SOLIDARITY FOR SALE
HOW CORRUPTION DESTROYED
THE LABOR MOVEMENT AND UNDERMINED AMERICA’S PROMISE
ROBERT FITCH
Public Affairs
New York
For Jack Schierenbeck:
valued mentor, loyal
friend, fearless journalist
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Part One: What's Wrong
With Corruption?
1. The Curse on the House
of Labor 3
2. The Hidden Cost of
Corrupt Unions 35
3. The Revolt Against
Solidarity 67
4. The Fall of Sam Parks 83
5. Dynamite Organizing 98
6.
Solidarity for Sale, Chicago, 1905 117
7. Totally Mobbed Up:
Daily Life in the Laborers Union 133
8. DC 37: A Progressive
Kleptocracy 162
9. UNITE's Garment Gulag 189
10. Ron Carey: Martyr or
Mountebank? 214
11. Teamsters for a
Democratic Union:
How Bottom-Up Reform Hit
Bottom 247
12. Eyes off the Prize:
Reform's Rebuff in DC 37 272
13. Andy Stern's Dead
Souls 290
Conclusion: Solidarity
for Real 315
Notes 339
Bibliography 391
Indcx 399
PREFACE
"Mokita" is the
term used by the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea for a truth that
everybody knows but no one talks about.[1]
Corruption is mokita in the
AFL-CIO. For generations, in the construction, longshore, hospitality, and
teamster unions, mobsters have had more influence than the members in choosing
the leaders; pension funds are stolen; and bribes smooth the way for
contractors to replace union members with lower paid non-union workers. To
control union wrongdoing, the Justice Department routinely resorts to the
federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, treating
labor unions as criminal enterprises. In defense, union leaders provide politicians
huge contributions—essentially for Get Out of Jail Free cards.
Even though, as a Harris
Poll released just before Labor Day 2005 showed, most union households
disapprove of American unions, the main reason for their disapproval is never
openly discussed in union media or addressed at union conventions.[2]
"Sure, unions are flawed," the defenders of American unions will
concede when pressed. "They have people in them. So what do you expect?
But they're like democracy: a flawed solution that is preferable to any of its
competitors."
But it's misleading to
blame the pervasive corruption of American unions on human nature or on the
nature of unionism. You don't find gangsters running European unions.
Nor does blaming the
values of American business culture get us far. Even the leftists who
ostentatiously reject those values somehow wind up living by them when they
become American union leaders.
Corruption flows rather
from the retarded development of American unions, which still haven't broken
out of nineteenth-century models of labor organization. The classic aim of the
American union is still to monop-
ix
olize a territory; the
means—an exclusive bargaining contract; the result—20,000 local
unions that inevitably behave more like semiautonomous fiefdoms than like a
genuine labor movement pursuing the common good for working people.
Despite the way corruption
cripples every vital union function—from organizing to mounting strikes
to safeguarding pension money—even many dedicated unionists believe that
any open discussion of the corruption problem would undermine the movement.
Most progressives inside
the AFL-CIO deeply resent critics of union corruption. Yet I believe
well-meaning insiders who close their eyes to the significance of corruption
can and must be challenged, because for years, as a union member and later as a
union staffer, I was one of them.
In the beginning, at
least, my blindness could be attributed to youth. I was fifteen when I joined
Local 5 of the Laborers. The ordinary members of the local couldn't figure out
what I was doing in the Chicago Heights, Illinois, based organization. Most
members were Italian or black. I was Jewish, and I'd been wearing big thick
glasses from the time I was five. "Cookie," a giant black fellow
ditch digger, immediately dubbed me "The Professor." A1though he
watched my back, he rode me constantly. I would retort that he was welcome to
reign as the Lord of the Ditches, but I was going to college.
One late summer afternoon
just before the 4:30 quitting time, I was digging away in a rowhouse project,
just south of Chicago Heights and a few miles west of the Indiana border. I
noticed a small cloud of dust on the flat horizon. It kept getting bigger and
bigger, until the cloud produced a big black Buick that pulled up to my ditch.
Two men in suits got out. They were business agents from Local 5. Towering over
me, as I stood clutching my shovel, the shorter one insisted, "You gotta
pay your initiation fee." I'd just been paid, so I reached into my back
pocket, took out my sweatsoaked wallet, and handed over the cash. While I don't
remember getting a receipt, I do distinctly recall being politely thanked. Then
the two suits drove away in the Buick.
I forgot about my brief
encounter with the Local 5 officials until many years later. In 1986, I was
just beginning a career in the labor movement when Chicago was shaken by the
news of one of the most brutal of the more than 1,000 gangland murders in the
city's history. The bodies of Anthony "The Ant" Spilotro and his brother
Michael, both members of the
x
Chicago Outfit, had been
found buried in a shallow grave in an Indiana cornfield. They'd been beaten
with shovels and then buried alive. The revolting and terrifying "batting
practice" scene is reprised near the end of Martin Scorsese's Casino.
Federal authorities found
the bodies and the man who supervised the operation. He was Albert Tocco, the
boss of the Chicago Heights crew that ran Local 5. His wife, Betty, gave him up
by leading authorities to where the bodies were buried, and Tocco eventually
received a 200-year sentence. According to testimony provided in 1997 at the
trusteeship hearings into mob control of the Chicago Laborers District Council,
Tocco had help from Local 5 offficials: Nicholas "Nickie" Guzzino and
Dominick"Tootsie" Palermo. They wielded the shovels.[3]
It still gives me a shiver
to think about the Spilotros' burial by union business agents. But had I known
about it at the time, I don't think it would have affected my decision to
become a business agent myself. Some years before the Indiana massacre, I'd
made good on my boast to Cookie. I'd graduated from college and earned enough
academic credentials from the University of California, Berkeley, to become an
academic gypsy. After bouncing back and forth between low-rung positions at
Cornell and New York University, I began to get union staff jobs through the
left-wing job network. By 1990, I'd moved up to consulting for a small
Tribeca-based municipal union run by leftists. My job was to produce a very
ambitious economic development proposal: a Henry George-style land reform,
taxing Wall Street, reviving manufacturing, and bringing back the New York City
port.
To get support beyond the
handful of leftist unions that tacitly supported the economic program, I argued
that we ought to try to reach out to the International Longshoremen's
Association. "Who has a more direct stake in the revival of the port than
the longshoremen's union?" I reasoned. And Lou Valentino, political
director and former business manager of Brooklyn's Local 1814, seemed like the
go-to guy. Lou was running for a city council seat from south Brooklyn. My boss
agreed to write him a small check—$500 from our campaign funds. I even
got permission to put the money in Valentino's hands myself.
