STRIKE IT RICH FOR SOCIALISM!
Kaus, Robert M.
STRIKE IT RICH FOR SOCIALISM! by Robert M. Kaus The offices of the "public interest" law firm of Connerton, Schulman, and Bernstein look like any other fashionable Washington lawyers' warren,...
...It must be tempting for Bernstein's leftwing friends to give him the benefit of this doubt too-to overlook the annoying persistence of corruption among his employers in light of the broad "progressive" role of unions in general...
...Looking at Jules Bernstein, it's easy to understand why-because the most convincing argument against the socialist vision may be the way professed socialists like Bernstein live their lives...
...Within three months after the first case was filed, 13,000 workers had sent in coupons...
...In the end, Jules Bernstein will tell you that his recent wealth simply helps him to further his political ideals...
...The subcommittee's hearings on the FLSA amendments tended to focus on other aspects of the legislatioll (including a rise in the minimum wage and the application of FLSA to local governments...
...It's the union member who sees his pension money lost or stolen in rigged investments...
...According to records obtained from the Postal Service through the Freedom of Information Act, Bernstein's "joint venture" has submitted bills since April 1978 for no less than $4.8 million in attorneys' fees, and an additional $266,819 in expenses under the agreement...
...Since there was a good argument that the move was illegal, Nader's Teamster reform group, PROD, planned a court challenge to try and get the secret ballot requirement reinstated...
...There were other discrepancies, none of them particularly prominent-but spread over 700,000 postal workers, all the quar" ter hours and night shift premiums coulq add up to a tidy sum...
...While this agreement settled only one of the many issues of liability, and involved no payments to any postal workers, it did require the Postal Service to hire the Murtha firm to help "develop an administrative procedure...
...More recently, Bernstein has been a chief architect of the "campaign to curb corporate abuse in the 1980s" that was, in theory anyway, kicked off with Big Business Day three months ago...
...The matter is now scheduled for arbitration...
...The public is hardly crazy, after all, to distrust such a man when he says he is fighting for a society where he would be denied his $300,000 house, his $30 lunches, and his Ben Shahn originals...
...What transpired at the meeting is the subject of varying shades of interpretation, depending on whom you talk to...
...Bernstein nervously twirls the swivel chair in front of his desk and drops his rumpled bulk on top of it...
...But this is followed by a penetrating look, an uncomfortable pause that seems to say, in effect, "That's all I want to say...
...For example, the Postal Service measured overtime by the halfhour while the new law required "rounding off" to the nearest quarter hour...
...It's the walls after all, or rather what is on them...
...Those links can connect, to be sure, but they can also imprison...
...When the first suit-involving the quarter-hour rule and other straightforward overtime claims-was settled, it gave Bernstein'S firm five percent of the total $42 million that the Post Office agreed to pay his clients...
...Nor, apparently, does it interrupt his peaceful sleep...
...It was a colossal blunder of the sort few attorneys get the opportunity to make in their lifetimes, because the Post Office's personnel practices were in fact subtly, but significantly, out of line with the FLSA's requirements...
...This "settlement" has proved as profitable in practice as it looks on paper...
...Once upon a time labor lawyers like Bernstein measured their incomes against those of the workers they they compare their fees against Covington and Burling's, and feel deprived...
...a genuine humanist...
...Thanks to Jules Bernstein, Robert Georgine and Michael Harrington have shared a platform in Washington...
...They were, in fact, an ideal trio to bring a lawsuit seeking re<;:overy under tne new statute...
...Bernstein argues that his fees came from a separate fund, rather than out of the workers' recoveries...
...Now, we are used to the perversity of wealth, and the contradictions inherent in being a socialist millionaire are . not particularly damning, or even interesting, anymore...
...Money is power in this country," he says, "and there shouid be some on the side of decency...
...What's intriguing about Bernstein, however, is not the mere fact that he is rich, but rather when he became rich (answer: very recently) and, more important, how...
...But not before the lawyers got into a bitter argument with the Postal Service over their attorneys' fees...
...These aren't the same benign Ben Shahn and Corita copies you see in the waiting rooms of every liberal congressman or antiwar dentist...
