Americans who live in towns and cities that have given power over their public safety workers to the government employee unions can never again truly rely on those workers to protect their safety. Union objectives come first, even when life and property are at stake. Once the union toughs like Jerry Wurf got their feet wedged in the government door, they had no qualms about breaking into the house, stealing the silverware, and then setting the structure ablaze.
More Strikes, More Violence
Strikes by public safety workers charged with protecting our citizens are very different from strikes by factory workers. In the private sector, strikes by workers put economic pressure on the owners of a business. The owners will seek to end the strike before it becomes too costly for the business or drives too many of the business’s customers to its competitors.
In contrast, strikes by public sector workers are not economic, but rather undermine the whole role of government—to protect its citizens. As labor policy analysts Armand Thieblot and Thomas Haggard noted, “When strikes involve employees charged with protection of public safety they are inherently violent.” They continue, “Denial of protection is itself a form of violence.”68 The point is that the job of the fireman or policeman is to protect citizens, and failing to do this job is itself a form of extortion.69
Beyond merely not performing their duties, strikes of union workers have often used outright violence as a tactic. According to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research (NILRR), union members have committed more than ten thousand incidents of union-related violence that were actually reported by the media since 1975, usually in the context of a strike.70 These violent incidents include vandalism, assault, battery, and even murder. The actual number of incidents may be ten times greater, or even a hundred times greater than these reported incidents; the media tends to ignore such violence. As the director of the NILRR project, Stanley Greer, concluded, the past quarter century has witnessed “an enormous amount of union-related violence… which can hardly be dismissed as spontaneous or uncoordinated.”
Of these media-reported violent incidents, no legal action at all was taken in almost four out of five of these cases. And a paltry 3 percent of these violent incidents resulted in convictions, even though there are usually plenty of witnesses in cases like these. One reason is that the law actually discourages prosecution of union officials and members for violence committed, particularly during strikes.
Legal Violence
You remember the story at the beginning of the chapter in which the union officials and members allegedly committed vandalism, threatened workers, and stabbed a company official to get them to sign agreements with the union? That case is still pending in federal court because the union claims that even if all the allegations of wrongdoing and violence are true, the union bosses and members are protected from prosecution under federal law.71 In discussing the case, Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee, explains: “Time and again, federal prosecutors have amassed extensive evidence that Big Labor bosses have orchestrated, authorized and/or ratified violence, vandalism, and threats.” He continues, “Nevertheless, because of the pro-union violence loophole… extortion prosecutions of the implicated union officials ultimately fail—or never even get off the ground.”72
How could that possibly be true? Because the Supreme Court has essentially legitimized union violence in the furtherance of union objectives. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Enmons that if union officials or members commit violence, they can’t be prosecuted under federal extortion laws as long as they were doing the violence in pursuit of a “legitimate” union aim, like striking for higher wages.73 The Supreme Court case involved several striking electrical workers who allegedly fired high-powered rifles at three utility company transformers, drained oil from a transformer, and blew up a substation. The court decided that their acts were not “wrongful” use of violence because they were in furtherance of legitimate union goals—these goals being improving the outcome of the strike.
Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III said the federal law as interpreted by the Supreme Court “in effect, permits union officials alone among corporate or associational officers in the United States to use violence and threats of violence to life and property to achieve their goals.”
Essentially, this decision means that union bosses and members aren’t treated like everyone else when it comes to intimidation and violence; only “little people” are prosecuted for violence. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III said the federal law as interpreted by the Supreme Court “in effect, permits union officials alone among corporate or associational officers in the United States to use violence and threats of violence to life and property to achieve their goals.”74 It’s just another way that unions and union officials get special treatment under the law that is not available for regular Americans. If you burn down your office building on behalf of your boss so he will get insurance money, both you and your boss will be prosecuted. If you burn down an office building on behalf of your union during a strike, no one will likely be prosecuted.
Although some violent crimes committed by union members during strikes can be prosecuted under state law, the Enmons decision itself encourages states and localities to drop prosecutions. The unions love this “end justifies the means” logic—after all, stronger federal prosecution of union crime might have a “chilling” effect on union violence during strikes which might make unions less effective in achieving their goals. And we certainly wouldn’t want that.
How many times has this law actually prevented union officials and members from facing prosecution? No one knows. We do know that at least 203 Americans have been murdered and at least 5,869 Americans have been injured in union-related violence since 1975. These are just the cases that are reported on and classified as union violence by the press, which is not always able and willing to cover these incidents.
