The union label: with the level of union violence on the rise, Congress must, again, deal with the courts.

The Union Label With the level of union violence on the rise, Congress must, again, deal with the courts. EUGENE H. METHVIN Mr. Methvin, a Washington-based Reader's Digest contributing editor, served on the 1983 - 86 President's Commission on Organized Crime and directed the commission's investigation of labor - management racketeering. AT 3:15 A.M. Sunday, November 8, 1995, Lance Young, a Detroit newspaper carrier, left a Detroit News - Free Press distribution center, his pickup truck loaded with papers for his 550 customers. The two related newspapers were publishing successfully in the fourth month of a strike by six of their eleven unions, chief among them the Teamsters, representing 2,500 strikers. A couple of blocks away, as Young pulled onto a freeway ramp, he realized he had three flat tires. Marauding striker squads would often throw a couple of five-gallon bucketloads of star nails around delivery trucks and carrier vehicles congregating at one of the newspapers' installations. This time a flying squad of masked men had hit the Plymouth distribution center; some had dumped the nails, disabling 14 vehicles, while others shattered windows and lights, and bashed and scratched cars with clubs and keys. As Young changed a tire, a hundred-vehicle squadron of raiders headed up the ramp toward him. Several threw beer bottles and tried to hit him on the head with signs. After the first thirty vehicles passed, three vans stopped and men with baseball bats, tire irons, and picket signs got out. Young retreated into his own truck, locked the door, and tried to dial 911. A brick shattered his window, and he fended off the missile with his arm. One man broke the window with a tire iron and flailed at him. Others battered his truck, rocked it, and tried to push it off the hill. Horns honked, and the attackers fled. Young went to the hospital, and resigned as a carrier the next day. The Detroit newspaper strike began with a bang on July 13, 1995, and ended with a whimper in February 1997 when the unions gave members a back-to-work order. The strike was marked by wholesale union violence and gangsterism, and demonstrates much that is wrong with the labor movement today. Last week, Labor Day week, the Senate held a Judiciary Committee hearing on union violence and legislation designed to curb it by plugging a big gap in federal criminal law created by the U.S. Supreme Court. Ironically, by passing this legislation the Republican-dominated Congress could save the union movement from itself by arming federal law enforcers with the tools needed to help liberate unions from the taint of gangsterism in the public mind. THE Detroit strike began at 8 P.M., and on that first night picketers smashed a company van and challenged police who were trying to keep order. Within days firebombs were flying, and strikers littered streets all over the metropolitan area with tire-puncturing star nails. One TV commentator called the rowdy picketing ''moronic thuggery.'' In the strike's third week, alert police caught a Teamster district manager and six striking pressmen night-riding in three cars, coordinating their maraudings with two-way radios. All three cars had baseball bats, masks, and roofing nails stuck through cardboard torn from the same Rice Krispies box. As the newspapers continued publishing, the strikers went berserk over their failure to stop them. The unions desperately copied tactics from some of the worst Teamster and United Mine Worker lawlessness in recent years. On Labor Day, three thousand strikers and supporters massed in the suburban town of Sterling Heights, at one of the papers' two printing plants. Frank Kortsch, spokesman and negotiator for Teamster Local 372, standing outside the newspaper plant's gates before television news cameras, proclaimed: ''We'll do everything we can to stop the papers from coming out. If the law says we can't stop the trucks, then the law is wrong.'' The mob blockaded the entrance and fought a pitched four-hour battle when Sterling Heights' police force tried repeatedly to clear the plant gate. The rioters, swinging axe handles and picket signs, repeatedly beat them back. Altogether, the unions staged some forty sieges, riots, and midnight strikes at the papers' two printing plants and twenty distribution centers. They formed human walls to prevent ingress and egress; attacked people and cars trying to pass in or out; wielded clubs, sticks, iron bars, tire-puncturing starnails and ''jackrocks,'' bombs, and Molotov cocktails. Often, as in the terrifying experience of Lance Young, they used midnight motorcades numbering up to two