by STEVE EARLY
SEIU’s Courtroom Payday Is Pyrrhic Victory for New Corporate Unionism
Legal lynching, actual or attempted, has been a longtime threat to union organizing. When workers first tried to form unions, they found themselves charged with conspiracy. For nearly a century, employer attempts to crush their “illegal combinations” took the form of injunctions, fines, and imprisonment for civil court contempt or criminal law violations. When the trade unionists involved were progressives, additional tools of repression were employed, including statutes against “criminal syndicalism” (a widespread IWW offense), “sedition” (for which Gene Debs spent time in jail, after opposing World War I), and advocating a government overthrow (the basis for Smith Act indictments against Farrell Dobbs of the Teamsters and Bill Sentner of the UE). For many years in California, the government used federal immigration law, fruitlessly, in an effort to deport Harry Bridges of the ILWU back to his native Australia.
In my own experience as a trade unionist since 1972, I’ve seen West Virginia coal miners hauled into court, jailed and fined for wildcat striking. The UMW was a frequent target of huge damage suits filed by coal operators for breach of the “no-strike” clause in the union contract; when the Pittston strike, an officially sanctioned work-stoppage, ended in 1989, the UMW and its members faced more than $60 million in fines. In the last twenty years, “civil RICO” litigation has become another popular form of management payback for non-strike activity, such as union-orchestrated “corporate campaigns.” The acronym refers to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. In protracted labor disputes, it provides a basis for a legal counter-attack similar to that faced, with increasing frequency, by citizens whose pro-consumer or pro-environment stance results in a SLAPP — a business-backed “strategic lawsuit against public participation” in regulatory proceedings or community protests.
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