Policing Organized Labor

...The BLMR, however, is not taking anything on faith...

...The complainant also got his information...

...The culprits were a small minority of the labor movement, but they often succeeded, as in the case of the Teamsters Union, in victimizing hundreds of thousands of members...

...it requires that union financial officials be bonded for "faithful discharge" of their duties...

...The members' rights to selfgovernment were as consistently flouted...

...In many cases, the BLMR sustains the parent body...

...He allowed no other names to be placed in nomination...

...The fact that it is on the books has made people more careful—both in handling union funds and in running elections...

...Last year, 2,000 people visited the BLMR's document rooms in Washington and some 1,300 inquiries came by mail...

...It endows individual members with certain civil liberties enforceable in court (such as free speech at union meetings...

...The most notorious hoodlum brought to book was Stoy Decker, president of Local 86 of the Teamsters in Louisville, Kentucky...

...Over 800 ballots were sent to the FBI laboratory for examination...

...there are over 52,000 union financial reports alone...

...One of its most interesting cases involved a trusteeship which the United Automobile Workers (UAW) imposed in January 1960 on Local 988 of Memphis, Tennessee...

...The investigators also interviewed a number of union members who, the records showed, had voted...

...the FBI reported suspicious indentations of "X"s on many ballots, which suggested that they might have been marked in stacks before being stuffed into the ballot boxes...

...From July through September, they sought a new election and were successively turned down by the local, by the international executive board and by the union's biennial convention...

...But soon afterward three of the losers charged that the election had been rigged...

...Fifty-one of them, however, insisted that they had not voted...

...In that month, however, the Labor Department set up a court of last resort for aggrieved union members—the Bureau of Labor-Management Reports (BLMR)—to enforce the recently enacted Landrum-Griffin Act...

...At first the act was viewed with horror by a good many labor leaders...

...Many of the 2,632 cases involved minor and unintentional violations, such as erroneous arithmetic in a financial report, and could be cleared up after an exchange of correspondence or a visit by a compliance officer...

...The new President was elected by more than 600 votes...

...a third of its 152 compliance officers are organized into task forces to ferret out the most covert and resistant pockets of corruption in the labor movement...

...In only 18 cases did it have to file a complaint in court—and in seven of these the union agreed to a new poll, under BLMR supervision, before the matter came to trial...

...Irwin Ross, author of The Image Merchants, has contributed to Harper's, Fortune and other magazines...

...The latter moved quickly...

...When they refused, the union sent in an administrator to run the local and oversee a new poll...

...The President gratefully accepted his own renomination and that of his slate...

...it sets up standards for fair elections and trusteeships...

...Almost any election case is dramatic testimony to the effectiveness of the law...

...First it tried to persuade the local officers to hold a new election...

...The BLMR is obliged to investigate every complaint of an illegal trusteeship and is empowered to bring a civil suit to set it aside...

...The Bureau prefers, however, to hold its penalties in reserve and secure voluntary compliance wherever possible...

...By early November, the BLMR uncovered 103 election violations...

...The BLMR checked its files, found that the union had not furnished the financial report required by the law...

...To correct such abuses, the LandrumGriffin Act provided that trusteeships could only be established for certain legitimate purposes—such as eliminating corruption, re-establishing democratic procedures, or assuring adherence to collective bargaining contracts...

...In the Banana Handlers Local of the International Longshoremen's Association in New Orleans, everything indicated that the incumbents had long kept themselves in power through autocratic rule...

...A compliance officer approached the union and two weeks later the report was mailed in...

...And so it was that the sorely tried Youngstown steelworkers formally appealed to the BLMR to void the June election...

...The files of the BLMR are full of expressions of approval on the part of rank-and-file members and local union officials...

...A number of Holcombe's subordinates have had trade-union experience...

...In 2,591 instances, voluntary compliance was secured...

...it requires full disclosure of union finances, payrolls and expense accounts, as well as employer payments to labor consultants...

...Only 41 cases required court action...

...The trusteeship, it developed, had been established after UAW headquarters had made repeated and vain efforts to persuade the Memphis leadership not to discriminate against the 500 Negroes in the 1,800-member local...

...when they returned, the boxes had been moved...

...A total of 506 were in effect when the Landrum-Griffin Act was signed...

...Typical was the experience of two bakery workers who informed the Philadelphia office of the BLMR that they were unable to get copies of the constitution and by-laws of their local...

...At one point, he announced, "I have always been President and will always remain President...

...The job is by no means over, but as BLMR Commissioner John Holcombe has put it, "The worst abuses revealed by the McClellan Committee have to a large extent been ended...

...It has been astonishingly successful in settling cases out of court...

...From a Minnesota union leader came the comment: "We were afraid of this law, and now we find that in some respects it has helped us a whole lot...

...After examining the facts and the UAW constitution, the BLMR held the trusteeship to be valid...

...Copies of any report can be obtained for 25 cents a page...

...Embezzlement, of course, has always been a state crime, but local authorities have often lacked the interest or facilities to police unions...

...Certain features of the constitution—such as fining members for using cuss words or smoking at meetings—were scrupulously observed...

...Within 30 days after a trusteeship is imposed, an international must file a report justifying its action...

...Up to last December 31, there were 21 embezzlement convictions under the act, involving unions in 13 states and Puerto Rico...

...The sections of Landrum-Griffin that aroused the AFL-CIO's ire were the TaftHartley amendments in Title VII, which do not bear on the act's main purpose of safeguarding the rights of individual union members...

...Before the count, the ballot boxes had been left unattended while the tellers went out to dinner...

...Thanks to the law, many rankand-file members for the first time can scrutinize the financial affairs of their unions...

