Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind

by Mallory Factor

  In 1947, the mal’ach hamaves went to work for the labor union American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to help them in their early efforts to organize government workers.28 Their first goal was to get New York City to grant unions collective bargaining power over city workers.

  There’s an old joke about a donkey trainer known far and wide for training donkeys in a gentle way, a “donkey whisperer.” One day, a man who had a recalcitrant donkey brought him to the donkey whisperer for training. The donkey trainer immediately pulled out a two-by-four and whacked the donkey right between the eyes. The man was taken aback. “Why would you do that?” he asked. “You’re supposed to be the donkey whisperer!” he cried. “Well,” said the donkey whisperer, “before you whisper, you need to get their attention.”

  Wurf knew how to get the attention of the government: by smacking them between the eyes with political muscle. In return for giving the union the power to organize government workers, Wurf pledged direct political support to politicians—not just money, but turn-out-the-vote support in the streets. He offered Democrat Robert F. Wagner Jr. (the son of Senator Wagner, who sponsored the Wagner Act) support in his run for New York City mayor in 1954. In return, Wagner agreed to support giving unions collective bargaining power over city workers. AFSCME then went out into the streets and delivered the votes needed to elect Wagner mayor. Thus began the great synergistic alliance between politicians needing election support from unions and unions needing political support from politicians.29

  Burn, Baby, Burn

  Wurf’s innovative arrangement with Mayor Wagner in New York City led to a groundswell in unionization of state and local government workers across the country—from 341,000 in 1961 to 5 million under union collective bargaining control a brief fifteen years later.30 Wurf’s true agenda was to extend the New York City model across the country. In that effort, he was backed in full by the radical progressives who thought that a socialist America was just around the corner. Of course, it would take until 2008 for the real socialist America to come into being with the election of Barack Obama… but we’ll get to that.

  Not all politicians were as accommodating to Wurf as Wagner. And to get less accommodating politicians on board, Wurf would have to break out a figurative two-by-four: the classic union threat of violence and coercion. Violence has always bubbled under the surface of the union movement. Labor unions had always relied on the implicit threat that if things didn’t go their way, they’d bring out the lead pipes. In many cases, this meant inciting violence and then allowing it to spin out of control.

  In other words: burn, baby, burn.

  Let’s look at what happened when Wurf got involved in 1968 in the union-hostile territory of Memphis, located in right-to-work Tennessee. Wurf came to woo the new Memphis mayor, hoping to secure monopoly bargaining and automatic dues check-off privileges for the local AFSCME sanitation workers union.

  Memphis Blues

  Working conditions for Memphis sanitation men were degrading and dismal at the time. By then, the famous Dempster Dumpster technology—that’s that sound that wakes you up at 5 a.m., when wheeled waste containers are mechanically tipped into a garbage truck—had already been available for three decades. But not in Memphis. There, sanitation men still had to pick up and carry metal garbage cans and dump them into heavy leather tubs. Then, they had to sling the tubs over their shoulders and carry them through people’s yards. Many of the tubs leaked, “and during the course of the day the caustic flow from the garbage caused huge welts on the men’s shoulders, arms, and torsos.”31

  There were still more indignities: white crew chiefs typically addressed black sanitation collectors as “boy,” and black men were not promoted to the job of supervisor.32 Also, the sanitation men were paid to cover a certain number of city blocks per day, no matter how long it took—with no overtime. And in 1968, their average weekly pay was a bit over $70 a week.33 In a sense, the situation in Memphis was one of those situations where workers were actually being exploited and mistreated, and where organizing the workers could perhaps produce improvements in pay and working conditions as it had in the earlier part of the twentieth century for garment workers and others. But this is not the lesson of this particular story.

  By adopting existing wheeled waste container technology, the city of Memphis could have dramatically reduced the number of man-hours needed for sanitation services. Why hadn’t the city of Memphis implemented such changes? The government didn’t want to change the existing system, which worked fine for the supervisors, at least. Wurf himself noted, “One of the real problems in public service is that the people who make management decisions may not be as concerned with efficiency and profit and loss as management in private industry would be.”34

  In any case, the sanitation workers called a strike in February 1968. Wurf got involved, both to make sure that the strike succeeded and to get the city to recognize the AFSCME local as the sanitation workers’ exclusive bargaining representative.35 It might not have been the perfect moment to strike, because it violated a few important principles that Wurf had developed for a successful strike. First, Wurf said that you are “stupid if you have a garbage strike in January or February. It doesn’t stink as much as if you have it in the middle of the summer.” He also noted that Memphis mayor Henry Loeb was new in office, and “you don’t go after a politician the moment he gets into office. You haven’t had time to get people mad at him and you have to develop this.”36 Wurf didn’t call the strike, and “would have advised anyone against it,” but once the workers were out on strike, he was not going to send them back to work without getting concessions from the city.37

  When faced with striking sanitation workers, Mayor Loeb agreed to institute overtime pay and uniform retirement benefits, and to fight racial discrimination. But he refused to recognize AFSCME as the sanitation workers’ exclusive bargaining representative and claimed that Tennessee law gave him no authority to hand union officials special privileges. He also refused to allow “dues checkoff”—which would have required the city to collect union dues on behalf of the union. Dues checkoff was critical to the union, but not very important to the workers themselves.38 Because AFSCME wouldn’t be recognized and they wouldn’t get dues checkoff, Wurf kept the workers out on strike. As the strike dragged on for weeks, both the sanitation workers and the city of Memphis faced real hardships.