Many states have similar laws providing exceptions to their extortion laws for union officials and members. Why? Because these state laws follow model legal codes that include this exception, which are written by pro-union law professors and leaders of the American Bar Association.75
To close this loophole in federal law, Congressman Paul Broun (R-GA) reintroduced the Freedom from Union Violence Act in 2012, which Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) and others introduced in earlier sessions of Congress. How many Democrats have ever cosponsored a Freedom from Union Violence bill? You guessed it: absolutely zero.76 If Democrats won’t oppose union violence, they won’t oppose unions on anything—especially not union coercion and intimidation.
Thuggery
Unions also use extreme intimidation tactics to force their opponents to back down. Service Employees International Unions (SEIU) have allegedly used brutal intimidation tactics in several campaigns to unionize corporate workplaces. While these examples involve SEIU’s private sector organization efforts, they show the extreme intimidation tactics that are allegedly in the union’s playbook and that unions could apply in government contexts as well.
One of the most egregious alleged cases of union pressure tactics involved SEIU’s campaign against the multinational food services company Sodexo, whose workers SEIU was seeking to unionize. If the employer permits it to do so, a union can be certified as the representative of workers in a business by simply collecting cards (“card check”) from workers without conducting a secret-ballot election. SEIU demanded that Sodexo let it unionize the company’s workers using card check, but the company refused. So, the union allegedly retaliated by launching a negative public relations campaign against Sodexo claiming food safety and other violations against the company.77
Sodexo fought back in court with a lawsuit against SEIU under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Sodexo issued a press release explaining that the company “filed the lawsuit seeking to halt SEIU’s extortionate threats and barrage of unlawful tactics.”78 In this press release, Sodexo alleges
that the union engaged in “blackmail, vandalism, trespass, harassment, and lobbying law violations designed to steer business away from Sodexo USA and harm the company.” In the suit itself, Sodexo accuses SEIU of numerous acts of threatening behavior, intimidation, and property destruction, some so extreme as to be comical. For example, in its legal complaint, Sodexo accused the SEIU of using “false pretenses to infiltrate a prestigious medical conference catered by Sodexo and, once inside, throwing plastic roaches onto the food being served at the conference.”79 Sodexo also alleges in its complaint that the SEIU attempted to “instill fear and disgust in hospital patients and their loved ones by passing out ‘patient surveys’ asking—without a shred of factual justification–whether patients had encountered ‘bugs, rat droppings, mold or flies’ in the food they were served by Sodexo employees.”80 Pretty nasty allegations indeed.
Faced with a RICO lawsuit, SEIU ended its public campaign against Sodexo. The case settled out of court, but not before the lawsuit exposed an SEIU manual entitled “Pressuring the Employer” which showed SEIU’s own coercive tactics, honed in disputes with private companies. This corporate campaign playbook “describes in detail its preferred tactics for harassing, intimidating, smearing and psychologically and financially punishing employers that are unwilling to yield to its extortionate demands,” alleged Sodexo in its complaint in the case.81
The manual begins, “It’s not enough to be right. You need might as well.”82 In an expose in the Washington Times, labor law analyst Vincent Vernuccio reported that the SEIU manual suggests local unions use community groups to “damage an employer’s public image and ties with community leaders and organizations.” He notes that the manual also suggests unions attack company leaders personally in order to get decision makers to take the union’s side in a dispute or to allow the union to organize workers in a company under more favorable conditions.83
SEIU allegedly put intimidation tactics into practice in another matter by driving fourteen busloads of protestors to the residential neighborhood of the deputy general counsel of Bank of America, and protesting on his lawn with bullhorns. The SEIU protestors were said to have scared the daylights out of neighbors and the counsel’s teenage son, who was home alone.84 Fortune’s Washington Bureau chief Nina Easton, who happened to live next door and witnessed the five-hundred-person protest on the quiet suburban street, concluded, “Intimidation was the whole point of this exercise.”85
The SEIU manual also explains that union representatives can use a legal form of blackmail against managers to get them to change their positions on union issues. The SEIU manual clarifies, “It may be a violation of blackmail and extortion laws to threaten management officials with release of ‘dirt’ about them if they don’t settle a contract.” But, as the manual points out, “there is no law against union members who are angry at their employer deciding to uncover and publicize factual information about individual managers.” In other words, extreme pressure tactics and personal revelations are union-prescribed techniques for getting opponents to give in to union demands.
Conclusion
With the unions now representing more government workers than private workers, unions generally use political persuasion to get what they want. Simply buying cooperation from politicians is much easier for the unions than using strikes, violence, and intimidation—and far better from a public relations perspective.
