Big Labor is watching your wedding: When your Big Day gets a secondary boycott

Union thuggery is a lot less common than it used to be, as the Long Decline has driven down the proportion of workers—and, importantly, consumers—exposed to unionized workplaces. But keeping Big Labor on the right side of public order required policymaking, both in the form of tougher criminal-justice laws to root out racketeers and limitations on union activities to preserve general order (so-called “labor peace”). But as one Chicago-area bride-to-be discovered, union thuggery is not dead.

Nice wedding you’re planning. Shame if anything were to happen to it.

The Daily Mail reports:

Lauren Johnson, of Mishawaka, Indiana, is all set for her wedding to her fiancé, Tyler Bradley, on July 17 in South Bend, and has made sure all the details are perfect on their wedding website.

On the site, she included a brief suggestion for guests to stay at the DoubleTree Hotel in South Bend, which is located near the venue.

But little did she know that a sentence on her website would cause such a stir for UNITE HERE Local 1 – a labor union that represents hospitality workers in Northwest Indiana and Chicago.

Over the past decade and a half or so, “wedding websites” have allowed couples to post information for wedding guests and sort through invitations and RSVPs. By default, these websites are often public, which usually doesn’t matter because weddings are semi-public events and marriages are matters of public record anyway. But for the unfortunate Ms. Johnson, the wrong people — Big Labor and its thuggish activist class — found her site. From the Mail:

Shortly after making the innocent recommendation, the 25-year-old future bride was inundated with bizarre abuse from union members, who even showed up outside her job and protested over her mention of the hotel.

‘They started calling my personal number, and then they started calling my friends, and then their workplace as well,’ Johnson told CBS News. 

The angry group even went as far as to send fake wedding invitations to her friends and family that stated: ‘Love is a choice. So is standing with workers. Say “I don’t” to this union boycotted hotel.’

Can Mr. Republican save the day?

Perhaps the most alarming action—of many, including direct correspondence with Johnson after she made her website private—taken against the bride-to-be was protesting outside her place of employment. Unidentified men held a sign declaring in all-caps: “TELL LAUREN JOHNSON TO BOYCOTT DOUBLETREE HOTEL SOUTH BEND.” (The Mail has a photograph of the protest at its report.)

This raises a question: Why don’t unions harass brides all the time? Enter the Taft-Hartley Act, named for the 20th century’s “Mister Republican,” Sen. Robert A. Taft (R-OH), and enacted to prevent exactly the sort of thing that Johnson has experienced. What the union or its allied activists have done to Johnson looks an awful lot like a “secondary boycott,” a form of pressure campaign officially prohibited to unions that otherwise functions as “the left’s ultimate weapon.” Allow me to describe such an action:

A “secondary” boycott differs from a traditional boycott in which entity suffers the activists’ pain. […] Secondary boycotts have different direct targets. The activist targets a victim with the intent of changing the behavior of a third party with whom the victim engages, usually in a commercial transaction.

Setting up the game-board in the Indiana case, the union is directly targeting the bride-to-be with classical union tactics—picketing, intimidating mail, leafleting—for conducting business with the third party, the hotel.

Now, thanks to the Taft-Hartley Act, unions are supposed to be prohibited from secondary boycotts. It is not clear from the Mail reporting whether any legal action has been taken in Johnson’s case to determine whether the union’s action runs foul of the prohibition; the application of the secondary boycott rules is extremely technical. Whether this usage is fair or foul, I noted that leftist activists have good reason to employ the tactic:

So, why do this? As labor-union-organizer-turned-nominally-objective-labor-journalist Josh Eidelson declared explicitly: “Secondary targets make for soft targets.”

But why do secondary targets make for soft targets? It is a case of costs and benefits. The primary target is deeply invested, both financially and ideologically, in whatever it is that the activists do not like. If a primary action would inflict enough pain to end the activity, activists would carry out a primary action.

But the secondary target is not invested and may even be ideologically at odds with the primary target. By training their power against the secondary target’s reputation, which can be extremely costly to the target, activists impel the target to take coercive action against the principal the activists hope to harm.

Cheers to the couple

Applied to this case, Eidelson’s “soft target” principle easily fits. The union, UNITE HERE Local 1, thought it had an easy, soft, and insignificant target in Lauren Johnson and her wedding website. The union would make an example of Johnson, with activists at her workplace trashing her public reputation; she would quietly accede to the union’s demands; and the union would show its power and deprive a targeted business of business. The soft underbelly of the consumer economy lay exposed, and the practice is infinitely repeatable, so long as consumers recommend targeted businesses publicly to their friends.

But ordinary Americans like Johnson have, as a group, never tolerated coercive unionism (or at least unionism that coerces economic actors other than employers). When railwaymen threatened a strike after World War II that would shut down the economy because union bosses thought the widespread economic damage would force the government, the railroads, and the public to surrender, then-President Harry Truman — a Democrat, a New Dealer, a self-proclaimed “friend of labor,” and the future veto-er of the Taft Hartley Act himself — went ballistic, telling the country:

I come before the American people tonight at a time of great crisis. The crisis of Pearl Harbor was the result of action by a foreign enemy. The crisis tonight is caused by a group of men within our own country who place their private interests above the welfare of the nation.

[…]

This is no contest between labor and management. This is a contest between a small group of men and their government. The railroads are now being operated by your government and the strike of these men is a strike against your government. The fact is that the action of this small group of men has resulted in millions of other workers losing their wages. The factories of our country are far behind in filling their orders. Our workers have good jobs at high wages but they cannot earn these wages because of the willful attitude of these few men. I cannot believe that any right of any worker in our country needs such a strike for its protection. I believe that it constitutes a fundamental attack upon the rights of society and upon the welfare of our country. It is time for plain speaking. This strike with which we are now confronted touches not only the welfare of a class but vitally concerns the well-being and the very life of all our people.

I somehow doubt Lauren Johnson and Tyler Bradley knew they were channeling Harry Truman and a century-old tradition in American life when they went to the press to object to UNITE HERE’s coercion. But they are not alone in feeling their sense of fair play violated by such behavior, and such offense (as President Truman’s vitriol indicates) is not partisan or ideological.

They have done the country a service by telling their story. All I hope is that their story has a happy ending—and that the old laws that keep their story rare stand the test of time.