hundred vehicles that attacked without warning at distribution centers just as trucks arrived from the central printing plants and carriers gathered to get their papers for predawn deliveries to subscribers. Meanwhile, all over the area, a guerrilla war raged. Homes were shot into and splattered with paint bombs, cars smashed in their driveways, and buckets of star nails scattered everywhere. Carriers were cornered and roughed up or menaced with knives and guns. A female carrier was attacked by two men; one held her down, slapping her face and yelling that he would kill her and that she had taken his job, while the other pulled her pants down. Five men in three vehicles boxed in and stopped two carriers and, brandishing baseball bats and axe handles, stole their papers. A grown Teamster threatened and chased an 11-year-old carrier on his bicycle. Another bully told a 13-year-old carrier, ''I'm going to break your legs,'' and menaced him until he ran away crying. A woman carrier delivering her papers had her car rear-ended by three men wearing masks; they said: ''We know where you live,'' and threatened to harm her and her children if she continued deliveries. One of the signal-callers in Detroit was Eddie Burke, a former United Mine Workers organizer, now a special assistant to Teamster President Ron Carey. Burke engineered the elections of Carey and UMW President Richard L. Trumka, and was chief strategist during the violent 1989 - 90 strike against the Pittston Coal Company in Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky. In a post-strike analysis Burke wrote: ''If any union plans on striking their employer in this day and age and is uncertain as to breaking laws that are on the books, my advice is not to strike.'' The UMW is a venerable college of lawlessness and violence. In 1987, after an earlier round of strike mayhem, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., fined the union heavily and ordered it ''to take all action reasonably necessary'' to keep strike activity peaceful in compliance with long-established federal law. The court commanded the UMW to refrain from interfering in any way with employees exercising their right to go to work. The UMW thumbed its nose at the federal judges. In 1989, 1,600 UMW members unleashed a blitzkrieg against the Pittston Coal Company. Some 44,000 miners from other Eastern states staged wildcat sympathy strikes, and flying columns drove hundreds of miles to Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky coal fields in support. The union opened ''Camp Solidarity'' to accommodate about a thousand strikers and sympathizers. Coal-truck drivers, company personnel, and family members were shot at, were stoned, and had their tires destroyed and vehicles bombed. Rowdies even threatened a federal judge and rocked his wife's car. State police and federal marshals made 3,600 arrests. On the strike's seventh day, a Virginia judge enjoined the United Mine Workers to stop mass picketing and violence. Over the next eight months he issued eight contempt citations listing at least 323 violations, including 204 violent ones, and levied $67 million in fines. A unanimous Virginia Supreme Court backed him up, declaring: ''Union officials took active roles in these unlawful activities. . . . Notwithstanding the large fines, the Union never represented to the court that it regretted or intended to cease its lawless actions. To the contrary, the utter defiance of the rule of law continued unabated.'' The U.S. Supreme Court later disallowed the fines on the ground that such heavy penalties should require a jury trial. Even when local authorities try their best to cope with mass union violence, they can hardly succeed. But too often, they are so politically dependent on the unions that they sit on their hands. Thus neither Mayor David Dinkins nor Gov. Mario Cuomo showed much interest in going after union terrorists who attacked the New York Daily News. On October 26, 1990, the strike's first day, strikers bombarded delivery trucks with stones and bricks, blocked trucks, and clobbered drivers with baseball bats. On the second day, more than fifty delivery trucks were burned. The conspiring terrorists were not particularly clandestine; determined law enforcement could easily have stopped the violence. News columnist Mike McAlary transferred to the New York Post and in his first column reported meeting with strikers at a Brooklyn union hall. ''By 2 A.M., there were 21 cars in the lot. . . . And then the moment for action came. The drivers huddled around the man in the tam-o'-shanter. . . . The target, the face under the tam-o'-shanter explained, was a Daily News drop-off point in the Hunts Point Market . . . 