# the law, we’re for rich pigs,” so say the Republicans.

The management at Boeing Publicly Stated that they were establishing a factory in South Carolina in retaliation for earlier (legal) strikes.  If there is no sanction allowed for blatant and admitted law breaking, it will get worse.

Then again, the Republicans don’t think that rich people should be prosecuted for breaking the law.