Feeling like a player in
New York City electoral politics, I walked the dozen or so blocks from Borough
Hall down Court Street to the old headquarters of Local 1814. I was brought up
short when above the doorway
xi
into the union hall, I
read the inscription "The Anthony Anastasio Memorial Hall." I knew
that name from New York City history. Most notoriously, Anthony shared the
surname with his brother Albert—a founder of the Gambino crime family and
the boss of Murder Inc.[4] For an
instant I wondered if I should turn around. But it was too late. Besides, what
would I tell my boss? I entered the building and asked a secretary,
"Where's Lou?" "He's upstairs," the secretary replied. I
walked up a single flight to find him all alone in a bare room just a few days
before the election. He was shouting hoarsely into a telephone, "Get me
half a dozen Puerto Ricans and put them on a flatbed truck." Although
distracted, Lou seemed glad to get the check I'd handed him.
Practically the next day,
Wayne Barrett, the principal investigative reporter for the Village Voice,
wrote a feature story explaining who Lou Valentino really was: a Gambino crime
family associate. Valentino had testified at the 1979 trial of Anthony Scotto,
a Gambino captain and Lou's predecessor as Local 1814 boss. On the witness
stand, Valentino acknowledged that Scotto had ordered him to take $50,000 in
cash from Anthony Anastasio and give it to Mario Cuomo's 1977 mayoral campaign.[5]
Cash contributions over
$100 are illegal. Valentino, who had been the favorite, lost the city council
race. But instead of feeling foolish that I'd tried to help elect a mob
associate, I remember feeling let down by Barrett. Here we in the labor
movement were trying to do something progressive in the economic development
field, and we were being undermined, in the left-wing press, by corruption
charges.[6]
Perhaps if my union client
hadn't decided to can me, I'd still be developing vast plans for urban economic
reform, rationalizing alliances with the mob, and fulminating against
muckraking radical journalists. But returning to academia, and freelancing for
the Voice myself, gave me a second chance to reflect on the low moral horizon
of the American labor movement.
Even our classic fallback
excuse for union corruption—that big corporations are just as bad or
worse—started to wear thin. So what if they are? We don't rely on tobacco
companies or HMOs to produce social justice or fight inequality. Because our
expectations are low, corporate executives can hurt us only once. But because
unions are supposed to stand for something besides the worship of the golden
calf, union leaders can actually
xii
hurt us twice: first with
the blow to our wallets, and then with the blow to our hearts.
The refusal to probe
seriously the sources of organized labor's failure shows that liberals and
progressives don't take their own political vocation seriously. A half century
ago, in American Capitalism,
liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith identified organized labor as the key
institution in the constellation of countervailing powers needed to check
corporate power and prevent a drift back to the politics of the Coolidge-Hoover
era.[7]
It's true that U.S. labor
did put together a couple of very good years (1935-1937). But for most of the
last hundred years or so it's been stagnation and decline. Yet the stance of
progressives toward official labor in this country, like the attitude of many
Chicago fans toward their beloved Cubbies, seems to be'"Well, anyone can
have a bad century." When pressed, labor's progressive supporters will
blame Bush, mean bosses, bad labor laws, globalization—anything but take
an unflinching look at what's gone wrong internally.
Last year's epochal split
in the AFL-CIO foreshadowed what may be the end of the line for the American
model of labor. Evidently, the Federation had been on the skids for more than a
generation. But in the summer of 2005, the full extent of its ugly disarray
became obvious to the broader American public. At the end of July, in Chicago, on
the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, after two years of ankle-biting
argument, the Federation finally split into two warring factions. Supposedly at
issue were questions of how best to make the labor movement grow, but it was
over turf and dues money that the labor chiefs had taken to cursing each other
at executive committee meetings.
Less than a month later,
the newly divided movement faced its first crisis. Northwest Airlines insisted
on cutting the pay of mechanics and ground workers by 20 percent, and more than
half would lose their jobs. When the workers struck, Northwest brought in
replacement workers. For a moment, the strikers and their families held their
breath, wondering how official labor would react. Then the shrunken AFL-CIO and
the dissident Change to Win coalition stunned practically everyone by uniting
to support the company. In exchange for not striking, one union, the
International Machinists Association, was awarded the jobs of the striking
workers.
It was dispiriting to see
big labor siding with a corporate Goliath intent
xiii
on breaking a union. It
was dismaying to realize that labor had split for no principled reason. But
turmoil on the tarmacs and the specter of the usually placid labor chiefs
calling each other "hypocrite" and worse in public at least had one
advantage. Completely overshadowed and overlooked was the Justice Department's
RICO complaint earlier in July against the International Longshoremen's
Association. The government charged that the nearly 60,000-member organization
had been run by the Genovese and Gambino crime families for half a century. It
was the usual story of extortion, robbery, bribery, and even murder.[8]
There was no comment from
either faction on the Justice Department's action. What could AFL-CIO president
John Sweeney say? The ILA belonged to his faction. What could Andy Stern or
James Hoffa—leaders of the dissident faction—say? The Change to Win
coalition was generally portrayed as the progressive alternative to Sweeney's
AFL-CIO Old Guard. But the fact that it contained three of the four
historically most mob-dominated unions went widely unreported.
Of course, because many
unions are corrupt doesn't mean they're monolithically so. There are thousands
of union staffers, and even top officials, who are trying to do their own jobs
honestly. They refuse bribes, earn relatively modest salaries, and pass up the
leased Lincoln Town Cars and the junkets to Honolulu or Las Vegas. But the
honest officials aren't willing to commit career suicide by criticizing
corruption—unless it's the corruption of a rival. If the odds of getting
thrown out of the labor movement for taking a bribe are pretty steep, it's
odds-on you'll get fired if you criticize bribe taking.
Still, the point of this
book is not to show that American unions are corrupt. That's obvious to anyone
who reads the daily paper. The real argument is about how they've become
corrupt, what difference it has made, and why America can't let it stand.
Working people are never
going to make sacrifices or run risks for institutions they don't trust. And
they are never going to trust institutions that refuse to come clean about
themselves. This book is animated by a belief that American working people
really want to know why the movement that's been organized in their name has
come to so little after so many years and such great sacrifices. It's also
based on a faith that today's workers can stand the truth and will act on it.
xiv
The Sheraton Bal Harbour,
where the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations
(AFL-CIO) Executive Council held its 2004 meeting, is an enviable spot to be in
late winter. The resort is nestled on ten acres of tropical gardens and sandy
beaches in Bal Harbour, just north of Miami. There's a lagoon-style pool with
waterfalls and waterslides. In the spa, guests can choose from half a dozen
types of body wraps, including the Water Lily After Sun Soothing Wrap and the
Desert Heat Clay Wrap. Certainly for AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, the
portly, soft-handed, seventy-year-old former IBM market researcher, there were
far worse places to be. The members of the old New York City janitors union he
once ran would be heaving thirty-pound bags of garbage in the cold March winds
into piles for the morning sanitation pickups. Still, Sweeney must have had
many reasons to feel uneasy in the shade of the majestic royal palm trees that
ringed the pool.