...Jules Bernstein can work up a healthy lather condemning Love Canal, and the threat to safety posed by the "abuse of corporate power," but he will defend with equanimity a union in which the dues of half-a-million laborers pay for a safety department consisting of exactly one part-time official...
...Either way, the union lawyers' message got through, and the suit was never brought...
...But they had a better idea...
...Schlossberg denies making any "threats," saying he only told the Nader people that bringing the dues suit "was not a friendly act...
...It was Bernstein who sponsored the film festival at last year's AFL-CIO convention that featured the work of new radical filmmakers ("The Wobblies," "With Babies and Banners") along with such old standbys as "Salt of the Earth...
...Instead, they decided to settle out of court...
...The point is, rather, the way in which Bernstein represents, in exaggerated, comic-opera form, a more general attitude among the lawyers and lobbyists who pass for "the left" in Washington...
...Along the walls, up and down the softly lit, carpeted corridors, are neatly arranged the artifacts and symbols of the labor movement...
...Instead, he and Feder joined up with Murtha and another Laborers official, Robert Connerton, to form a "one-case law firm," Donald M. Murtha & Associates, in which each held {Jartnership shares...
...To appreciate it, you should understand the problem Bernstein and his colleagues faced~ Here was the Postal Service, admitting violations of law that could mean millions...
...I happen to believe we shouldn't have this tremendous disparity between rich and poor...
...Jules and Victor Kamber [former chief AFL-CIO lobbyist] were responsible for that, but then Jules is responsible for Kamber's links to DSOC...
...At some point, you stop giving Jules Bernstein the benefit of the doubt...
...Inside, in a large glass-walled office to the left of the modernistic conference room, lurks Jules Bernstein, father of Big Business Day, adviser to socialist Michael Harrington, and by his own admission "one of the leadingpro bono lawyers in this country...
...I've always said," he had told me at our first meeting, "if you're a union lawyer, you can sleep nights...
...Most of our members are where you would expect therp...
...According to government investigators, these revelations were only the tip of the iceberg...
...For Bernstein, whose salary with the Laborers was $37,000 a year plus expenses, it was a taste of things to come...
...Bernstein left the Teamsters in 1967 to go to work for the Laborers, whom he has represented ever since...
...So, with Cox nodding his head, the amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act were signed into law in April 1974...
...You see, he did not inherit wealth, like Stewart Mott, or marry it, like Norman Thomas...
...They are impressive enough, starting in the mid-50s at Brandeis University, an ideological hothouse where Bernstein studied under such contending radical luminaries as Herbert Marcuse ("a grea t man"), Irving Howe ("a dear friend") and C. Wright Mills...
...This makes Bernstein the kind of potential patron that potential proteges will try hard to accord the benefit of every doubt...
...This is a life marked off into what Bernstein calls his "ten-year struggles," first to "democratize the legal system" through prepaid legal service plans, then in a campaign against the "union-busting" industry- the management consultants who hire themselves out to employers who want to fight unionization ("a bunch of mercenaries," Bernstein labels them...
...When they learned that a California attorney had been soliciting letter carriers as clients for a back pay case, Feder, Ratner, and Bernstein got together and decided to take quick action...
...Before they do, though, they might think about who pays for the illegal practices of the men whom Bernstein represents...
...Will you forget the theory for a moment...
...he brings people together...
...But he knows that few corporate law firms have a contract guaranteeing that their adversaries will purchase three- to four-million dollars' worth of their admittedly more expensive hours...
...Postal Service stood exposed to a steadily growing liability for its now illegal payroll practices...
...It failed...
...Even after the new firm's first suits were filed, the Postal Service struggled gamely to bring its computers into line with the FLSA...
...In so doing he moved to a union with a slightly less sensational, but no less distasteful, reputation than his previous employers...
...And, as officials of their unions, not only had Bernstein anq Ratner participated in the contract negotiations during which the Postal Service admitted it was violating the law, but they were well-situated to contact the workers who would be the plaintiffs in any lawsuit...
...It is unfortunate," he laments, "that the biggest single fair labor standards violation in history should have been caused by an instrumentality of the U.S...