But don’t think for a second that union coercion and violence is a thing of the past. Just because unions may now represent far more white collar workers than blue collar workers, far more postal workers and teachers than burly steel workers and truckers, doesn’t mean that violence and coercion aren’t still front and center in the unions’ playbook.
Today’s Shadowbosses may dine at the White House and be more refined and polished than union bosses of old (in many cases, at least). But they still use strikes, and threats of strikes, by our nation’s public safety workers to put communities at risk and win concessions from them. They still use extreme pressure and blackmail-like tactics to get politicians and corporate leaders to decide their way. Also, outright union violence is still with us and is about three times more prevalent in union-controlled states than in less union-controlled, right-to-work states.86 Funny how this type of violence doesn’t bother liberals who are usually so focused on “tolerance” and “peace.”
Union advocate Robert Reich, who was President Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, admits, “To maintain themselves, unions have got to have some ability to strap their members to the mast. The only way unions can exercise countervailing power is to hold their members’ feet to the fire.”87 In other words, a union supporter explains that sometimes unions need to exercise coercion over their own members to achieve union objectives.
In nearly every chapter of this book, we will see how unions will use coercion and violence in order to achieve their objectives. But next, let’s see how government employee unions use dues money to buy the government that is supposed to represent us all.
Chapter 2 Summary Points
Even early labor leaders and Democrat politicians including FDR recognized the danger of collective bargaining for government worker unions.
Whenever unionization increases, the economy suffers, as happened in the 1930s when the Wagner Act was first implemented.
JFK’s Executive Order No. 10,988 opened the door to our union-dominated federal government and encouraged states and localities to unionize their workforce as well.
Only 341,000 state and local government employees were under union collective bargaining control in 1961, but this number increased to 5 million over the next fifteen years.
Violence and intimidation has been a constant in union activity from the earliest days until today. Over ten thousand incidents of union-related violence have been actually reported in the media since 1975.
At least 203 Americans have been reportedly killed in union-incited violence, and almost 6,000 injured, but union violence is probably significantly underreported.
Union violence is rarely prosecuted. The law actually condones union violence in cases of strikes.
IMPORTANT MILESTONES IN LABOR UNION LAWS
Popular Name Law Date Brief Description Coverage
RLA Railway Labor Act 1926 • Governs labor relations in the railway and airline industries (since 1936).
• Denies right-to-work protections to all railway and airline workers even if they work in right-to-work states (which is why airlines can be forced-dues operations all over the United States).
• Arose out of a period of intense strike activity and provides extensive dispute resolution procedures designed to prevent strikes and the resulting disruptions to interstate commerce.
All Railway and Airline Employees
Wagner Act/NLRA National Labor Relations Act 1935 • Signed by President Roosevelt into law as part of New Deal legislation with the purposes of encouraging collective bargaining and unionization of private sector workers.
• Prohibited unfair labor practices by employers, set forth mechanism for certification of unions and created National Labor Relationship Board for enforcement of the Act.
• Does not apply to railway or airline workers, agricultural employees, domestic employees, supervisors, federal, state, or local government workers, or independent contractors.
• Is considered by many to have bonded labor unions and Democrats together.
Private Sector Employees with Exceptions
The Hatch Act An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities 1939 • Designed to prevent civil servants (including post office workers—but not including Presidential appointees) from engaging in partisan political activity and to remove political patronage from government jobs.
• Originally prohibited partisan activities such as endorsing candidates and taking an active part in political campaigns, but were relaxed under Clinton in 1993.
• Still prohibits political activity while at work, running for par
tisan office, soliciting political contributions, and certain other restrictions.
• Also applies to state and local government employees in agencies paid for with federal funds and DC employees.
Federal Employees (and Certain State and Local Employees)
Taft-Hartley Act Labor-Management Relations Act 1947 • A federal law regulating labor unions amending the Wagner Act (passed by Congress over President Truman’s veto).
• Passed in reaction to frequent strikes by labor unions which interfered with interstate commerce.
• Prohibited unfair labor practices by labor unions (the Wagner Act had only prohibited unfair labor practices by employers).
• Allowed states to pass right-to-work laws (codified in Section 14(b) of the Wagner Act); 23 states now have right-to-work laws on their books.
Private Sector Employees with Exceptions
Little Wagner Act (NYC) Executive Order 49 1958 • Signed into law by New York City Mayor Robert Wagner Jr., son of Senator Robert Wagner who sponsored the federal Wagner Act.
Local Government Employees (NYC)
• Gave the unions collective bargaining rights over New York City workers, and a “forced dues” provision that made supporting the union a condition of employment was added in 1977.
Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind Page 8