'I don't care what you do. But stop the truck. If you want to burn it, go ahead. But if you're going to burn it, remember what the firemen over in Brooklyn told us. Keep the truck doors open. That makes it burn faster . . .' The cars pulled out of the lot around 2:30 A.M. heading for a confrontation . . .'' In April 1996 eight hundred members of the United Auto Workers struck an auto-parts plant in Winchester, Va. About fifty non-union employees (Virginia is a right-to-work state, meaning that it outlaws forced union membership) crossed the picket line and continued working. The strikers unleashed a campaign of vandalism and terror. The non-strikers were videotaped, and the videos were shown in the union hall so that members could identify them. Their names, addresses, and phone numbers were posted and printed in the strike paper. They had their homes shot into at night, windows broken, cars vandalized in their own yards. Night-riders placed bloody cows' heads on the hood of one employee's car and in the backyard of another -- both Vietnamese immigrants. One was Sucheng K. Huang, a 55-year-old woman who did not even know what ''strike'' meant until the violence began. ''My family is poor. I need a job,'' she explained, so that she and her husband could put their children through college. Someone posted a ''WANTED -- DEAD OR ALIVE'' poster with Mrs. Huang's photo on it in the plant, and later sent her a photo of the cow's head on her car hood, with her head superimposed on the cow's. Her windows were shot out, her tires slashed, her car sprayed with paint. She was so terrified that her blood pressure shot up and her doctor compelled her to leave her job for a month so that he could stabilize her. One union member reported that the day the union took its strike vote and threw up its picket line, Local 149 President Robert Ramsey told them, ''Those that cross the line will live in hell. Make it as hard as you can on them. I'm not condoning it, but make it as hard as you can.'' A UAW International official from Detroit headquarters, David Smith, told members how, in another strike, ''When a guy crossed our picket line, the union hung his dog and put a sign around its neck saying, 'Next time it will be you.''' He warned strikers to avoid ''nails and stuff'' on the picket line because the company could get a court order stopping picketing: ''If this happens, it will disable our strike. We can use other opportunities later to deal with the scabs at a less critical location.'' CONGRESS has twice sought to outlaw such union violence. In 1934, after a broad investigation of widespread mob use of threats and violence to extort payment for actual or alleged services, Congress passed the first federal anti-racketeering statute ever. In 1942, the Supreme Court gutted the law in a case almost identical to some of the horror stories that had prompted Congress to adopt it in the first place. Officials of Teamsters Local 807 in New York City had been convicted for stopping non-union truck drivers at the Holland Tunnel and demanding money equivalent to a day's union wages before they would let the trucker proceed into Manhattan. The gangsters backed up their blockade with threats and actual violence. Yet the Court held that the extorted payments fell within the statute's exemption of ''payment of wages by a bona-fide employer to a bona-fide employee.'' Chief Justice Harlan Stone dissented hotly, accusing the majority of countenancing what amounted to common-law robbery so long as it was committed by union members. Congress agreed. In 1946, Rep. Sam Hobbs (D., Ala.) introduced remedial legislation. ''The sole purpose is to undo the outrageous opinion of the Supreme Court in the Teamsters Union case,'' declared Rep. Edward E. Cox (D., Ga.). Others reiterated the point. Rep. Emanuel Celler, Brooklyn Democrat, whose district was heavily populated by members of the Mafia-dominated Long shoremen's Union, tried to tack on an exception excluding cases where payment sought by violence or threats was ''wages paid by a bona-fide employer.'' Hobbs's supporters countered that Celler was trying to create substantially the same exception as the one in the 1934 act that had ''caused the error into which the Supreme Court fell.'' The House rebuffed Celler. One again, the Supreme Court stubbornly nullified Congress's effort to outlaw extortion under color of union activity. In 1973 the Justices decided the case of Travis Paul Enmons and other union officials and striking employees of Gulf States Utilities. They were indicted on charges of conspiring to violate the Hobbs Act by blowing up a transformer substation and destroying transformers with high-powered rifles to coerce the company into agreeing to higher wages