For one thing, nearly nine
years before, when he was first elected as the AFL-CIO's "New Voice"
president, Sweeney had pledged to give up Bal Harbour. The media, he noted,
portrayed the meetings "as symbols of the labor federation's
complacency—often with photos of older men lounging at poolside."
Sweeney pledged that organized labor would henceforth be meeting at the sites
of major organizing drives.[1]
The total, sweeping
failure of Sweeney's organizing drives had been made plain just weeks earlier,
when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that private sector union
membership had hit the lowest rate since of ficial figures were compiled: 8.2
percent. There were almost a million fewer union members than when Sweeney took
office. These figures
3
were especially derisory
given Sweeney's early prediction that the AFLCIO would add a million members a
year through its organizing efforts. In 2003, National Labor Relations
elections added a net of only 30,000 members.
Sweeney had already
suffered public humiliations earlier in the year, in Iowa's Democratic
presidential caucuses in January. Labor's two candidates, Vermont governor
Howard Dean and former House majority leader Dick Gephardt, finished third and
fourth—dooming their candidacies and ensuring that the Federation would
have no leverage over the eventual winner.
Then, just the week before
the Bal Harbour meeting, the biggest strike of Sweeney's presidency was settled
on humiliating terms. Fifty-nine thousand grocery workers from seven southern
California locals would return to work after four months only to accept wages
and benefits that were worse than those originally offered. Leaders of the
largest locals tussled publicly over the microphone at a major rally. Then they
squabbled so long over who would get face time on the evening news that the
network canceled them. When Sweeney's AFL-CIO intervened to organize a major
Wall Street rally, only 250 people showed up.
Weakness invites attack.
Sweeney faced a challenge from Andy Stern, his former aide, who was president
of the Federation's largest union—the 1.8 million-member Service
Employees International Union (SEIU). Stern assailed the Federation's record on
organizing. If it didn't agree to a restructuring, he hinted, he'd split the
AFL-CIO. With no irony intended, Stern called his movement the New Unity
Partnership.
All these issues would be
debated in the light of the sparkling Miami sun. But there was another
problem—arguably the most widely perceived and the most
fundamental—that dared not speak its name. Corruption was an issue that
neither Sweeney nor Stern nor any of the Council's executive committee members
would ever publicly discuss—not in the thousands of union newspapers, nor
on the myriad union Web sites, nor even in the dozens of academic labor studies
programs in universities around the country. It was inadmissible, undebatable,
simply unmentionable— taboo.
Just as the rulers of the
House of Atreus never told their subjects about the curse levied by the gods
that led to five generations of family crimes
4
and mayhem, so the leaders
of the House of Labor pledged themselves to silence. There could be no
recognition that they had been beset by five generations of racketeering, Mafia
rule, bribery and extortion, job selling, benefit fund theft, and simple
thievery, going back to the days of the early twentieth-century labor czars.
Of course, not all
fifty-four members of the Executive Council were corrupt. But silence
undermined even the guiltless leaders, those who forswore kickbacks and managed
to survive on their six-figure salaries, because although corruption itself was
unmentionable, it was most often at the root of the mentionable problems.
Understood properly, corruption could reveal why American union leaders
couldn't organize, win strikes, keep their hands off pension and benefit funds,
offer a progressive political agenda, keep labor standards from falling, or
reform themselves.
Unlike the House of
Atreus, organized labor's curse wasn't the fault of the gods. Corruption had
been built into the labor movement from its very inception. Andy Stern, the
rebel SEIU leader, hinted obliquely in this direction when he referred
balefully to AFL-CIO's "structure"—its loose collection of
affiliates and the primacy of its autonomous locals. Stern would allow that the
structure produced a weak labor movement, but he refused to probe the structure
deeply enough. Ultimately, the source of the Federation's crisis lay in its
deepest foundations—the corrupt relations between the members and the
leaders.
These foundations are
often obscured by ideology. The meaning and nature of corruption have been bent
and twisted to fit right- and left-wing agendas. Corruption is properly
understood as the private use of public office. When union corruption appears
in the press, it's usually because of illegal acts, such as the outright
pilfering of union assets or collusion with the boss selling the members'jobs
or giving away their benefits. But a lot of corruption is legal—hiring
your relatives, taking excessive salaries, hiring-hall favoritism.
Typically, pro-business
conservatives stretch the definition of corruption too far by applying it to
the actions of unions they don't like—militant strikes or violent
political demonstrations, for example. Such actions may be illegal, and they
may even be wrong, but they aren't corrupt: no one is exploiting the union for
a private purpose.
5
far, the populist left
would narrow it too much. For some leftist critics, only the actions of union
officials can count as corrupt. The members are eternal victims.
Exempting the membership
entirely means that corruption can't ever be understood as what it patently is:
systemic. Corruption in American unions isn't a matter of isolated felonious
acts by individuals or permeation from outside by American culture. The U.S.
labor movement relies on its own internal system for producing corruption. Some
fraction of the membership is involved just as much as the leadership. That's
why it has lasted so long.
Organized labor's
governance resembles the ancient fiefdoms. Like feudalism, the union system is
local, territorial, and based on ties of mutual dependence and protection.
Those who produce the revenue—union dues and manorial rents
alike—are tied to the territory. Just as serfs couldn't switch manors,
workers stay in their locals unless they want to give up their jobs. Just as
the serfs paid feudal dues for the right to work the land, workers pay union
dues for the right to stay on the job.
Power in the system rests
on reciprocal ties between leaders and favored or connected members. Together
they are able jointly to exploit the union's job control power. The most
favored get union office, and the less favored get staff jobs or positions as
stewards and foremen. In Teamsters Local 282, Sammy "the Bull" Gravano's
old local, "working teamster foreman" jobs pay six figures—and
you don't have to bounce around in the cab of a truck all day long. Foreman
jobs are tied to the fortunes of the leaders who give them out. A client
turning on his boss, even if the boss is charged with a felony, means giving up
a comfortable livelihood.
Together patrons and
clients transform unionism into a special interest—a faction that thrives
at the expense of the common good. At the hard core may be the officers who use
loyalty to create immunity. Those who rely on the officers for jobs are loath
to give them up. But the leaders'long reach into the pockets of the disfavored
members could hardly exist without sinews that connect them to a substantial
fraction of the membership.