...Before bringing the suit, however, PROD's attorneys decided to "touch base" with a few prominent labor lawyers, just to play it safe...
...Bernstein prefers not to be concerned...
...Not just Washington-lawyer rich, but millionaire- rich...
...And what of the "claims procedure" that the Murtha firm has developed in order to actually get the postal workers their back pay cheCKS for time spent on "training, travel and study...
...This is the only way the underprivileged are going to be represented...
...Bernstein performed a similar function for Big Business Day, on whose letterhead Robert Georgine's name appears alongside Michael Harrington's, Arthur Schlesinger's, and Ed ("Lou Grant") Asner's...
...Ratner, Feder and Bernstein had hit the jackpot...
...But although Bernstein received the aid of the Laborers' Union in attracting clients, he did not bring the suits as the Laborers' associate general counsel...
...Challenging a union leader for his office requires openness and invites retribution...
...Meanwhile, however, Bernstein has plenty to keep him occupied...
...At the time, the chief counsel of Williams's subcommittee was a young lawyer named Gerald Feder...
...Even more lucrative, however, was the deal that Bernstein and Feder struck on the cases they didn't resolve, involving compensation for study, training, and travel time, of which there were no accurate payroll records...
...This time, however, the technique didn't work...
...According to some participants, Schlossberg threatened not only to cut off labor support for Nader's most precious goal, a Consumer Protection Agency, but also to see to it that Public Citizen's ability to raise funds was undermined...
...So even assuming that fringe benefits and any overhead expenses not already reimbursed by the Postal Service (mainly rent and normal clerical help) amounted to another 100 percent of salary-an extravagant figure-that still means well over $50,000 in profit for every $100,000 Murtha & Associates received...
...to be," says DSOC's chief spokesman, Michael Harrington...
...But don't think he has had to give that up, not for a moment...
...Postal Service...
...True, the Postal Service might adjust its payroll practices to meet th...
...Then there was the civil rights movement, which captivated Bernstein while he was in law school, and then there are his 20 years as one of Washington's leading labor lawyers...
...And ·here are some Ben Shahn originals...
...Because Jules Bernstein, it turns out, is a rich man...
...The same logic has led other "public interest" lawyers to spend more than a decade trying to convince courts to award them "reasonable attorneys' fees" whenever their lawsuits "confer a substantial public benefit...
...Morrison, for his part, acknowledges discussing the matter with Bernstein but claims "no recollection" of any threats...
...The $50,000 Question All told, the Murtha firm has billed the government for about $10 million under the various parts of the settlement...
...It was Feder who drafted much of the bill's language...
...When hostile letters to PROD's Washington attorney, Arthur Fox, failed to keep Early from boarding the plane, Bernstein-according to Fox-tracked down Fox's boss, chief Nader litigator Alan Morrison, in Massachusetts, and made the familiar threat to do everything he could to destroy labor's alliance with the Nader organizations, a message that Morrison duly transmitted to his subordinate...
...To get around this obstacle, the lawyers discovered mass marketing...
...A secret 1978 Justice Department memo to President Carter, first obtained by Mother Jones magazine (which is publishing an expose of the union in its August issue) states flatly that current Laborers president Angelo Fosco is "a tool of the crime syndicate...
...The FBI files describe the usual assortment of practices that accompany such infiltration- extortion of employers, sale of "sweetheart" contracts in exchange for kickbacks, favored treatment for workers willing to engage in illegal activity on the side...
...Then it hits me...
...Letterhead Socialism To many organizations on the left, of course, Bernstein's connections with the right wing of the American labor movement (the Laborers endorsed Nixon in '72) are precisely what make him so prized...
...In Chicago," the memo continues, "Fosco follows the orders of Al Pilotto and Vincent Solano, two local union presidents who are also LCN [La Cosa Nostra] lieutenants...
...In all these lawsuits, Bernstein is asking for a cut...
...Bernstein has asked at least one other Teamster dissident group to 'try to pressure the Alaska'workers into dropping their case, with no success so far...
