Labor Union Accomplishments – Epilogue
Posted by Larry Miller on September 6, 2010 under Why | 
3 Comments to Read
Yesterday’s post told a story of working in a unionized shop in the garment industry in the late sixties and early seventies. It may be instructive to look at where some of the actors ended in later years.
The International Ladies Garment Workers Union, from a peak of about 450,000 members in 1969 started loosing members as manufacturing left the United States for foreign shores. It seems that all the members’ money they threw at politicians was used to pursue other agendas and not keep jobs at home. Their influence dropped as membership continued to decline until, in 1995, they merged with rival Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union when their combined membership was only 250,000.
The new union was called the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) which, in 2004 merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) to form UNITE HERE. These mergers took place as union membership continued to fall. In fact as one looks at the union publicity, it appears that UNITE HERE seems to be a competitor to SEIU. This is not to say that they are the good guys deserving of our support, but that they, like most non-governmental unions, suffered from the loss of manufacturing jobs in our country and the realization of the American people the they neither needed nor wanted union goons fighting their battles.
The misfortunes of the ILGWU were nothing compared to what happened to two others.
Interstate Dress Carriers still exists as a shell of a corporation… no longer functioning. There was no need to carry garments produced overseas. Founder and primary stockholder, Jack Lieberman, was gunned down outside a Miami nightspot one evening. To my knowledge, no one was ever charged with the murder.
Then, there was Bob Mickus, who organized the Slate Belt Apparel Contractors. It was an association of factory owners who banded together to negotiate union contracts and acted as a clearing house for getting them work. One morning, he left his office to visit several of the shops in the group. Later that day, he was found dead in his car by the side of the road. The official story was that he had a heart attack, but my naturally cynical nature always left me wondering.
In any case whatever the positive propaganda, labor unions have a dark side that they don’t like the public to see. However, much like the current administration, they are willing to use brute force when people see through their smoke and mirrors and become obstacles in their path. As we’ve seen with SEIU, manipulating their membership, bullying others and accumulating power is the way they do business. We live in extremely dangerous times when we have these predators running free in our society, a President who says “I owe these people” and a justice department cooperatively turning a blind eye to the corruption rampant in both organizations.
David Lagesse said,
I was thinking about the Garment Workers Union
Our local ice cream trucks play various tunes, one of those tunes is the old “Union Label” song. It went: ” Look for the Union Label, the Union Label, the Union Label. Look for the Union Label, the Union Label the Union Label, the Union Label.
— Wow! catchy lyrics! —
QUESTION for the Garment Workers Union Members and past members.
Hows that working out for you?
Jabari Apparel said,
As a result, union membership as a share of the total workforce rose last year for the first time since 1983. Jabari Apparel
gk68 said,
Important RE: Obama and Corrupt Labor Unions–Trumka!!!
Big Labor’s Legacy of Violence
by Michelle Malkin
09/03/2010
To mark Labor Day 2010, President Obama will join hands with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in Milwaukee and pose as champions of the working class. Bad move. Trumka’s organizing record is a shameful reminder of the union movement’s violent and corrupt foundations.
The new Obama/AFL-CIO power alliance — underwritten with $40 million in hard-earned worker dues — is a midterm shotgun marriage of Beltway brass knuckles and Big Labor brawn. Trumka warmed up his rhetorical muscles this past week with full-frontal attacks on former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. He indignantly accused her of “getting close to calling for violence” and suggested that her criticism of Tea Party-bashing labor bosses amounted to “terrorizing” workers.
Trumka and Obama will cast Big Labor as an unassailable force for good in American history. But when it comes to terrorizing workers, Trumka knows whereof he speaks.
Meet Eddie York. He was a workingman whose story will never scroll across Obama’s teleprompter. A nonunion contractor who operated heavy equipment, York was shot to death during a strike called by the United Mine Workers 17 years ago. Workmates who tried to come to his rescue were beaten in an ensuing melee. The head of the UMW spearheading the wave of strikes at that time? Richard Trumka. Responding to concerns about violence, he shrugged to the Virginian-Pilot in September 1993: “I’m saying if you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you’re likely to get burned.” Incendiary rhetoric, anyone?
A federal jury convicted one of Trumka’s UMW captains on conspiracy and weapons charges in York’s death. According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Legal and Policy Center, which tracks Big Labor abuse, Trumka’s legal team quickly settled a $27 million wrongful death suit filed by York’s widow just days after a judge admitted evidence in the criminal trial. An investigative report by Reader’s Digest disclosed that Trumka “did not publicly discipline or reprimand a single striker present when York was killed. In fact, all eight were helped out financially by the local.”
In Illinois, Trumka told UMW members to “kick the s**t out of every last” worker who crossed his picket lines, according to the Nashville (Ill.) News. And as the National Right to Work Foundation, the leading anti-forced unionism organization in the country, pointed out, other UMW coalfield strikes resulted in what one judge determined were “violent activities … organized, orchestrated and encouraged by the leadership of this union.”
Trumka washed off the figurative bloodstains and moved up the ranks. As AFL-CIO secretary, he notoriously refused to testify in a sordid 1999 embezzlement trial involving his labor boss brethren at the Teamsters Union. No surprise. Thugs of a feather: Trumka’s violence-promoting record echoes the riotous Teamsters strikes dating back to the 1950s, when the union organized taxicab companies to target workers with gas bombs, bottles and fists.
And now, Trumka is spearheading a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote campaign by far-left groups — publicized in the revolutionary Marxist People’s World — to “energize an army of tens of thousands who will return to their neighborhoods, churches, schools and voting booths to prevent a Republican takeover of Congress in November and begin building a new permanent coalition to fight for a progressive agenda.”
Take those as literal fighting words. The bloody consequences of compulsory unionism cannot be ignored.
Mrs. Malkin is author of Unhinged (Regnery) and “Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies” (Regnery 2009).
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