Organized Crime

Imagine starting up a coffee shop that becomes successful and profitable. Then imagine that, as is par for the course in competitive markets, competing coffee shops pop up and begin competing for your customers with lower prices. You respond by attempting to murder the competitors, assaulting them and their employees with knives, baseball bats, clubs and fists, vandalizing their cars and places of business, setting fire to their buildings, spiking their coffee stores with rat poison, throwing rocks at them as they leave their coffee shops, and even dynamiting their buildings.

Would such practices be considered to be a part of the peaceful freemarket economy? Of course not; the above-mentioned acts are pure thuggery and criminality. They are also among the inherent defining characteristics of the American union movement.

A basic understanding of elementary labor economics, and of the history of unionism, explains why violence has always been an inherent feature of private-sector unions. Historically, the main “weapon” that unions have employed to push wages above competitive rates through individual, employee/employer bargaining has been the strike or strike threat. But in order for a strike to be effective, and for unions to have any relevance at all to workers, some form of violence and coercion must be employed to keep competing replacement workers from the labor market. As explained by Dr. Morgan Reynolds, a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, in his book Power and Privilege: Labor Unions in America:

A union’s problem is painfully obvious: organized strikers must shut down the enterprise, close the market to everyone else—uncooperative workers, union members, disenchanted former strikers, and employers—in order to force wages and working conditions above free-market rates. If too many individuals defy the strikers . . . then unionists often resort to force. Unionists ultimately cannot impose noncompetitive wage rates . . . unless they can prevent employers from hiring consenting adults on terms that are mutually satisfactory. Unions must actively interfere with freedom of trade in labor markets in order to deliver on their promises.

Thus, strikes—and unions in general—represent a conflict between unionized and non-unionized labor, not between “labor and management.” According to Reynolds, among the tactics that unions have traditionally employed against non-union workers, who they describe as “scabs” and “rats,” are mass picketing, insults, threats, throwing rocks and bottles at them, car chasing, abusive phone calls, physical assaults, property destruction, and even murder.

Union violence is in fact far worse than Reynolds’s description of it. In 1983 the Industrial Research Unit of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania published a 540-page book entitled Union Violence: The Record and the Response by Courts, Legislatures, and the NLRB by Professors Armand J. Thieblot, Jr. and Thomas R. Haggard. The book notes that employers have also resorted to violence in labor disputes, but that does not mean that two wrongs make a right. There have been books written about employer violence; Thieblot and Haggard document union violence which, as Reynolds has said, is inherent in labor unions.

Surveying newspaper accounts and judicial records for a period of several decades, the authors write that the accounts of union violence are

full of examples of murder, assault with intent to kill, destruction of property, arson, sabotage, mayhem, shooting, stabbing, beating, stoning, dynamiting, intimidating, threatening—in short, physical, verbal, and psychological abuse of every sort.

The police and the judicial system often look the other way when unions are the perpetrators of violence and property destruction. They do this because the police are unionized themselves, and consider striking workers to be their “union brothers.” And the judicial system is just as inefficient and corrupt in dealing with union violence as it is in dealing with anything else.

Thieblot and Haggard explain why violence and coercion are inherent features of unionism: they are used as an organizing tool; to engender fear and compliance with union demands; as a bargaining device; as an attention getter that they hope will generate pressure for a settlement in their favor; as an enforcement mechanism to keep strikers in line; as a warning to employers who might consider contracting with non-union companies; as a means of preventing non-union companies from working during strikes; and as a means of generating fear in general, just like any criminal gang would in order to intimidate any potential competitors.

Thieblot and Haggard surveyed hundreds of National Labor Relations Board cases and thousands of other judicial documents and newspaper accounts of union violence over several decades and concluded that “judging from the listings, violence seems to be an inherent part of labor relations and the collective bargaining process, or at least its use is widely distributed. The 2,598 incidents in the data base involve 131 different unions.” The overall purpose of the violence, they further conclude, is “to attain union objectives through the blatant and often unpunished use of force and coercion.”