Kia Franklin
Union Organized Crime?
I thought RICO lawsuits were for mafia-types, but a handful of corporations have filed suit against unions under the law (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act). According to Adam Liptak’s NYT article A Corporate View of Mafia Tactics: Protesting, Lobbying and Citing Upton Sinclair,
“Smithfield [Foods] has filed a racketeering lawsuit against the union, on the theory that speaking out about labor, environmental and safety issues in order to pressure the company to unionize amounts to extortion like that used by organized crime.“It’s economic warfare,” explained G. Robert Blakey, one of Smithfield’s lawyers. “It’s actually the same thing as what John Gotti used to do. What the union is saying in effect to Smithfield is, ‘You’ve got to partner up with us to run your company.’ ” (Read full article)
Yes, organizing against worker and environmental abuses and quoting passages from the novel “The Jungle” is precisely like Gotti. Mmmhmm. We’ll borrow Liptak’s reflections on that:
On the other hand, listen to Upton Sinclair, as quoted in the RICO suit. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” Sinclair wrote, “when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Posted at 3:10 PM, Feb 05, 2008 in Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Comments
RICO (like the ADA before it and various other well-intentioned but poorly drafted and poorly thought out laws) has always been a prime target for abuse
The best way to deal with these sort of abuses is to repeal RICO , ADA, Sarbanes-Oxley and similar boondoggles and start over from scratch, crafting more narrowly defined statutes
Posted by: Paul W Dennis | February 5, 2008 08:13 PM
I've often wondered why RICO doesn't apply for corporations and union-busters whose methods are often illegal. Isn't that organized crime, too? And then those corporations join together in groups like the National Association for Manufacturers (NAM), to lobby for weak enforcement of the labor laws allowing union organizing that are widely abused by some scofflaw corporations.
NAM even puts American industry with legacy unions like Ford and GM in unfair competition with foreign owned U.S. factories like Toyota who don't have to worry about unions forming or negotiating wages and benefits with their employees.
Why does NAM hate American industry and American employees so much?
http://blog.nam.org/archives/2008/02/voice_of_the_mi.php
Posted by: John | February 6, 2008 08:27 AM
I've often wondered why RICO doesn't apply for corporations and union-busters whose methods are often illegal. Isn't that organized crime, too? And then those corporations join together in groups like the National Association for Manufacturers (NAM), to lobby for weak enforcement of the labor laws allowing union organizing that are widely abused by some scofflaw corporations.
NAM even puts American industry with legacy unions like Ford and GM in unfair competition with foreign owned U.S. factories like Toyota who don't have to worry about unions forming or negotiating wages and benefits with their employees.
Why does NAM hate American industry and American employees so much?
http://blog.nam.org/archives/2008/02/voice_of_the_mi.php
Posted by: John | February 6, 2008 08:29 AM
I have often wondered why RICO does not get applied to the criminal cult enterprise that is the lawyer profession, whose bias and self-dealing methods are almost always illegal, and even more often in an out of control uprising against the Constitution. And, the the criminal cult hierarchy often gets together in such organizations as the ALI, including all its ex officio members, and the ABA, to impose their self-dealing rules, and pro-lawyer rent seeking biased candidates on the public.
Why do the land pirate rackets hate America and all its productive sectors so much?
Posted by: Supremacy Claus | February 6, 2008 02:39 PM