A crackdown on political violence that quietly worked

Since the horrifying murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, allegedly by a man apparently motivated by disjointed left-wing or transgender ideology, and the shooting at a Texas Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, allegedly by a man who marked his cartridge cases with anti-ICE slogans, the nation has been gripped by the problem of politically motivated violence. But one dog has not barked, and that is organized labor.

Big Labor was once a big source of organized political violence in the United States.

Before the 1980s, violence was a common feature of union activities, with hundreds of incidents documented annually, many involving shootings and even homicides. Today, such events, while still occasionally alleged or occurring, are much rarer, and often do not rise to the level of public media reports. The Taft-Hartley Consensus, combined with good old-fashioned gumshoe law enforcement, worked, and teaches lessons for combating broader political violence problems. In short, expelling malevolent actors from the labor movement using government force and ceasing to treat union violence as “acceptable” or “less culpable” than normal violence brought labor peace.

Mobsters, meet RICO

According to the AP: DeFede and “others allegedly threatened violence and labor unrest if the business owners did not submit to the extortion demands.”

It should not be surprising that labor-related violence and threats of violence have declined since the federal government made major efforts to eliminate organized crime control of labor unions. By itself, the 1959 Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act was not enough to break thieves’ and mobsters’ control of unions; labor-regulation law could not even get Jimmy Hoffa out of office at the Teamsters union, which took federal law enforcement. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, passed in 1970, gave federal law enforcement additional powers to break up Mafia operations and send mafiosos to prison.

By the 1980s, the federal government (under Taft-Hartley Consensus supporting President Ronald Reagan) wanted to get organized crime and related labor racketeering—including the attendant violence—out of American life. In 1982, the Feds took on Teamsters Local 560 in Newark, New Jersey, which had been run by a Genovese family capo and was plagued by violence against members opposed to its Mob-tied leadership. The government filed a civil RICO lawsuit to restructure and reform the union.

In 1983, President Reagan convened a commission to investigate the full extent of organized crime in American life. In 1986, it published a volume on organized criminal penetration of labor unions, marking the Teamsters, the east coast longshoremen (ILA), Laborers, and Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees (HERE) unions as the most corrupted by mafiosi. The federal government would file civil racketeering suits against the Teamsters, Laborers, and HERE international bodies, placing them into supervisory trusteeships ranging from 18 months in HERE’s case to over two decades in the Teamsters’ case.

Removing mobsters from union leadership removed at least two common forms of union violence from the scene. First, mobsters (or their nominally union allies) occasionally threatened or even whacked rivals for union leadership. This is one of the leading theories for the still-unsolved probable-murder of Jimmy Hoffa: The Mafia found his successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, easier to manipulate, and so they, uh, “dealt with” Hoffa at the Machus Red Fox when it became clear that Hoffa wanted back into the labor racketeering game.

The second form of Mafia labor violence is classical extortion. Mafia-aligned unionists (or just mafia soldiers) would extort businesspeople through violence or the threat thereof to engage with the mobbed-up union, the Mob itself, or both. Joseph DeFede, a mobster reputed to be the acting boss of the Lucchese family in the late 1990s, went to prison after pleading guilty to labor racketeering in the New York City garment industry. According to a contemporary Associated Press report, DeFede and “others allegedly threatened violence and labor unrest if the business owners did not submit to the extortion demands.”

Enforcement of the law

… various arms of the federal government have conflicting interpretations over whether employers have the obligation to protect workers from union-related harassment in the workplace or are prohibited from protecting workers from union-related harassment in the workplace.

Another reason labor-related violence seems to have declined is plain and simple law enforcement. It’s hard to find data for recent times on how much labor union-related violence there has been. This is likely an indication it has declined substantially since the early 1980s, when the University of Pennsylvania Industrial Research Unit published a 500-page tome on the law of union violence.

And one of the reasons for that is that even back in the early 1980s, unions became less violent when they reasonably expected that state and local governments would apply the basic anti-violence laws against them. The authors of the UPenn report detail the differences in violent behavior by United Mine Workers members involved in a 1981 strike in Virginia and in Kentucky. Virginia Governor John Dalton (R) called out state police and declared that he would protect the operation of non-union mines; Kentucky Governor John Brown, Jr. (D) declared “strict neutrality,” which meant in practice that he would not enforce the law against strikers. No prizes for guessing which state had more strike violence, but it was Kentucky.

There remain loopholes in applying the law evenly and properly to union-related violence and misconduct. The Employee Rights Act, a proposal to reform labor law to protect individual workers from various union abuses, would close two of them.

First, various arms of the federal government have conflicting interpretations over whether employers have the obligation to protect workers from union-related harassment in the workplace or are prohibited from protecting workers from union-related harassment in the workplace. The Institute for the American Worker (I4AW), a labor-policy think tank aligned with the Taft-Hartley Consensus, calls this paradox the “Battle of the 7s” after the relevant, conflicting portions of law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) and Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which enforces the CRA, requires employers to prevent workplace harassment, and I4AW reports that its guidance has held that “insults and slurs could trigger liability under Title VII.” Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the Biden administration ruled that the NLRA protected certain “blatantly discriminatory or harassing language in the workplace, so long as the comments are made in the context of labor union activity.” In addition to creating an apparently unresolvable legal paradox for an employer, this dichotomy seems to tell Big Labor that its misconduct does not matter to public policy and is a wink-and-nod tolerance of it.

Similarly, a judge-created loophole in extortion law has persisted since the 1973 Supreme Court decision United States v. Enmons, which held that the Hobbs Act, which had been passed in part to override court decisions protecting certain extortionate acts by unions, did not punish the use of violence by unions and union officials “to achieve legitimate union objectives.” The decision has been challenged by legislative action essentially since it was handed down, but no legislation to correct it has successfully passed into law.

The Employee Rights Act would close both of these loopholes, among making other salutary changes to labor law. While union violence is not the emergency that other forms of political violence presently seem to be, ensuring that unions do not get the signal that their violence and intimidation are politically and socially tolerated should prevent a crisis from reemerging.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-crackdown-on-political-violence-that-quietly-worked/