  MLK in Memphis

  Then the sanitation workers and AFSCME received a ray of hope from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King knew about the labor unions’ long history of sanctioning racial discrimination in employment, which union officials had not yet fully repudiated.39 But he supported the rights of working men and women as part of his civil rights mission.40 He therefore agreed to speak at a pro-strike rally of fifteen thousand people in downtown Memphis, and then to come back and lead a march through the city’s streets.

  The procession, however, quickly turned violent—marchers and police clashed; youths broke away and began looting local stores.41 Having declared for many years he would never lead a violent march, Dr. King returned to his motel under his advisors’ recommendations and then went home to Atlanta.42 But Dr. King soon announced he would return to Memphis for another march on April 5.

  And on that well-publicized return to Memphis, escaped convict James Earl Ray shot King to death. Ray had been planning to murder King in Atlanta, but he soon learned through the newspapers of King’s Memphis visit. Dr. King’s stalker arrived in Memphis on April 3, and was able to learn from the thoughtlessly informative local papers not just the motel, but also the very room number where his target was staying.

  Always philosophical about the possibility of his being assassinated, Dr. King refused to maintain any security detail. On the night of April 3, King addressed a large crowd and gave his famous and prophetic speech. He said, “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the P
romised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”43 The next day, early in the evening, Dr. King was standing on his motel balcony. A single fatal shot by Ray brought down the great civil rights leader. Although the assassination was not connected with the sanitation workers’ strike, Wurf would make sure that AFSCME would be forever linked with Dr. King’s martyrdom when the history of the labor movement was written.

  Never Waste a Good Crisis

  Tragic as the assassination was for our nation, it was somewhat less tragic for Wurf and AFSCME, who quickly used the crisis to their advantage. Wurf might have agreed with President Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who made the famous statement, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Emanuel explained further that what he meant by that is that a crisis gives you “an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”44 Dr. King’s assassination gave Wurf the opportunity to end the strike on terms favorable to AFSCME.

  On the very evening of the murder, Wurf called William Welsh, then an assistant to Vice President Hubert Humphrey and later to become AFSCME’s political director.45 Unless the White House quickly intervened to settle the strike in favor of the sanitation workers, Wurf warned, violence would be the rule of the day. “I don’t know what buttons to press,” Wurf said, “but, g——, Memphis is going to burn.”46

  The day after the King assassination, the White House dispatched Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds to Memphis to prevent the violence that Wurf had predicted by bringing the strike to an end. The strike was quickly settled with the city, and indeed, riots did not occur in Memphis.47 Sanitation workers continued to lug tubs with forty to fifty-five gallons of trash through people’s backyards for low pay, but were now represented exclusively by the AFSCME local union complete with dues checkoff. AFSCME then quickly proceeded to go after other city employees in Memphis.48

  Fortunately for Jerry Wurf and his cohorts, very few of the millions of Americans who sympathized with the plight of Memphis sanitation men during their strike in 1968 paid any attention to how it actually turned out for them. In the minds of many Americans, the Memphis sanitation strike led by AFSCME and Wurf was linked forever to the tragic death of Martin Luther King Jr.

  The association between King’s assassination and the Memphis strike thus “identified AFSCME, in the public mind, as a union linked to the surging civil rights movement.” Wurf suddenly became a “unionist of national stature.”49 The AFSCME website today still proclaims proudly, “During the 60s, AFSCME’s struggles were linked with those of the civil rights movement.”50 But it took another thirteen years, until late 1981, for the city of Memphis and the AFSCME Local union to eliminate the back-breaking tubs with the introduction of curbside collection and wheeled garbage bins.51

  Nonetheless, the AFSCME victory over the city of Memphis and other union victories greased the skids for even greater union takeovers of our government workers.52 Cascades of government workers in cities and states across America were going over the union falls—and worker freedom was going over those same falls in a barrel.

  Memphis Blues Again

  This was not the end of the story of union coercion in Memphis. Within a few short years, both the firefighters and police workers were unionized. Soon after, they struck. The story of these strikes shows us the true danger of unionizing critical public safety workers. Once organized, they can and will strike—even if striking is illegal. And when public safety workers go on strike, citizens are truly left unprotected.53

  In July 1978, the local affiliate of the International Association of Fire Fighters ordered more than 1,400 firefighters to go out on strike. This union wasn’t aiming for decent pay or better working conditions with this strike. Not even close: this strike was over “shift differential”—the fact that firefighters received less additional pay for working less desirable shifts than other city employees received.54

  Faced with striking firefighters, the new mayor, J. Wyeth Chandler, cobbled together a force of 150 substitute firefighters made up of supervisors, National Guard troops, the few firefighters who did not go on strike, and National Parks Service firefighters. Many members of this skeleton crew were not even familiar with the streets in the city of Memphis.