The kings of the House of
Atreus, Menelaus and Agamemnon, couldn't talk about the crimes of their
ancestors because they owed their rule to them. It was the same for the rulers
of unions like the Teamsters, the Laborers, and the United Food and Commercial
Workers.
6
No wonder the favorite
movie of Jimmy Hoffa's son Jim was The Lion King. Young Hoffa, a graduate of the University of
Michigan Law School, had won the presidency following the 1998
expulsion-for-life of Teamsters president Ron Carey. Now Hoffa occupied the
office of his father in the "Marble Palace"—the glittering,
five-story white headquarters that stands in the shadows of the nation's
Capitol building—that had been built in 1995 by Hoffa's immediate
predecessor, right before he went off to prison. The new Hoffa was a head
taller and a few steps slower than his famous father, whose abduction in 1975
by organized crime probably stands out as the signal event in postwar U.S.
labor history. But Hoffa Jr.'s closest allies were chiefly the sons of his
father's allies—who had been Midwestern crime family associates.[2]
To exorcise these
unpleasant perceptions, Hoffa Jr. hired Ed Stier, a former U.S. attorney, to
head an internal anticorruption task force. Stier tried to probe alleged
second-generation Chicago mob ties, but then he accused Hoffa of stonewalling
the investigation. His report alleged that several Chicago locals were still
run by mobsters. The scams were traditional— kickbacks to allow companies
to hire non-union drivers and kickbacks from members to get favored jobs.[3] Mobsters even communicated with union
critics in traditional "Chicago Outfit" style—a .44 caliber
bullet in an envelope meant "Stop passing out leaflets." In case
recipient John Pavlak, who wrote a leaflet in 2001 criticizing Dominic
Romanazzi, the boss of Local 330, somehow missed the symbolism, the envelope
also contained a written message: "You are dead."[4]
According to Stier and his
team of internal investigators, Romanazzi was in frequent contact with the
Outfit. He received calls at union headquarters from nine different wiseguys.
"The people who called me were nephews or sons of mobsters. They were not
mobsters," explained Romanazzi to the Chicago Tribune. Allegedly, Romanazzi was sent by the Outfit to
get Hoffa to stop Stier's investigation. Whether it was Romanazzi or someone
else who convinced Hoffa, he did take Stier off the case.[5]
The latest head of the
Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) was another
junior—Terence M. O'Sullivan, the son of Terence J. O'Sullivan. Like
Hoffa Jr., O'Sullivan Jr. was born on the labor union equivalent of third base.
His father, O'Sullivan Sr., was a mob associate who'd been the
Laborers'secretary-treasurer. So was the man O'Sullivan
7
Jr. had served for so long
as a personal aide and had finally replaced— Arthur Coia Jr., a longtime
mob associate who in 1999 finally got taken down on federal tax charges.
Coia Jr. had stepped into
the union's no.2 job on the death of his father, Arthur Coia Sr. His ascension
signaled the beginning of a Coia dynasty, which succeeded the half-century
reign of the Chicago-based Fosco dynasty. Now the Coias in turn were being
replaced by the O'Sullivans.
Genealogy casts a dim
light on LIUNA's effort to present O'Sullivan Jr.'s replacement of Coia Jr. as
a movement toward union reform. Going back to the 1970s, the two families had a
history of working together: the Coias—junior and senior—and the
senior O'Sullivan had all been co-indictees in the same benefit fund fraud case
involving eastern and Chicago crime families.[6]
Of all the AFL-CIO
affiliates, though, it is the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the
AFL-CIO's largest private sector union, that seemed to have the densest and
most ingrained patterns of nepotism. UFCW had at least a dozen ongoing
father-son—and even father-son-grandson—dynasties from California
to Long Island. One of the most notorious had belonged to the Talarico family.
Sam Talarico, a UFCW founder, was succeeded as its no.2 official by his son
Joseph, who may have set some kind of record for family loyalty. Joseph placed
more than forty relatives on the payroll of his Utica local. In 1998, the
dynasty fell when Joseph went to prison for embezzling nearly $ 1
million—including funds to pay for his hair transplant.[7]
The New Jersey UFCW locals
had been Genovese crime family territory going back to the 1950s. The family
controlled the two big grocery and meatcutters locals through
associates—the Kaplans, the Randos, and the Niccollais, some of whose
descendants are still running the locals today.
In the 1970s, the big
central Jersey UFCW locals formed the spear point of a Genovese effort to gain
a foothold in the banking and soap industries. Local 1262 in Clifton was the
lead local in the Genovese scheme to take over a dozen banks by using pension
funds as bait. The enterprise failed, and the local's president, Frank Rando,
pleaded guilty. Frank's brother, Ramon Rando, is now the no. 2 official in
Local 464a, earning $348,000 a year.[8]
UFCW Local 464a, just a
few miles away in Little River, was another
8
Genovese stronghold.
Control over the local figured prominently in a mob plot to sell dirty soap to
grocery stores in New Jersey and Westchester County. The Genovese family's soap
was marketed as "Ecolo G" for its alleged ecological properties. It
was a hard sell because the FDA had declared that it contained an eye irritant.
To hook store managers, Genovese-controlled union officials offered a break on
their Local 464a members'contractual wages and benefits. When A&P executives
balked at the deal, their stores were hit with explosions and arson. Two
executives were murdered. After the executions, the Genovese boss in charge of
the operation was heard on tape saying, "When is A&P gonna get the
message?"[9]
But because release of the
tapes generated pretrial publicity, nearly everyone charged, mob guys and union
officials alike, got off.
Failure to convict anyone
for the murder of the A&P executives led to a federal investigation seeking
to determine whether organized crime had infiltrated the New Jersey criminal
justice system. A grand jury probed possible ties between Local 464a
officialdom and the Passaic County prosecutor's office. They found quite a few.
The first assistant prosecutor, John Niccollai Jr., was the son of John Niccollai
Sr., Local 464a's secretary-treasurer. Steven Kaplan, an assistant prosecutor,
was the son of Irving "Izzy" Kaplan, Local 464a's founder and
president. Sam Kohen, a business agent for the local, had a brother working as
a county investigator.[10]
Following the probe, John
Niccollai Jr. made a career change. He resigned from the prosecutor's office
and got a job with his dad's union. (The senior Niccollai had just been
indicted for the fourth time.[11]) The
junior Niccollai's ascendancy to the presidency came in 2002, when the
incumbent president was charged with taking bribes and pleaded guilty to a
lesser charge.[12]
Two years later, Mr.