...It was this device-the creation of a separate, private firm-that guaranteed the lawyers a hefty cut of any back pay award the postal workers received...
...If I were Michael Harrington, I would be bothered...
...Yet there is something wrong...
...Instead, Jules Bernstein got rich while "striking a blow for American workers," as he would put it...
...This time it was Bernstein who took the lead in opposing the reform effort, after his newly founded "public interest" firm was hired to look after the not-so-public interests of the Alaskan unions...
...The Laborers, however, will be well represented in Alaska, though it will not come cheap...
...As one of the firm's five partners, Bernstein's share of the profits so far probably adds up to close to $1 million...
...Fringe Benefits Ironically, it is Jules Bernstein's newfound affluence that has enhanced his prominence on the left and given his political colleagues an incentive not to look too critically at where it came from...
...But the lawyers were not to be denied...
...In December 1978, four years after the statute had passed, the Postal Service was still violating it, and an angry federal judge threatened to make USPS pay an extra 100 percerit of back pay as "liquidated damages...
...Schlossberg got so furious at one point that he threw books and overturned a table to make his point...
...Union officials are people who are disturbers of the status quo...
...Eleven days after that, Gerald Feder quit his job with the Senate Labor Subcommittee and went into private practice...
...From 1962 to 1967, Bernstein's client was the Teamsters Union, then under the control of Jimmy Hoffa at the height of his powers...
...The lawyers had argued, in essence, that if a worker who normally worked Monday-through-Friday was instead asked to work Tuesday-through-Saturday, he should receive overtime for the elltire week instead of just for one day...
...In fact, it may cost $100,000, Bernstein has said, for him to handle the case...
...Out of this sum, of course, the Murtha partners had to pay the salaries of the lawyers they have hired to carry out the required work (at one time Murtha & Associates had 43 attorneys on its payroll billing the government for their services...
...Enlisting the aid of another prominent labor barrister, Mozart Ratner (then general counsel of yet another postal union, the Letter Carriers), they eventually received fees totaling $3.1 million...
...But the amount of back pay owed any single worker, even those with the best claims, would not amount to more than a thousand dollars or so-hardly worth the collective efforts of three legal heavyweights...
...Or Bernstein and Ratner could have undertaken the suit as employees of their unions, with the unions simply paying their salaries, and any other litigation expenses, and then distributing all the back pay recovered to the individ ual employees...
...He admitted, however, that he "may have gotten a little excited," believing that the Nader suit against the Teamsters would also complicate the means by which the UA W raised local dues...
...The trick was to combine the claims of thousands of workers so that, when they all added up, you had a really whopping lawsuit...
...One example should do...
...By law, however, local dues elections must be conducted by secret ballot...
...And the enduring failure of the left has been its inability to make any such vision seem plausible to more than a handful of Americans...
...Bagging the Money An ingenious idea it was...
...The lawyers included Donald M. Mllrtha, former general counsel of the American Postal Workers' Union, and Bernstein, who was associate general counsel to the Laborers Internation~ l, a union of over 400,000 members, including 60,000 Postal Service inailhandlers...
...Once the firm has milked the contract with the Postal Service for all it's worth, you can bet they'll settle for $600 per worker across the board, and the whole claims proced ure they were paid to develop will be scrapped...
...They involve not only the mechanics of his recent good fortune, but another, more delicate subject...
...Many of the organizations in which he is a leading figure-from the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to the National Resource Center for Consumers of Legal Services-have been supported by his actual, as well as intellectual, capital...
...You see, for the entire course of the back pay case, while he was collecting fees as an independent attorney, Bernstein remained on the Laborers' payroll as associate general counsel, drawing salary and expenses averaging about $50,000 a year...
...In effect," says one lawyer familiar with the litig&tion, "the Murtha firm was set up as a bag to catch the money...
...The 'joint venture" with Feder and Ratner has worked out well-it would have taken Bernstein decades to earn as much at his comfortable union salary...
...In Bernstein's case, however, those doubts run deep...
...for the processing of claims...
...But "reasonable attorneys' fees" is a term of art, and what was "reasonable" for an idealistic lawyer has undergone a subtle transformation in the past 35 years...