  From the beginning, the strike was marked by widespread violence, vandalism, and other misconduct. Within twenty-four hours of the strike, tire slashing, headlight smashing, engine tampering, and destruction of medical equipment put most of the fire department’s ambulances out of operation.55 Using vandalism, union strikers took away the tools that the substitute firefighters would need to keep the population safe. What better way to pressure a city than put its population in real danger of being without essential safety services?

  On the first weekend of the strike, three times as many fires were reported as normal—stretching the skeleton crew very thin. At the sites of some of the blazes, union militants physically blocked their substitutes from getting to the fires. And so Memphis burned. In just two days, fires caused an estimated $3 million in damage to the city.56 The Memphis police director reported that union agents were responsible for setting 90 to 95 percent of the fires. That’s actual arson on the part of the firefighters union. The police director exclaimed, “Last night was one of the most unreal scenes I’ve ever seen. It was like a World War II newsreel.”

  After three days, the city’s firefighters returned to work, complying with a court injunction against the strike. But Memphians barely had time to catch their breath before the next illegal public-safety strike. Less than one week later, police went out on strike. What were they aiming for? They wanted an arbitration clause added to their contract so that future disputes between the police and the government employers would be sent to a neutral arbiter.

  Once again, violence and intimidation were the order of the day. Officers who returned to work heard from anonymous phone callers threatening to “make your families pay,” to “take it out on your wife and kids,” and to “teach you a lesson.”57 Union members trashed twenty-five police vehicles and three fire trucks and blew up a tear-gas bomb in the county administrative building, all in pursuit of that all-important arbitration clause.

  While this strike raged, the firefighters rejected the tentative contract that they negotiated the previous month and went out on a second illegal strike. Now, Memphis had police and firefighters both out on strike at the same time, creating a public service emergency. To add to the crisis, Memphis sanitation and teachers union bosses launched sympathy strikes in support of the police and fire unions. Within eight days, Memphis was brought to its knees. The mayor was forced to cut a deal with these various government employee unions—and that deal included a provision giving all the illegal strikers amnesty, except for those who had actually been caught committing felonies.58 That, naturally, was a small number, since the police were striking—so who would arrest the felons?

  More Unions, More Strikes

  Rather than avoiding strife, unionizing our essential public safety workers actually puts our government in the position of being unable to protect our public safety in the case of strike. Breakdown in government services is possible only when government workers are unionized. Strikes of public safety workers actually create emergency situations, causing citizens to panic.59 And citizens’ fears make public safety worker strikes both short and enormously effective.

  Breakdown in government services is possible only when government workers are unionized. Strikes of public safety workers actually create emergency situations, causing citizens to panic. And citizens’ fears make public safety worker strikes both short and enormously effective.

  And with greater unionization of government public safety workers, strikes increased dramatically. In New York City, where unions were king, the unions were no kinder to their subjects—illegal strikes and violence were the order of the day. On July 1, 1975, sanitation workers staged a wildcat (illegal) strike, l
etting garbage pile up in the city—in the heat of the summer, just as Jerry Wurf had advised for a successful garbage strike. During the strike, police officers marched on City Hall, blocking access ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge and carrying signs that read, “Cops Out, Crime In” and “Burn City Burn.”60 Even the liberal New York Times editors admitted, “Last week’s illegal sanitation strike… was the end product of three decades in which one New York mayor after another systematically fostered the growth of centralized union power.”61 Instead of bringing cooperation and labor peace, growing union power resulted in greater strike activity.

  In Pomona, California, in 1975, police officers went on strike and then proceeded to vandalize cop cars and stop volunteers from assuming police duties. “I am ashamed of this kind of activity on the part of policemen,” said a police captain there. “The citizens feel the officers have abandoned them, and they have.”62 That same year, policemen went on strike in San Francisco. When the mayor threatened to fire them, the officers firebombed his home.63 Firefighters in Dayton, Ohio, let fires burn out of control during their strike in 1977.64 The same thing happened in St. Louis that year.65

  From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, sanitation, public safety, and public hospital strikes hit not just Memphis, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, but also Kansas City, St. Louis, Huntsville, and many other American cities, large and small.66 Time and again, homes and businesses were destroyed and lives were jeopardized as a consequence of government employee union strikes, most of them illegal. As Al Shanker, the legendary head of the American Federation of Teachers, explained, “One of the greatest reasons for the effectiveness of the public employee’s strike is the fact that it is illegal.”67 He was making the point that illegal strikes inflict harm on cities and frighten residents, which make these strikes even more successful than legal strikes. And calling an illegal strike rarely hurts the union or its members—after illegal strikes, unions have almost always been able to negotiate for amnesty for the illegal strikers as part of the strike settlement agreement.