Niccollai was identified by the Philadelphia Inquirer as having received the
highest yearly pay of any union official in New Jersey or Pennsylvania. He
earned $407,656.[13] Niccollai also has a
dauphin, John II, who serves as a $ 156,000-a-year "director of
operations." And, finally, there is Gloria Niccollai, who receives a more
modest salary as a clerical employee. When asked in a telephone interview if
she was related to the president, Ms. Niccollai replied,"I have no comment
at this time."[14]
Across the river, in the
town of Hastings-on-Hudson in southern Westchester County, lay another troubled
UFCW family fiefdom. It
9
belonged to the Vetrano
family, who ruled quietly until March 2005, when the family patriarch,
eighty-three-year-old James Vetrano, was indicted on charges that he helped the
Gambino crime family steal Local 305's benefit funds. Vetrano was alleged by
the U.S. attorney's offfice to have cooperated with famed Westchester Gambino
boss Greg DePalma in a plot to make wiseguys beneficiaries of the plan even
though they weren't legitimate union members. Vetrano faces thirty years'
imprisonment.[15] But even if he is
imprisoned, there's another Vetrano in the pipeline—Secretary-Treasurer
Ray Vetrano. When asked what relation Ray was to James, a spokesperson for
Local 305 declared,"I'm not going to answer that, sir."[16] A spokesperson for the parent union
was no more communicative. Asked if the UFCW would force the elder Vetrano to
step down, she replied, "I can't comment on that."[17]
Had Sweeney's talk of a
"New Labor" been spin from the very beginning? Well, mostly, yes. A
prime concern of delegates to the 1995 convention was the Federation's bad
public image. Gallup polls regularly showed that labor leaders ranked near the
bottom in ratings of professional ethics. Sweeney showed his determination to
change those perceptions by outsourcing his job to Washington's top public
relations firms, pollsters, and speechwriters—mostly from the Clinton
White House. Sweeney's pollster was Stanley Greenberg, Clinton's pollster.
Sweeney's autobiography was written with David Kusnet, Clinton's principal speechwriter
from 1992 to 1994. The prominent firm of Greer, Margolis, Mitchell, and Burns
came up with a report on "core positioning and message discipline."
They provided what Jo-Ann Mort, then communications director for UNITE, called
"the new gospel." Union media should always foreground "the
economic concerns of all working families" and put the union "as an
institution" in the background. The whole effort took a little more than a
year to gear up. "The repositioning campaign launched by the AFL-CIO began
in 1997," recalls Mort, "with ads and slogans airing in five test
markets."[18]
The campaign flopped. By
2002, the public esteem in which labor lead-
10
ers were held had fallen
even further. In 1997, according to a Gallup poll, only 17 percent of Americans
had thought the ethics of labor leaders were "high or very high." But
five years later the figure had dropped to just 14 percent. Only some
salespeople—telemarketers, used car dealers, and insurance
salespersons—were ranked lower.[19]
The 1995 contest between
the two presidential rivals, Sweeney and Thomas Donahue, had been portrayed as
"the first contested election" in the Federation's history. The
implication was that a real election was finally going to take place. But a
genuine vote would have meant a direct election—one that respects the
country's democratic norms. Ever since the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment
in 1913, even the United States Senate has had direct elections. But in only a
handful of the AFL-CIO's fifty-eight affiliates do the members get to vote for
top officials.
When direct elections do
take place for the highest offices in American unions, it's usually because of
a court-ordered consent decree: The leaders opted for elections only because
they were faced with a decision—either allow genuine elections or stand
trial on racketeering charges.
The last time union
candidates with alternative programs faced each other in a real contest was at
the AFL's 1895 convention. An alliance of Populists and labor radicals backed
United Mine Workers of America president John McBride. He actually defeated the
conservative AFL incumbent, Samuel Gompers.[20]
But it was a last hurrah for radical politics— or for any politics in the
Federation. The Gompers forces crushed the McBride insurgency after only a
year. A weak confederacy of autonomous fiefdoms will never provide a theater
for genuine politics. Instead of settling arguments by persuasion and
mobilization of opinion, those who find themselves in the minority simply leave
the organization.
A century later, the
delegates could choose between two former offficials from the same union who
stood for almost identical goals and strategies. Thomas Donahue, the older of
the two, who was serving as interim AFLCIO president, had actually given Sweeney
his first staff job in the SEIU's 32BJ—the largest of the union's
janitorial locals and one of the most corrupt, going back to its founding in
the 1930s.[21] Initially, Donahue had
been Sweeney's choice for president. Both were bald-headed Irish Americans from
the Bronx. In fact, three of the last four AFL-CIO presidents have been
bald-headed Irish Americans from the Bronx.[22]
11
And what about New York's
janitors Local 32BJ—now the mother of AFL-CIO presidents? Why wasn't
serving as a top official in the New York janitors union an outright
disqualification? James Bambrick, who founded the union in 1935, had struggled
unsuccessfully to free himself from mob control. He wound up paying protection
money to George Scalise, the former pimp who had become the union's
international president with the approval of the Capone gang.[23] Bambrick was succeeded under dubious
circumstances by David Sullivan, who'd been the union's secretary-treasurer.
Sullivan had also been indicted for allegedly participating in the payments to
Scalise as well as pocketing funds. The indictments were dropped and the
prosecuting attorney was hired as Local 32BJ's general counsel. Like Sweeney,
Sullivan would use 32BJ as a springboard to the presidency of the international
union. But Malcolm Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose series of
exposes turned into On the Waterfront, described the local's saga as a paradigm of labor racketeering.[24] If Sweeney's predecessors were
tainted, so was his immediate successor, Gus Bevona. In 1999, Bevona, often
reckoned the nation's highest-paid union official, decided to retire after
settling a civil suit by dissidents charging him with using union funds to hire
a gumshoe to harass a member who had complained about"Greedy Gus"'s
$400,000-a-year salary.[25]
Sweeney's relationship
with Bevona perfectly illustrated the patronclient relationships at the heart
of the American labor movement. Bevona, who lived at members' expense in a
3,000-square-foot marbleclad penthouse atop the union's Sixth Avenue
headquarters, was widely regarded as an embarrassment. He allegedly once told a
crowd that he'd kill President Clinton if he was in the room.[26] Sweeney was the labor movement's
rising star. Yet Sweeney and Bevona were joined at the hip — and cash was
the glue. Basically, Bevona paid Sweeney protection money. After being elevated
to the SEIU's presidency, Sweeney stayed on as Bevona's consultant, at a salary
that reached nearly $80,000 a year. But the job was no sinecure, Sweeney
insisted; he was involved. True enough. When Bevona used union funds to go
after his principal critic, Sweeney approved the use of union funds plus legal
expenses to defend Bevona. Sweeney also approved a sweetheart real estate deal
Bevona made with two cleaning company contractors that allegedly cost the union
$200 million in extra lease payments. It was part of a rental arrangement on
the
12
union's headquarters,
which the members were made to believe they owned.[27]
Sweeney's rival Donahue
connived at even grosser corruption. When six officials of 32E, the parent
union's Bronx affiliate, were convicted of taking bribes from landlords in
exchange for sweetheart contracts, Donahue was brought in. It was his job to
supervise the long-overdue reform of the local. Ever since Scalise founded the
local in 1938, installing Sam "Firpo" Abrams, a convicted bank
robber, as president, every local president had gone to jail or been murderecl.[28]
Donahue let a slate of
convicted officials run again, and they were all reelected. Donahue advanced to
the assistant secretaryship of labor in the Johnson administration.[29]
Not that it made all that
much difference whether Sweeney or Donahue served as AFL-CIO president. Both
had established their qualifications for a job that demanded more discretion than
dynamism. The AFL-CIO was not a centralized organization that put a lot of
power in the hands of a single leader. The presidency was mostly an honorific
position, and the occupant acted as a spokesperson for a collection of
completely autonomous affiliates. The affiliates in turn were made up of 20,000
largely autonomous locals. The president couldn't call a single strike or
organize a single worker—any rebuilding of the Federation's strength had
to start at the local level, where the money and power were located. It was
often not in the interest of these leaders to bring in new members or to do
much more than perform routine maintenance on the political machines that kept
them in power.
