The airplane’s aft section arrived early Monday morning. That’s what they’d been waiting for at the final assembly plant in North Charleston, S.C. They already had the wings, the nose, the tail — all the other major sections of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. With the arrival of the aft, the 5,000 nonunion workers in the plant can finally begin to assemble their first aircraft — a plane three years behind schedule and critical to Boeing’s future.

The Dreamliner is important to America’s future, too. As companies have moved manufacturing offshore, Boeing has remained steadfast in maintaining a large manufacturing presence in America. It is America’s biggest exporter of manufactured products. Indeed, despite the delays, Boeing still has 827 Dreamliners on order, worth a staggering $162 billion.

Boeing’s aircraft assembly has long been done by its unionized labor force in Puget Sound, Wash. Most of the new Dreamliners will be built in Puget Sound as well. But with the plane so far behind schedule, Boeing decided to spend $750 million to open the South Carolina facility. Between the two plants, the company hopes to build 10 Dreamliners a month.

That’s the plan, at least. The Obama administration, however, has a different plan. In April, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Boeing, accusing it of opening the South Carolina plant to retaliate against the union, which has a history of striking at contract time. The N.L.R.B.’s proposed solution, believe it or not, is to move all the Dreamliner production back to Puget Sound, leaving those 5,000 workers in South Carolina twiddling their thumbs.