...They come from Jerry Wurf, from Doug Fraser, from Wimpy [William Winpisinger, president of the Machinists...
...Today, what is a "reasonable" fee for a public interest lawyer may be fixed with some precision: sufficiently below the market rate to maintain a sense of sacrifice, but not too low to pay for a townhouse in Dupont Circle...
...But others may remember the '60s as the era in which Hoffa was indicted on a series of racketeering charges-first, for diverting $1,700,000 of a Teamster loan for his personal use, and later for demanding and receiving a kickback of more than a million dollars from Teamster employers...
...One reason for Cox!s complacency, it should be noted, was that tht!re was no visible groundswell of outrage rising up from rank and file postal employees condemning "rounding off' to the half-hour, or the other payroll pnlctices the bill would outlaw...
...As the lawyers discovered additional ways in which the Postal Service had been snagged by the FLSA, more coupons were printed, in what came to resemble a "Lawsuit of the Month Club...
...When asked about the charges of corruption in the Laborers, he responds with poise: "I don't pay too much attention to that kind of stuff...
...Handy clip-out coupons were included in the ads-send them in, and you had hired Bernstein, Feder, or Ratner to bring your back pay case...
...Meanwhile, the Postal Service and the ullions were slogging through the contract talks of 1975, during which the Postal Service had to admit that it was violating the FLSA, and promised to redesign its payrolls and begin awarding back pay to its workers...
...There are framed, colorful posters proclaiming "Strike...
...And these are old British posters...
...The Laborers underwent a muchheralded "revitalization" in the mid-'60s, but in the '70s the pUblicity was less favorable...
...He will claim, half-heartedly, that the rates he charged the Postal Service were "relatively modest" compared with the fees charged by the corporate law firms who work on the management side...
...More important, as anyone reading Cox's letter would quickly grasp, the Postal Service had no idea what would be required of it...
...These are Shahn and Corita originalseven the painting of striking workers by the front door turns out to be an original that Bernstein has picked up at a New York exhibition...
...Cox wrote back a letter saying he had no objections...
...But neither of these alternatives seemed very attractive to the attorneysperhaps because neither would have allowed them to share in what Bernstein, with characteristic modesty, calls "potentially the biggest back pay recovery in history...
...But as one postal attorney pointed out, "It was all one pie...
...government...
...It doesn't seem like a very good bargain...
...There are posters of the early British Labour party, Ben Shahn posters from the New Deal, gritty black and white portraits of coal miners and construction workers, and paintings of workers on picket lines...
...It's like the guy in the airplane ads, taking off and thinking, 'Wow, I've just won this terrific prize.' That could be us...
...he cajoles, pacing back and forth...
...indeed, none of the postal unions chose to testify...
...Eventually, 90,000 workers subscribed...
...At least as much as they symbolize the struggles of the working man, it seems the decorations on -jules Bernstein's wall symbolize something else, namely money...
...More recently, the union has added members who perform similarly arduous jobs in the public sector-garbage collectors, for example, or the bulk-mail handlers Bernstein represented in the back pay cases...
...As one fellow DSOC activist put it, "the unions he has worked for are unions that need lawyers for something other than the practice of labor law...
...So what's the story...
...Today, Bernstein is one of the two or three most visible left-wing lawyers in Washington, especially if you give points for the fact that unlike a Ralph Nader or a Joe Rauh, he is an avowed sociaJist, a member of the national executive board of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC...
...Lawyers make big fees all the time," he explains...
...Still, something is off key, something IS too facile in Bernstein's invocation of the "American worker" in this particular situation, or maybe just in these particular surroundings...
...he builds and finances...
...I would be bothered, first, by the money .. The point is not simply that socialists shouldn't be allowed to be richthough I confess to some disorientation when I asked Bernstein if he would be allowed to make his current income "after the revolution" and he answered, "I should hope not...
...As the judge's deadline approached, it became clear to all concerned that the government's lawyers were ready neither to perfect their payroll practices nor to go to trial on the remaining legal and factual issues...
...By all accounts, Bernstein is generous with his money, willing to fund a cause, organization, or artist struggling to make a start...