A major journalistic
conceit is the importance of character. By probing the lifestyle, background,
convictions, ethnicity, and gender of the actor, you understand the person. If
you understand the person, you understand the behavior of his institution.
If character is so
decisive, how come union problems all seem so much the same, year after year,
no matter who runs the institution? Whatever the
13
gender, race, or
intellectual background of the leaders, corruption has been a constant.
District Council 37, the 120,000-member NewYork affiliate of the American
Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, is run by a
seventy-eight-year-old black woman, Lillian Roberts, a former nurse's aide. Her
critics accuse her of responsibility for kickbacks, election irregularities,
nepotism, benefit fund scams, and poor contracts. In 1998, her predecessor,
Stanley Hill, a black man, resigned in the face of similar charges. But many of
the rackets uncovered at the time by prosecutors originated in the era of his
predecessor, Victor Gotbaum, a Jewish man who'd been an intelligence offcer and
served on the Council on Foreign Relations. Regardless of temperament or
background, the job requires a certain combination of iron and rubber—an
iron hand and rubber principles. The occupant either has them to begin with or
acquires them soon.
Academics generally don't
do character analysis. They have bigger theoretical fish to fry: globalization,
the shift of manufacturing to the third world, the rise of the information
economy, the feminization of the workforce. These universal trends are supposed
to explain our unions' problems. How come, then, American unions are so
different from unions elsewhere? Except in officer salaries and total union
financial assets, where we're far ahead, the U.S. labor movement comes in last or
nearly last in just about every other important respect: the lowest density,
the longest decline in membership, the least success in social welfare
legislation, the fewest strikes—America hasn't had a real general strike
since 1877.
The American labor movement
is not only weaker than others, it's also a lot more corrupt. Of course, some
corruption is probably inevitable. But the scale and scope of corruption and
self-enrichment in "old Europe" remain relatively underdeveloped. In
other advanced industrialized countries, you don't find insignificant local
leaders earning over half a million a year. Nor do you find whole unions run by
crime families—not even in Sicily or Calabria.[30] To realize their dream of becoming
union leaders, young thugs like James "Big Jim" Colosimo, the founder
of the Chicago Laborers and the longest-serving crime boss in the city's
history, had to migrate in 1895 from southern Italy.[31] Only in America!
The fundamental actors in
American labor are institutions—the unions themselves. It's the union
institutions that act and have identity, that manage or succumb to trends, and
that shape the character of their
14
leaders. The real question
is not "Who is John Sweeney?" but "What is the institutional
character of a labor movement that turns out John Sweeneys generation after
generation?" What needs scrutiny is less the adverse macroeconomic trends
than why the AFL-CIO has been so notably unable to handle them. American unions
share the problems of unions everywhere, but they also have deeper,
characteristic problems.
Call it the fiefdom
syndrome—a kind of protection system based on exclusive jurisdictions,
exclusive bargaining, and job control. Those who control the jobs become the
bosses; those who want the jobs become their clients. Loyalty to the boss
becomes the highest virtue. It's an ethic of dependence rather than solidarity,
one that promotes the most wide-ranging corruption. Corruption in turn produces
atomization, weakness, demoralization, and apathy, which in turn promote further
corruption. Solidarity—united action on behalf of the common
good—turns into a slogan that produces only crooked smiles.
It's this special
character that explains why the American labor movement fares so poorly in the
vital tasks unions are designed to perform: improving the material living
standards of the majority of working people, ending the dependence of workers
on the will of the employer, and reducing the blatant economic inequality that
tends to develop between those who run corporations and those who work for
them.
Defenders of the AFL-CIO
status quo argue that friends of the labor movement should shut up about
corruption. Exposes of labor bosses, they say, only aid corporate bosses. The
unstated assumption is that corruption has no damaging consequences of its own.
It's just the perception of corruption that's harmful.
But corruption is not cost
free, and in many ways its consequences are more serious than ever. This is
true even though the gross symptoms are less obvious. It's not like in the late
1920s or the early 1930s; we don't have gunfights on street corners, with the
Capone and the Moran gangs blasting away at each other for control of the
Teamsters, laundry, janitors, and
15
bartenders unions.
Nowadays in Chicago, the Outfit has no rivals, and their bullets are delivered
in envelopes, meant to scare dissidents, not kill them. Maintaining a territory
requires a lot less firepower than seizing it in the first place. But the slow
strangulation of genuine labor union impulses and energies has had its effect.
The devastating results of the curse—five generations of
corruption—can be measured in seven specific ways.
The continuing
shrinkage in membership numbers. Most critics point to a decline in dues-paying
membership as the Federation's biggest problem. It's not. If the AFL-CIO's 13
million members were active, participating members, if they were connected in
action and in sympathy with non-dues-paying workers in a genuine labor
movement, if current union leaders had any moral authority, American labor
might still be a powerful force in the country.
Still, the numerical
decline says something about the fortunes of the Federation. When the AFL-CIO
was created fifty years ago, it had 16 million members, and private sector
union density stood at nearly 40 percent. Now in the private sector, it's 8
percent. Public sector membership stands much higher, but it has stopped
growing, and public sector workers constitute only about 15 percent of U.S. workers.