and other benefits. The case produced a strange Supreme Court combination. The five majority Justices were Potter Stewart, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, and Harry Blackmun, who concurred separately. They held that the bombing and gunfire were ''militant activity in the pursuit of legitimate union ends,'' and therefore did not violate the Hobbs Act. Only criminal threats and violence for illegitimate ends, and clear examples of extortion such as payments demanded by union officials or for work not wanted or performed, would violate the law, they said. Blackmun, a recent Nixon appointee whose vote was crucial, added that his ''visceral reaction to immaturely conceived acts of violence'' such as bombing and gunfire was that they ''deserve to be dignified as federal crimes,'' but he also disliked the prospect of federal judges having to wrestle with ''incidental'' or ''low level'' strike violence, and so he declared that he would wait until Congress spoke plainly. It had spoken plainly, retorted Justice William O. Douglas for the four dissenters. They constituted one of the unlikeliest combinations in Supreme Court history: Douglas joined by Chief Justice Warren Burger and the two brand-new Nixon appointees, William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell. Douglas declared that the rejection of Rep. Celler's amendment proved that Congress intended to outlaw strike violence. For good measure he quoted a House member who said Rep. Hobbs's legislation would not be needed ''if organized labor had recognized law and order in striking . . . Everyone can remember the taxicab strike in Baltimore, where cabs were overthrown, bricks thrown through the windows endangering the lives of innocent victims. Those were the tactics which organized labor sanctioned. The leaders were locked up and put in jail for participating in those activities.'' Despite the State of Maryland's forthright prosecutions, Congress had passed the Hobbs Act making such criminal violence during a strike a federal crime. ''The consensus of the House is so clear, we should carry out its purpose no matter how distasteful or undesirable that policy may be to us,'' declared Douglas. By narrowing the law the majority Justices were guilty of ''judicial legislation,'' Douglas declared -- and he had done enough of it to know it when he saw it. Thus the Supreme Court created a monstrous anomaly: labor-union officials and members are the only citizens allowed to use threats or violence to extort money or other property with impunity so far as federal law enforcement is concerned. Striking union members are free to engage in terrorism without worrying about ''the Feds,'' and if they have the local law enforcers outwitted, outnumbered, or simply cowed, they can bushwack and bomb, bully and badger, to their hearts' content. And few local police departments and politicians have the will or the ability to penetrate such gangs. Few can or will follow leads outside their jurisdiction -- to trace, for example, orchestration of violence by officials from distant union headquarters. That is why the Enmons decision was so devastating. There are only three ways to get evidence of conspiracy: 1) penetrate an organization with an undercover agent; 2) bug or wiretap the plotters; 3) ''turn'' a participant into a witness. The FBI could handle a conspiracy to violate the Hobbs Act as neatly as it handles Mafia gangsters. Instead, the Supreme Court's decision ''allows a few people the license to commit atrocities which a civilized society should not have to tolerate,'' declared economics professors Armand J. Thieblot and Thomas Haggard in their 1983 study, Union Violence: The Record and the Response. In the six years 1975 - 81 they counted 49 deaths, more than $15 million in property damage, more than 3,000 acts of vandalism, 300 arsons, hundreds of injuries and woundings, thousands of shots fired, and innumerable threats and harassment incidents. The record, they concluded, demolishes the ''persistent myth that labor violence is an aberrant, rather than a commonplace event.'' The National Institute for Labor Relations Research, a subsidiary of the National Right to Work Committee, monitors America's newspapers and broadcasters, and since 1975 has recorded more than 8,500 incidents of union violence. Its files show that 181 Americans have been killed, 445 employees, managers, and business owners beaten or assaulted, and more than 6,000 incidents of vandalism and arson reported. Police have made arrests in more than 20 per cent of reported cases but have won convictions in only 220 -- less than 3 per cent. The terror tactics and guerrilla warfare did not win in Detroit. The unions admitted defeat