...Which leaves the firm a clear profit of over $2.4 million on the contract alone...
...Bernstein has simply carried this attitude to its logical conclusion...
...The point isn't even that any way I cut it, I come to the conclusion that Bernstein made his fortune at the expense of the taxpayers and the postal workers he represents...
...In the spring of 1974, Feder's subcommittee asked Louis Cox, the Postal Service's general counsel, if his agency had any problem with the proposed law...
...If most attorneys corne across as cynical, self-consciously separating their client's views from their own, Bernstein is clearly quick to place his actions on the side of righteousness, and the touchstone is usually Bernstein's role as defender of the American worker...
...The FLSA also requires employers to include any "night shift" or other pay premiums in computing overtime, while the Post Office had been paying straight time-and-a-half...
...But something is wrong, out of sync, though I can't put my finger on it...
...Of this, $3.3 million has already been paid (the remainder is in dispute...
...new requirements-but the act would give them only three weeks to comply, once it was signed, al1d the Post Office's payroll system was pieced together from ov~r 200 different computer programs...
...It is the worker, after all, who must kick back part of his daily wage to the boss who runs the crooked hiring hall, who must pay for the phony insurance claims used to supplement the income of corrupt officials, who must come up with the dues used to support their friends in ceremonial "international representative" positions...
...These are good, hard-working trade unionists who care about their members," he asserts...
...by Robert M. Kaus The offices of the "public interest" law firm of Connerton, Schulman, and Bernstein look like any other fashionable Washington lawyers' warren, except for the walls...
...Since he has also opened yet another law firmConnerton, Schulman, and Bernsteinthat performs legal work for the Laborers and bills them for it separately, exactly what the union members are getting for their $50,000 is hard to ascertain...
...The Postal Service would presumably just as soon have given a bigger slice to the workers, and a smaller slice to their attorneys, as long as the total size of the pie stayed the same...
...The problem can't be Bernstein's leftist credentials...
...Nor are unions allowed to sue for themselves-only individual members may recover back pay...
...Wait and see," one cautioned me...
...But for Bernstein, who draws so much of his moral and political credibility from the causes he represents ("when you're a union lawyer, you can sleep nights"), it's worth looking at exactly what those causes have been...
...But under the formula in the agreement, Murtha & Associates was allowed to charge the Postal Service $50 an hour for inexperienced attorneys who were encouraged to bill the government for 2,000 hours apiece, or $100,000 a year...
...The enduring appeal of the left is the possibility it holds out for a radically altered society in which virtues like democracy, altruism, and patriotism playa much larger role,and the quest for money a much more limited one...
...Nothing in the Mother Jones article, or in my own limited inquiry, links Jules Bernstein himself to any of this activity...
...Robert M. Kaus is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...After the initial settlements, he discovered additional Postal Service violations of FLSA, and another round of clip-out coupons garnered 200,000 responses...
...For most lawyers, this fact would only be the occasion for a familiar debate on the adversary system and the right of every man to counsel...
...It's a feeling I've gotten several times in the past few weeks, when I've asked around about Bernstein in Washington's close-knit left-liberal community...
...Under the statutes, the Secretary of Labor could have been asked to file a suit that would have protected all half-million postal workers, rather than just the 90,000 who clipped out the forms...
...After this policy prompted the firm's attorneys to unionize, their salaries were raised-to $16,000...
...The answers are usually the same...
...Look," Bernstein will say (as he said to me), "if people are to have justice there has to be funding for it...
...Our interview is over, and Bernstein is showing me out...
...Under this "contract," the...
...Too late to ask any more questions...
...When the supporters of the striking chicken-pluckers in Mississippi needed someone to buy a bloc of tickets to a benefit performance of a play about Karen Silkwood, Bernstein was there...
...Postal Service was obligated to pay Bernstein's firm up to $80 an hour for attorneys who would develop a series of "pilot projects" in five cities for the resolution of possible disputes (over, for example, how many hours a given worker had spent studying mail-sorting schemes on his own time...
