Book review: Two contrasting views on union corruption

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By William Kornblum

Like deadly parasites, gangsters and labor racketeers feast on the finances and pensions of union members. This is an old and painful story for AUD members, but two new books take a hard look at the causes and consequences of union corruption. Unfortunately, only one of these books offers a detailed and critical analysis of what strategies work best to rid the house of labor of its pernicious pests.

Mobsters, Unions and Feds, The Mafia and the American Labor Movement (New York University Press, 2006) by Jim Jacobs, a professor of Law at NYU, presents a clear vision of the underlying need for democratic reform of corrupt unions. He evaluates federal efforts under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to rid the teamsters, laborers, hotel and restaurant workers, East coast longshoremen, and New York carpenters -- the most important unions with longstanding mob connections -- of corruption and comes out of the research convinced that, while these efforts are not always as effective as they might be, they are warranted and should continue.

In Solidarity for Sale (Public Affairs, 2006) Robert Fitch, a labor-oriented journalist and teacher, is more interested in documenting the extent of corruption and gangsterism in American trade unions. The book's subtitle, "How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America's Promise," helps the reader understand from page one that Fitch is extremely dubious about reform or legal remedies to rid unions of mob rule. Indeed, he seems to have embarked on his book with the fixed idea that our unions are so rotten with corruption that American workers might better think about getting rid of them altogether and starting over again. With unions fighting for survival in the most anti-union climate we have experienced since the twenties, the constructive Jacobs volume is likely to find a place on the shelves of hard-working union reformers. Fitch's book is more likely to be ignored as irrelevant.

Solidarity for Sale offers many grim but sensationally entertaining anecdotes about the looting of union coffers and the moral bankruptcy of elected union officials. It develops the broad thesis that corruption is endemic in American unions largely because of the greed of easily corrupted labor oligarchs, the lack of democratic controls and competition within the unions, and the complicity of employers, government officials, and intellectuals of the right and left alike. Like Jacobs, Fitch focuses most of his attention on the notoriously corrupt union locals among teamsters, laborers, carpenters, and stevedores, but he continually implies that the corrupt patterns and practices he describes are true for the entire U.S. labor movement. Longstanding struggles for honesty and democracy in unions like the United Autoworkers, the United Steelworkers, and in hundreds of locals inside even the most corrupt national unions, are never mentioned.

Jim Jacobs is less interested in proving that union corruption has undermined America's promise and more intent on understanding what we have gained after years of application of the RICO statute to cases of racketeer infiltration in the unions. He reviews the successes and setbacks of over twenty years of federally sponsored monitoring and union reform efforts under RICO. While recognizing all the problems of the RICO strategies and federal monitoring, Jacobs warns that "the government has much credibility at stake in its anti-labor racketeering campaign. If it loses interest, withdraws, and allows Cosa Nostra to reconsolidate its control, it will be harder in the future to persuade criminals and would-be-criminals that U.S. law enforcement has staying power." He is also quite certain that outside pressure or court-appointed trustees cannot have lasting positive effects without the sustained involvement of an active union membership. More real union democracy, he believes, is essential to address corruption and to rejuvenate the labor movement. He writes:

"Union democracy proponents and lawyers have worked tirelessly and with some limited success, to make union democracy a civil liberties issue. They provide an ear to union members who complain they have been mistreated by corrupt union officials. They file suits with the Department of Labor and with the federal courts, but they are immensely outgunned by the unions that they challenge. The torch has been courageously carried for decades by the minuscule Association for Union Democracy, which operates on a shoestring budget with a handful of staff. The country would be very well served by a governmental or, better yet, a private foundation's serious funding of the AUD or some new "Center for Union Democracy." (p.251)

These unsolicited accolades are welcome, but AUD can hardly afford the hope of a rosy future with windfall funding. It's more likely that the American labor movement will choose to rebuild itself from the beginning, as Robert Fitch recommends, than that the federal government or a single foundation will save the day for union democracy. The message of both these books is that racketeering in the labor movement is a serious problem for American workers and thus for all Americans. As AUD members know from their own personal experience, and as Jacobs shows systematically in his brilliant review of federal anti-racketeering efforts, there is still a great deal of work to be done and some good precedents and methods we can apply. But nothing lasting will be achieved without courageous rank and file union members who are dedicated to honest democratic unions.

See also Assessing a half century of union reform on Benson's Union Democracy Blog