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Resisting attack from the right; fighting the mob
Submitted by mnadmin on Fri, 04/08/2011 - 00:03
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Facing the most outright attack since President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers association, unions are responding with an unusual display of labor power. Reagan destroyed the union, but he stopped short of challenging the fundamental right of unions to represent workers. The new assault goes further as the anti-union right seeks to end or drastically curb the very principle of collective bargaining itself.
Teachers become the scapegoat for all the shortcomings of American education. Public employees are blamed for massive deficits in state budgets. The anti-union right, hoping to ride what it thinks is popular sentiment, seizes the opportunity--and a solution--to weaken, even destroy unions.
In Wisconsin, the governor and state legislature, move to restrict public employee unions to the narrow right to bargain on wage rates only. In Ohio, a right wing governor would eliminate all union rights for public employees. In Tennessee, the state senate passed a law to abolish collective bargaining for teachers. In Indiana, where Republicans control both legislative houses, they would make it a right-to-work state. In New York State, the New York Times [12/10/10] reports that a Democratic governor-elect, on a more moderate level, gives moral support to a Committee to Save New York which has raised $10 million "in support of [his] looming showdown with government employees’ unions over wages and pensions."
In Wisconsin, 10,000-15,000 workers massed at the state capitol initiating a series of demonstrations to protest the curbs on bargaining. At one point, 70,000 responded! In Ohio, 4,000 demonstrated at the Columbus Statehouse. According to the AFL-CIO, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin alerted the National Guard to be ready in case strikes or demonstrations got out of hand. Two New York Times reporters wondered, "Is Wisconsin the Tunis of collective bargaining rights?"
However, just at the moment when labor is massing its power, the integrity of that power is undermined by a stubborn old enemy: organized crime and not-so-organized corruption.
Still battling the mafia in unions
In an Op-ed piece in the New York Times, Selwyn Raab, tells us that the organized crime mafia is still very much alive. He should know what he is talking about. Now retired, for decades he reported for the Times and wrote books on the subject. His opinion was massively confirmed in early January when, as he says, the Federal government “swept up more than 120 people in a smorgasbord of racketeering indictments, mainly in the New York area... “The current indictments...allege that the mob was behind corrupt construction deals and waterfront shakedowns through infiltration of unions.”
Where is (or was) the Laborers anti-crime program?
One of those unions is Laborers Local 6A, the Cement and Concrete Workers, controlled by the Colombo family in 1993 when Joseph Scopo, its president, was murdered. Six years of Federal trusteeship ended in 1993 leaving the local still in the hands of the old gang. Some time in 1995, the Laborers union established its own monitoring program presumably designed to free the union from organized crime penetration. However the latest federal indictment which points to continued corruption in Laborers Local 6A suggests that the Laborers union program, in this case, has been a failure When asked by National Public Radio to comment on this failure, union attorney Robert Luskin explains that he simply is not invested with power enough to do the job. But that poses a more fundamental question: how
effective have union ‘voluntary’ anti-corruption programs been?
Around 1991, after the government filed a RICO anti-corruption suit, the court-ordered Independent Review Board was assigned responsibility for eradicating the mob from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Because it was armed with all the powers of government enforcement, the Teamsters IRB has been able to do an effective job in wiping out organized crime.
In contrast, a few years later, the Laborers International [LIUNA] cut a deal with the U. S. Justice Department: the union “voluntarily” agreed to set up its own anti-crime program; in return the government agreed not to file a Federal suit against it. In the years that followed, according to Professor James Jacobs, LIUNA was able to force out hundreds of suspect officials. But the latest Federal indictments suggest that the voluntary program was powerless to deal with organized crime in Laborers Local 6A.
Other intricately interlinked questions come to mind, not directly related to the latest mass of indictments but provoked by them:
Operating Engineers Local 14: A Federal RICO suit directed against organized crime in this New York 1,600-member local of heavy construction equipment and crane operators was settled by a consent decree in 2008. Court-appointed monitors were to be armed with sweeping power to clean up the union, but no one seems to be using that power. The monitors were not actually appointed until November 2009. Since then many months have dribbled by but no word from those monitors.
James R. Zazzali, retired as a respected former New Jersey state judge, is retained by the International Union of Operating Engineers as its Ethics Officer to oversee enforcement of its
Code of Ethics. He has not said or done anything about the Federal suit against racketeering in IUOE Local 14. Mr. Zazzali is looking into charges that Jack Ahearn, business manager of
IUOE Local 30 in New York, may have improperly benefited from construction work at his home on Long Island. Ahearn has been under fire for doubling the pay he receives for his other job as president of the AFL-CIO New York Central Labor Council.
Mr. Zazzali is very active in the sensitive field of union ethics. In addition to his work for the IUOE, he was hired by Andy Stern as the SEIU’s first ethics officer to preside over a highly publicized commission to enforce the union’s new code. He was recently appointed as co-chair of the trial committee to hear charges in the N. Y. District Council of Carpenters. Inside the IUOE he may be burdened with many other problems: In New Jersey IUOE Local 825, a former local president went to jail in 2008 for taking bribes and a former local business manager and international vice president was found guilty of receiving around $300,000 in bribes and illicit union payments. In Mid-west Local 150, there are assorted charges of bribes by employers, election fraud, and kickbacks by staff employees to a business managers. With the heavy concerns weighing him down, it hardly seems fair to expect him to be able to fulfill all these responsibilities with maximum effectiveness.
AUD theme(s)
tags:
- Selected Stories
- Building Trades
- Longshore and Warehouse
- Public Employees
- RICO and Government Intervention
- U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)
- U.S. Department of Labor (DOL)
- Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA)
- RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act)
- Carpenters
- Laborers
- Longshore ILA
- Operating Engineers
- SEIU
- Teamsters
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