last February and advised their members to go back to work. The newspapers refused to fire strike replacements; they merely take strikers back as openings occur. The strike produced over 5,000 individual reports of strike-related violence, and hundreds of arrests. The newspapers' own security force investigated and where possible identified those guilty of strike-related misconduct; 235 were fired. Some 150 suits for damages are still pending against identified individuals. On the strike's second anniversary, July 13, 1997, the newspapers had regained about 85 per cent of their prestrike circulation and 80 per cent of their advertising and they were publishing with 625 fewer people, a 25 per cent reduction. In the mail room, 150 do the jobs left by 300 Teamsters. The prediction of News columnist Tom Henderson at the start was fulfilled: ''The worst thing the unions could do was let management take over the daily running of the printing plant and find out for themselves how truly overstaffed some of those departments were.'' Still, until Congress amends the Hobbs Act, there is little to deter union militants from thinking they can get away with murder. They have done so -- literally. Ask the York family in Logan County, West Virginia, Eddie York, 39, father of three youngsters ages 7 to 18, was a backhoe operator who worked for his brother-in-law in a small environmental-cleanup business. They had a contract to clean a sediment pond at the Arch Mineral Company's Ruffner mine, one of the state's largest strip mines. Ruffner's 300 UMW members were on strike as part of a seven-state UMW walkout idling 17,500 miners. But everyone understood that cleaning the runoff pond was not union members' work. So on July 22, 1993, York and a co-worker excavated sludge as usual. At quitting time two security trucks escorted them out. As they passed the UMW picket shack, from the underbrush hooded and masked men in camouflage T-shirts, the official UMW strike uniform, bombarded the little motorcade with rocks. Several shots rang out. Three bullets hit York's truck, and one hit him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. There was never a homicide prosecution. West Virginia State Police identified eight UMW members who took part in the ambush, including Local 5958 President Ernest Woods. UMW strike conduct rules expressly forbade throwing rocks, wearing masks, carrying firearms, or consuming alcohol on the picket line, and the Ruffner pickets had violated them all. They had consumed several six-packs of beer. Woods admitted packing a .380 caliber pistol, donning a mask, and leading the rock-throwing ambush that resulted in York's death. He also admitted he saw that another striker, Jerry Dale Lowe, had a gun and was drinking beer. The police investigation established that the shots came from the position other pickets said Lowe manned. A federal grand jury indicted all eight on charges of violating the only statute the U.S. Attorney could hang his hat on: damaging a vehicle used in interstate commerce. Lowe was also charged with using a firearm in a crime. In a plea bargain, the others were allowed to plead guilty to state misdemeanor charges and serve 120-day jail terms in exchange for testifying against Lowe. A federal jury convicted him on all counts, and Judge John Copenhaver gave him the maximum of ten years and eight months in prison. Five months after affirming Lowe's conviction, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed another conviction under the same federal statute involving a Logan County bombing murder. The three judges cited the Lowe case and declared: ''In the absence of prosecution by local and state authorities, one has to ponder whether the felonious killing of another is a criminal offense in Logan County, West Virginia.'' Not only did the union refrain from disciplining or reprimanding the seven co-defendants who took part in the attack that resulted in Eddie York's death. Incredibly, the UMW forced the company to arbitration over their firing, and arbitrator Irving N. Tranen compelled the employer to rehire them with full back pay on the procedural ground that they were not given proper notice of intent to discharge. They're back at their jobs. Sen. Orrin Hatch, one of the few senators who has belonged to a union, has joined with Sen. Strom Thurmond in sponsoring legislation to plug the hole the Supreme Court knocked in the Hobbs Act. Sen. Hatch cites Eddie York's murder as a prime example of ''how violence is often threatened and executed as a negotiating tool by some unions . . . countless other American workers have been victims of these reprehensible union tactics. Congress must simply begin taking strike violence more seriously.''