Two Princeton labor economists predict that, given present trends, the entire
U.S. labor movement—in the public and private sectors—will
eventually bottom out at 2.1 percent.[32]
Theories abound to explain
the decline—including outsourcing, deindustrialization, globalization,
the Reagan Revolution, bad labor laws, employer resistance, and the decline in
the species of male, blue collar workers. But lacking is any recognition that
stagnation is the natural state of official labor in America. From the dawn of
the twentieth century, the periods of decline (1919-1934 and 1955-2004) are
greater than the periods of growth (1900-1919 and 1934-1955).
Historically, the American
Federation of Labor has tended toward stagnation for a lot of the same reasons
corporate monopolies do. They are able to raise prices by restricting entry.
They have little incentive to expand. Inefficiency, underinvestment,
corruption, and inequality flow naturally from their restrictive efforts.
Understood as a loosely
connected web of urban job trusts, the recent history of U.S. labor is easily
told. Early in the twentieth century, the AFL
16
steadily filled up the
available monopoly niches—mainly in the construction, longshore, and
transportation trades. Having reached a saturation point after World War I,
membership naturally began to stagnate, at least until the 1930s, when a mass
revolt of industrial workers shook the Federation and caused a split. Goaded by
the newly formed CIO to defend its jurisdictions and aided by the federal
government, the AFL poured resources into organizing, and membership tripled.
But organizing stopped in 1955, when the two rival federations merged and
agreed to respect each other's jurisdictions. A burst of organizing in the
public sector during the 1960s proved to be only a speed bump on the road to
stagnation.
Why, then, if there is an
inherent tendency to decline, didn't organized labor disappear long
ago—or at least fall to its 2 percent natural equilibrium level?
Historically, what has prevented the AFL from death by attrition is foreign
wars and opposing organizations. World wars have been tremendous stimuli for
growth: in exchange for unions giving up the right to strike, the government
promotes unionization.
Having a domestic
opposition helps too. The AFL grows when it can provide a more acceptable
alternative to employers than more inclusive, less corruptible organizations.
About once a generation, a new labor movement comes along to challenge the
trade unions. The Progressive Era produced a "new unionism" in
opposition to the prevailing "business unionism" of the AFL. Even
when the new unionists failed to consolidate their victories in the aftermath
of the great strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, led by the Industrial Workers of
the World, they triggered an increase in the demand for unions. Above all, they
produced the aspirations and forms of struggle that eventually led to the
challenge of the more inclusive CIO.
But after the CIO merged
with the AFL in 1955, all direct incentives to organize disappeared. The
following year, organizing budgets fell more than 50 percent, and organized
labor began its slow fifty-year fade. The inherent tendency for the local
monopolies to stagnate was abetted by their unwillingness to spend money on
bringing in members who might tip the political balance within the union.
The failure to organize.
The total may represent only a third of the civilian labor force, but the
AFL-CIO cites polls indicating that 45 million workers would like to join a
union.[33] Yet the AFL-CIO has only 13 million
17
members. Neither Sweeney
nor anyone in official labor was willing to admit that it simply wasn't in the
interests of many unions to spend money on organizing. That's why they never
did—and never will. But at least Sweeney didn't hide behind the old
excuses that employers were mean and the government's election rules unfair. He
squarely blamed his predecessor, Lane Kirkland, for failing to lead.
Under Kirkland, Sweeney
noted, organizing efforts had hit rock bottom. In 1990, the worst year, there
were only 3,628 elections for union representation covering 230,000 workers.
Winning only about 50 percent of the elections meant bringing in less than half
of the 300,000 new members a year the labor movement needed just to keep from
shrinking. Sweeney's target was a million a year, which in ten years would
bring the Federation back to where it was at the time of the merger. AFL-CIO
headquarters hired 200 new organizers, and the affiliates hired thousands more.
The goal was to get every affiliate to increase its organizing budget to at
least 20 percent.
The upshot was even fewer
new members: a steep and steady decline in the number of elections and in the
number of workers brought into unions through elections. In sheer numerical terms,
Kirkland, whose organizing specialty was alleged to be Georgetown soirees,
actually produced better organizing numbers than Sweeney. In 2003, there were
one-third fewer elections than ten years earlier, under Kirkland, and the
number of workers brought in through union elections was only 47,000. When the
number of members lost via employer-sponsored decertification
elections—where the members vote to get rid of the union—was
figured in, it left only 30,000 new members, or about 3 percent of the target of
1 million.
Why should this come as a
surprise? The U.S. fiefdom model of unionism operates a lot like old-style
cartel capitalism. Of course, it's in the interests of organized labor to have
more members. But it's not necessarily in the interests of each local to spend
the money to organize. It's also in the interest of business as a whole for
each individual firm to invest. One firm's spending benefits another. But if
the firm has a monopoly, extra investment may lower profits. There has to be a
competitive threat.
In the 1930s, the threat
of the CIO forced the AFL to organize. In fact, when challenged, the AFL was
able to out-organize the CIO.[34] With
the
18
gradual taming of the CIO
and its ultimate incorporation into the AFL, employers had less incentive to
recognize the more employer-friendly, corrupt AFL affiliates. The main point of
the merger was to save money by calling off the battle for members. The big
falloff in membership started with the agreement between the two federations to
stop competing for members. Jurisdictional boundaries between unions became
more secure than ever before.
Certainly U.S. laws
governing union recognition are a disgrace. They abridge a fundamental human
right—the right to organize and bargain collectively with employers. But
the most towering obstacle to organizing remains the AFL-CIO itself, a
patchwork realm of 20,000 self-regarding local fiefdoms. That's where 75
percent of the money for organizing lies.[35]
Many have little incentive to organize. Others aren't equipped to organize even
if they wanted to.
In the classic
trades—construction, longshore, and certain elite locals in the
Teamsters, unions don't organize because bringing in more members wouldn't
raise the income of those already organized. It would lower them. Many blacks,
immigrants, and women would like to become plumbers and electricians, and many
would like $100,000-a-year jobs on the docks. But from the union standpoint,
bringing in these groups wouldn't increase the number of unionized jobs, just the
number of workers sitting in the hiring hall waiting for jobs. There's also the
danger that black members might dilute the political base of the white
leadership.
Then there is the most
unmentionable of internal organizing obstacles: corruption. Why didn't the
Teamsters'Joint Council 25 boss, Bill Hogan, try to organize low-wage United
Service Companies employees at the Las Vegas Convention Center? Why, in 1999,
did he try to replace Las Vegas union workers making $20.00 an hour with
employees from United making $7.90? Because his brother was a big executive in
United, according to a Teamsters Internal Review Board, which expelled him for
life.[36] Why didn't Hogan's boss, Hoffa Jr.,
set him straight? Most likely because gaining new members was less important to
Hoffa than keeping the political support of his powerful regional baron.
