Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (11 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.