...One of Feder's first acts as a private attorney was to sign on as litigation manager for several prominent Washington labor lawyers who had sued the Postal Service on an earlier labor violation, involving overtime payments for work performed "out of schedule...
...What are you driving at, anyway...
...Later, an associate of Rubin's, one Joseph Hauser, was discovered to have siphoned off at least $11.7 million from union trust funds around the nation...
...and in the future if we were in a coalition with them we would understand it to be a coalition with our enemies...
...As an added bonus, the Post Office agreed to immediately pay Bernstein's firm an extra $2.5 million to "facilitate their future representation of the plaintiffs...
...But the lawyer's traditional mechanism for doing this-the "class action"-is forbidden in FLSA actions...
...Jules links us to people we would otherwise have little contact with...
...I remember the Democratic Agenda meeting in 1979," recalls Harrington, "where you had Wimpy and Georgine sharing a platform...
...If I felt he was shaving, or adapting his politics, I would be bothered...
...My guesstimate is that the total liability here could be as high as $2 billion...
...In addition, the government would pay for the Murtha firm's expenses, including Xerox costs, postage, travel, taxis, hotel rooms, meals, and computer services...
...They would use union machinery to round up clients, placing ads in union magazines asking postal workers to join in their lawsuit...
...To be less delicate, Bernstein has spent the bulk of his legal career working for two of the most corrupt unions in America...
...After the second case ended in a hungjury, Hoffa was convicted of bribing one of the jurors, and in 1967, Hoffa went to prison...
...And money, I now realized, was one of the aspects of Jules Bernstein'S life that his colleagues on the left had been reluctant to talk about, even as they reached for nice things to say about him...
...Not noted for a tradition of grassroots democracy, the union managed not to hold a convention for one 30-year stretch prior to World War II...
...Don't laugh-the suit was eventually settled for $25 million...
...You've got to think big in this world...
...The dissidents asked PROD organizer Steve Early to fly to Alaska to help them track down precisely what was happening to their dues and pension funds, using records that by law are available to union members...
...Moments after he greets me, the phone begins to ring, and Bernstein is back at work -in this particular instance, trying to get the lawyers for three postal workers' unions to join him in pressing an "unfair labor practice" charge against the U.S...
...But close observers of the case are skeptical that a procedure to process individual claims will ever be worked out...
...In 1975, Bernard -Rubin, the leader of two important Florida locals, was convicted of embezzling close to $400,000 in union funds...
...Among the lawyers invited to a meeting at Public Citizen's headquarters were Stephen Schlossberg, then general counsel of the United Auto Workers, Larry Gold, special counsel of the AFLCIO, and Jules Bernstein...
...That one's only a copy, but the other two are originals...
...That's one of the major problems in this country and the world...
...In Elizabeth, New Jersey, laborers who report for work at the union hiring hall have the honor of being personally chosen, or not chosen, to work by John Riggi, who as reputed head of New Jersey's only home-grown Mafia family and undisputed ruler of Laborers' Local 394 may be the highest ranking organized crime figure to occupy a workaday union position in this country...
...Three years later, however, a similar suit was threatened by dissidents from the Teamsters and Laborers unions in Alaska, where the oil pipeline boom had left union officials sitting on huge pots of pension money, which .they were allegedly frittering away in questionable real estate transactions...
...Well, the story is that the left was supposed to be different...
...Feder, of course, had written much of the law in question...
...First, a quick word of praise: "He's a catalyst...
...Says Harrington, ''I'm not bothered by the union he works for, particularly because he's so up front about his politics...
...Three weeks later, the U.S...
...Chain Links If I were Harrington, I'd also worry about the "links" that men like Jules Bernstein are so good at providing...
...Deep down, Bernstein has convinced himself of something else: that la wyers like himself deserve to make a bundle, that they are, in fact, properly motivated by that prospect...
...You can't spend all your time worrying about that, because it gets so that you can't do your job...
...You may not sleep long, but you rest peacefully...
...But it appears that the union lawyers, led by Schlossberg, had a definite messageforthe Nader people: The Teamsters' suit would mean the end of the ''friendship'' between labor and the Nader organizations...
...That's because Bernstein's defense against charges of hypocrisy is a practical one...