Why don't union carpenters
have a bigger share of the work in midtown Manhattan? Because the head of the
New York City Council of Carpenters allegedly took an envelope with $10,000
inside. Prosecutors said it
19
had been given to him by
the son-in-law of the DeCavalcante crime family's godfather. The exchange took
place after the two quaffed beers at Hooters, just a few steps from the Park
Central Hotel. In exchange for the ten large—a down payment on a $50,000
bribe—Mike Forde, the Council's boss, agreed to allow lower-paid,
non-union carpenters to replace his members on the Park Central remodeling job.
Forde was convicted of the charges in 2004, but the conviction was later overturned
by the presiding judge, Jeffrey Atlas, because of alleged anti-union sentiment
on the part of some jurors. Atlas accused them of holding the view "that
the case resembled a Sopranos episode."[37]
Perhaps the problem of juror bias could have been solved by excluding those
contaminated with knowledge of the union's history. A decade earlier, Martin
Forde, Mike's dad, was brought down on similar charges. The same charges doomed
an almost unbroken series of District Council officials going back to the late
Teddy Maritas, who allowed Genovese crime families to control a non-union
drywall empire in the Bronx until he disappeared just before his trial.
The decline in the
number and effectiveness of strikes. Just consider the past fifty years. There was no great spike in
strike activity in the 1950s— nothing like the strike wave following
World War II, after price controls were lifted. But in 1952 there were 470
major strikes involving 2.75 million workers. The totals have dropped pretty
steadily since. There was a flareup in the 1970s—inflation again. But the
numbers in the Nixon-Ford era never reached those of the Truman-Eisenhower
period. And by 1992, there were only thirty-five strikes involving 364,000
workers. The percentage of work time lost by strikes fell to an oceanic depth
of 0.02 percent— two hundredths of 1 percent.[38]
Although it hardly seems
possible, strike activity has fallen substantially since then. The 1997
Teamsters strike against UPS—heralded as a "watershed" by the
secretary of labor and "a major triumph and an omen of future
success" by the New York Times—proved to be a false dawn.[39] The two-week strike didn't even change
the ratio of full-time to part-time workers at UPS, much less reverse the
decline of the U.S. labor movement. The downward trend continued unabated. In
2004, there were only seventeen strikes affecting only 0.01 percent of precious
work time.[40] The strike rate in the
United States is only a fraction of what it is in major western European
countries.
20
Labor experts at the
Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, predict that globalization will
bring with it the triumph of the U.S. industrial relations model. This may be
wishful thinking. Despite setbacks and scattered signs of convergence, it
hasn't happened yet. On the contrary, in western Europe, South Korea, and
Israel, general strikes, nationwide labor protests, thought to have gone out
with cloth caps and lunch pails, have returned. Most seek to stop the
dismantling of the welfare state. Perhaps the most successful general strike
took place in France, where a three-week job action in 1995 brought down the
conservative government and led to the passage of legislation guaranteeing a
thirty-five-hour workweek.[41]
General strikes in Italy brought down the first Berlusconi government; since
then they have become almost routine. In the winter of 2004, the second of two
massive actions saw over a million demonstrators in fifty Italian cities
protesting changes in pension eligibility.[42]
Likewise, in France during the winter of 2005, when the conservative government
of Jacques Chirac tried to repeal the thirty-five-hour law, over a million
workers went on strike in protest.[43]
Not all the general
strikes were defensive. In the late 1990s, a largely successful Danish strike
for a sixth vacation week had 10 percent of the Danish population in the
streets. The Danes stayed out for two weeks, demanding parity with workers in
other Scandinavian countries. Seventy percent of the Danish population
supported the action. When the vacation legislation was enacted, employers
complained that Denmark had become "a workers'dictatorship."[44]
At least that's one threat
America doesn't face. It's not just that multinational employers have an easy
time of crushing the isolated, uncoordinated protests of their employees, who
are trapped in the ever-shrinking archipelago of organized labor, or that U.S.
labor laws uniquely favor employers by allowing the use of "replacement
workers." There's also the cynical indifference of the higher union officials
to the struggles that take place at the lower levels of their own organization.
Consider the desperate but
doomed efforts of 300 workers at Domino Sugar's Brooklyn refinery who tried to
resist management's plan to lay off a third of the workforce. On June 15, 1999,
the members of Local 1814 of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA)
challenged Lyle & Tate, the multinational owners of their 143-year-old
plant, by going out on strike.
21
The union ranks held for
twenty months—not one single member crossed the picket line. By the end
of February 2001, the members were driven back to the factory by hunger, a
member's suicide, and the glacial indifference of labor's
leadership—including their own. Domino Sugar's other unionized U.S. plants
worked overtime to turn out the sugar lost by the Brooklyn strike. Explained
the head of Baltimore's United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1l0l, "If
my contract were expired, I would have joined them 100 percent." The
Domino Sugar workers also got no help from the head of the NewYork State
Federation of Labor. "It bothered me from the beginning that the union
wasn't strong enough to put this together," recalled the official.[45] But it was the silence of AFL-CIO
president John Sweeney that resounded loudest in Brooklyn. After the members
had surrendered, strike leader Joe Crimi commented, "God Bless our labor
leaders who must have thought this strike was a waste of time," he said.
"But what makes me mad is I stopped [the] members from putting up the RAT
[a fifteen-foot inflatable rodent signifying"scabs at work"] against
Sweeney. Two-year strike, one death, totally destroyed membership, a contract
book that took more than sixty years to accomplish slashed to shit. God knows
the money they lost, families disrupted. And I stopped them. Why? Because I
didn't want to hurt the labor movement."[46]
Crimi's strikers didn't
even get any help from their own international union, the International
Longshoremen's Association—not even strike funds. John Bowers, the ILA's
president, who kept office even after a 1990 racketeering suit charging he was
a mob puppet, couldn't be bothered.[47]
Nor could the top leaders of Local 1814. These weren't the same mob associates
charged in the 1990 suit—they were new ones. But they were busy, too,
running errands for the Gambino crime family, extorting payments from members
for cushy waterfront jobs, collecting kickbacks from bosses for labor peace,
and intimidating trustees of the local's health plan to award contracts to
companies owned by the Gambino and Genovese families. These activities are the
charges in the 2002 indictment brought against Local 1814's president, Frank
"Red" Scollo, who was indicted along with fifteen other crime family
members and associates. Scollo eventually pleaded guilty.[48]
The collapse of labor
standards. "America Needs a Raise" was the title of John Sweeney's
book. His premise was that by putting resoorces into or
22
ganizing unions, Americans could get a raise. But increasingly, many American unions weren't capable of getting raises that exceeded the non-union rate or sometimes even the minimum wage. Union wages below or only slightly higher than the legal minimums were common in the grocery stores and chicken-plucking factories represented by the UFCW,