...Another union member wrote to Washington that his local had refused the membership information about its finances...

...During the investigation, a transformation occurred in the local: business agents were suddenly responsive to members' grievances, shop stewards began to make their rounds diligently, the membership took a more active interest in the local's affairs...

...In April 1961, he received a nine-year sentence and a $10,000 fine after being convicted on 10 counts of embezzling union funds...

...One of the major contributions of the Landrum-Griffin Act is that for the first time it has made embezzlement of union funds a Federal crime...

...By agreement between the Labor and Justice Departments, most such investigations are conducted by the FBI, with the BLMR often providing the initial leads...

...The Bureau began an exhaustive investigation which soon turned up some disquieting facts: There was evidence that only 1,178 members had actually voted in the election, whereas 1,432 votes had been counted...

...The deplorable electoral system in Local 1617 was only one of hundreds of messy situations which the BLMR has set aright in its two-and-a-half years of operation...

...Negroes were systematically excluded from union committees and were forced to use segregated washrooms and drinking fountains—all of which the international found incompatible with its constitutional goal of uniting all workers in its jurisdiction regardless of race, creed or color...

...With no opposition, he triumphed handsomely at the polls...

...The law has had a salutary effect on the internal life of unions even in the absence of a major "case...

...Holcombe and his staff have a lot of muscle to enforce compliance with the law...

...Ten other cases are pending prosecution...

...This action prompted the union to agree to a new election, at which 86 per cent of the 753 eligible members voted...

...429 were dissolved by November 24, 1961...

...When the votes were in, however, every one of the 17 former officers had been defeated...

...They can go to court to set aside rigged elections or overturn trusteeships illegally imposed by an international union over a dissident local...

...Fraudulent elections are only one way by which union members are victimized...

...Disclosure, public scrutiny and relentless investigation have already noticeably improved the atmosphere in many unions...

...With one exception, all the previously defeated candidates won...

...Arthur J. Goldberg, who became Secretary of Labor after a career as a union lawyer, says, "I think the law has had a great prophylactic impact...

...Up to November 3, 1961, it determined that 2,632 violations of the act had occurred...

...The Bureau has over 500 employes and maintains five regional and 24 area offices, operating on an annual budget of $5.7 million...

...Title VII is administered by the National Labor Relations Board...

...Other infractions, such as election irregularities, involved the rights of a good many union members...

...Indeed, those aspects of the law which the AFL-CIO favored back in 1959—financial disclosure, fair election standards and Government scrutiny of trusteeships—are considered by many trade unionists to have worked a positive boon for the labor movement...

...As Commissioner he appointed John L. Holcombe, a judicious, affable career civil servant who had been a labor expert early in his Government service and in recent years had held high-ranking posts in the Defense Department...

...In that same period, 236 new trusteeships were set up, but 98 of them were thereafter terminated...

...Some unionists object to these searching audits—calling them "fishing expeditions"— but Goldberg regards them as at least as valid as those of the Internal Revenue Service...

...The labor movement has neither been crippled nor harassed nor overrun by spies...

...James P. Mitchell, Secretary of Labor when the act was passed, staffed the BLMR with men who were both knowledgeable about the labor movement and sympathetic to its aspirations...

...A union officer in Arkansas told a BLMR representative, "After hearing your speech...

...In the near future, it is planning to decentralize its document files, so that a copy of each report will be available in the area in which it originates...

...Sharp scrutiny of trusteeships has unquestionably decreased their number...

...The compliance officer told them of their legal rights, and they subsequently raised such a stir that documents were made available to the group...

...After receiving several complaints, the Bureau launched an investigation...

...His opponents vainly sought relief through their union and then approached the BLMR, which ultimately filed a complaint in Federal court...

...This prediction has not been borne out...

...Additional reports, explaining why the trusteeship has been continued, have to be filed every six months...

...The Bureau undertook an investigation of financial chicanery in a large East Coast local headed by a man who had many brushes with the law...

...Most of the members who lined up at the polls were equipped with buttons, arm bands and banners proclaiming their allegiance to the incumbent slate...

...in the first election, he had lost by nearly 200...

...Before going to court to invalidate the election, the BLMR laid the facts before the international union...

...Several had been out of town—one in military training, another attending a wedding in Pennsylvania, still another fishing 44 miles away...

...Every report filed with the BLMR is subject to public inspection...

...In March 1961, a second election was held...

...Investigators also routinely audit union books and records, even in the absence of specific complaints, to verify the accuracy of the annual financial reports...

...At the end of BLMR's second year of operations, Secretary of Labor Goldberg hailed the "fair and cooperative attitude" of unions in complying with the law...

...The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, popularly known as the Landrum-Griffin Act, was passed by Congress largely in response to the startling disclosures before the McClellan Committee of financial malpractice, conflicts of interest, phony elections and other undemocratic procedures in certain labor unions...

...The McClellan hearings revealed many instances in which international unions arbitrarily denied self-government to local unions, deposing their officers and sending in trustees to run their affairs...

...In 85 instances, it was able to persuade the union to right matters voluntarily...

...I don't believe you're the monster I had envisioned...

...It subjects every union to harassment, litigation, factionalism and the legalized infiltration of employer spies and stooges," President Al Hayes proclaimed to a convention of the International Association of Machinists...

...Before September 1959, the defeated candidates would have had no further recourse...

...In March 1960, the local held a meeting to nominate officers for an election to be held in April...

...The incumbents won handily...

...Most of the waterholes are no longer being visited, and the tracks are old...

...Basically, the Landrum-Griffin Act seeks to protect union members against abuse of power by their officials...

...They can invoke penalties of a year in jail and a $10,000 fine against willfully false reporting by a union, an employer, or a labor relations consultant...