...The words pour easily from Bernstein's mouth...
...There were alternatives, of course...
...Frequently cited, in this connection, is Bernstein's influence with Robert Georgine, president of the AFL-CIO's Building Trades division...
...Yes, the credentials are solid, the references impeccable...
...The story begins with an attempt by lawyers in Ralph Nader's Public Citizen organization to bring a suit challenging a dues increase imposed by the Teamsters national convention, meeting in Las Vegas in 1976, on the various Teamster locals...
...Well, if he really wants to strike a blow for American workers then he should file on this...
...Another call: "Look, Lubbers is over there at the NLRB with a mandate to protect the American worker...
...The firm paid these lawyers only $15,000 per year...
...But in measuring Bernstein's contributions to decency, we should look at both sides of the political coalitions...
...Well, it has yet to be agreed on, in part because of the Murtha group's insistence that claims be initiated with the assistance of a lawyer...
...Fair Labor The story of how Bernstein made his first million begins back in 1973, when Senator Harrison Williams, chairman of the Senate Labor Subcommittee, introduced a bill to bring the federal government under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the law that establishes the minimum wage, the 40-hour week, and a slew of other rules that govern the way most employees in the private sector are paid...
...They can't hope to have everyone love them, and, naturally, accusations will be made...
...To appreciate the signific~nce of the suit, it is necessary to understand that, in many unions, the power to deny a dues increase may be the only remaining lever members have in their efforts to shake up an entrenched hierarchy...
...Along with Ratner, he is also trying to enforce a so-called "non-plaintiffs agreement," under which he claims the Postal Service agreed to compensate all 470,000 postal workers on the same terms as Bernstein's initial clients...
...What had seemea to be a simple display of ideological badges is in fact many thousands of dollars' worth of expensive art...
...he's such an idealist...
...Bernstein admits they might have done that-and, after all, the salaries the unions were paying to the two attorneys were already enough to place them in one of the higher tax brackets (by 1976 Bernstein was receiving $40,000...
...Early went to Alaska, and the dissidents filed their lawsuit...
...Of course, these are Coritas," he is saying, proudly pointing to a row of familiar-looking silk-screen prints arrayed on one side of the corridor...
...Although the full range of the Postal Service's violations was still a matter of speculation, "Gerry [Feder] had a smell of them and I had a smell," Ratner would later tell Robert Windrem of The American Lawyer...
...So it was an important step when unions like the Teamsters began asserting the power to raise "minimum" local dues without going through the messy formality of a rank and file election...
...The unions-represented by, among others, Bernstein and Ratner in their official capacities-went along, and the contract was signed, temporarily putting the issue of the FLSA violations on the back burner...
...In the light of these prodigious feats of linkage, Bernstein's socialist colleagues profess no distress at eith~r his recent rise to riches or his long-time employers...
...At the same time, thanks to Jules Bernstein, members of the Teamsters and Laborers have a little less control over their unions...
...The agreement set no firm limit on the number of hours for which the government could be billed...
...Bernstein is fond of recalling the Teamsters' role in the early civil rights movement-"I was there at a dinner with Hoffa and Andy Young and Martin Luther King when the Teamsters presented SCLC with a big fat check for 25 G's," he told me...
...He was assisted in the research for this article by Robert Jacobi...
...All in all, it was an arrangement to make any self-respecting Washington consultant drool...
...The thing about Jules," says DSOC national director Jim Chapin, "is that as he did better for himself, his politics got better, unlike the usual case...
...Originally called the Hod-Carriers, the Laborers have traditionally represented workers who do much of the hard hauling and digging on America's construction sites...
...As union officials, in fact, you might have expected them to bring such a back pay suit as part of their normal course of duty, on behalf of the workers whose dues paid their not inconsiderable salaries...
...He wi11 rail against the "union.-busting industry," but is it union-busters or men like John Riggi and Angelo Fosco who are responsible for unionism's declining appeal- to the extent that only 20 cents of every construction dollar spent in 1979 went into union shops, down from a figure of 60 cents just a decade earlier...
Vol. 12 • July 1980 • No. 5
