Penalty For Defying Pickets: Death

Orange County Register ^ | January 30 | Mark Mix

[NFP Rocks]

The AFL-CIO hierarchy's recent decision to charge its secretary-treasurer, former United Mine Workers (UMW) President Richard Trumka, with "turning around" the three-and-a-half-month-old California supermarket strike is an ominous development.

[NFP Rocks]

Organized Labor's "strategist" for winning the grocery strike has a history of inciting violence.

[jnarcus]

AIn't gonna register to read this thing...but what can you expect from a bunch of folks picketing in LALA land? These people have a LARGE number of illegals working at these stores and ordinary citizens aren't sympathetic. Let em try the violence it will destroy what is left of the labor movement

[BreitbartSentMe]

try user: annoying password: annoying
usually somebody with an anonymous email account sets up that login for us to use for the lamestream press websites.

Oh, and thanks to whoever does that!!

[LeoHat]

How about a link that doesn't require me to register?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Why the damned EXCERPT?

[TheSpottedOwl]

Hmmm, my oldest daughter went to Albertson's today and was heckled about her engagement/wedding band and her clothes. The picketers have never said a word to her before today. Hmmm, I should take my son and his friends on a shopping trip over there.

Why the hell can't these people understand that their union reps are a bunch of bloodsucking mafia types. They represent their own interests, not the union worker.

[MediaMole]

Funny, the World Socialists see this as the first step in the AFL-CIO's betrayal of the strikers.

A warning to California grocery workers: Trumka, AFL-CIO preparing final act in betrayal

The AFL-CIO’s intervention into the strike by grocery workers in southern California should be understood as a sign that the leadership of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) is preparing its final act in the betrayal of the three-and-half-month-old struggle by employees at four major supermarket chains to defend their wages and health benefits.

The UFCW is hailing AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka’s involvement as the initiation of a renewed effort to beat back the demands of the grocery stores. In fact, the opposite is true. The maneuvers that have been devised under Trumka—“pray-ins” outside the house of one of the supermarket executives, demonstrations at stock-holders meetings, and demands that pension funds not buy the supermarkets’ stocks—amount to little more than stunts that have nothing in common with a serious effort to shut down the supermarkets. These pathetic gestures are intended to divert workers’ attention from the underhanded role that the union bureaucracy has played in the strike thus far and to prepare the rank and file for a settlement on management’s terms.

This Trumka must be a piece of work if he can get the National Right to Work and the World Socialists to hate him.

[Torie]

Someone got the NEA to start running radio ads urging folks to support the picket lines, because if the strike failed, the workers would have no health insurance, and flood the Medicaid hospitals. It was sort of an appeal to it is all about me matter, because we don't want to add them to be on the dole at our expense. Of course the strike has to fail. The companies can finance it, because only a small part of their empires are mired in strike (the strike is limited to SoCal, and nastygrams to the CEO of Safeway up in NoCal), and the traditional supermarkets have to "win" the strike, because of the specter of the incipient Walmart hordes beginning to penetrate the SoCal market with supermarket food, otherwise will eat them alive. I don't know what the traditional supermarket union's grand strategy is, that they think will work. It is an impenetrable secret.

[Auntie Mame]

AIn't gonna register to read this thing

No registration necessary.

[sarasmom]

If the corporate stategy was to replace employees with illegal slave labor, I would have grabbed a picket sign myself.
But that is not an issue.
What is an issue, is that labor unions ignore economic reality, and are now no different in purpose than the "evil" corporations they pretend to save the helpless worker from.
Funny that so many people are so stupid as to think the right to choose who will benefit most from their labor is equal to fairness/parity/freedom.

[longtermmemmory]

Is this a California only strike? The union leadership must be worried about THEIR jobs.

[truth_seeker]

"These people have a LARGE number of illegals working at these stores and ordinary citizens aren't sympathetic. Let em try the violence it will destroy what is left of the labor movement."

You are wrong about the "LARGE number of illegals" comment. I've lived here, and shopped regularly at the stores in question. Striking workers now picketing are NOT illegals.

You are right that what there is of citizen sympathy, will diminish sharply if there is any violence.

My wife was verbally harrased at the Albertsons where she shops. She had been sympathetic, shopped elsewhere for the most part -- until the harrasment. Now she just goes to Albertsons.

The union has served their members very poorly. The people are hurting very badly financially, and want to go back to work.

Somewhere in SoCal the area residents plan a demonstration, along the lines of "get this thing over" so we can go back to shopping in peace.

Get off your kick of LALA land. Check the 2000 election map by county. Most of California is far from whacky.

They are NOT on strike in whacky SanFran bay area, fyi. Just came back from trip north and saw pickets in San Luis Obispo, but not in Contra Costa County (Bay area).

The stores will outlast the union. Rumors abound that some stores will change names, and reopen with new permanent workers. I can't verify the rumors.

The three chains (Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons) are owned by national giant parent companies. Ralphs could reopen stores as Kroger; Vons as Safeway for example.

The intransigence of the union was and is a big blunder. And the little-guy workers are the losers. A news article recently pointed out that unions management Bigs earn $200k plus.

[longtermmemmory]

the unions opperate on the concept that corporations should not make a profit.

nothing stops the union and members from buying shares in these companies.

[Enterprise]

LOL - It worked!

"West Virginia heavy-equipment operator Eddie York wasn't as fortunate as the trapped miners. On July 22, 1993, this husband and father of three was shot in the back of the head as he drove past militant UMW strikers toward a work site. He died instantly. UMW goons then pounded would-be rescuers with stones."

Sounds like terrorism to me! Calling Ridge, Mr. Tom RIDGE! Respond to the white courtesy phone!

[Benjo]

No registration necessary.

How do you read the article without registering? I wasn't able to.

[sd-joe]

See reply #3.

I tried it, and it works.

[BlueCat]

thanks...that did the trick

[BlueCat]

The stores will outlast the union. Rumors abound that some stores will change names, and reopen with new permanent workers. I can't verify the rumors.

I don't think that will do any good, since those stores are all signed with the union and the contracts would just follow the name change.

[leadpenny]

NFP Rocks signed up today and did not respond on his/her own thread. I feel static in the air.

[Auntie Mame]

How do you read the article without registering? I wasn't able to.

That's really weird. I clicked and went right in. I go there all the time but I KNOW I've never registered. Maybe I've just got their cookies??? Anyway, the article's really interesting. Let me post it in its entirety here:

Friday, January 30, 2004
Penalty for defying pickets: death
AFL-CIO official sent to plot strategy for grocery strike has a scary history

By MARK MIX
President of the National Right to Work Committee

The AFL-CIO hierarchy's recent decision to charge its secretary-treasurer, former United Mine Workers (UMW) President Richard Trumka, with "turning around" the three-and-a- half-month-old California supermarket strike is an ominous development.

Californians unfamiliar with Trumka's past may not immediately appreciate the significance of his vow to instill "a whole new attitude" in supermarket companies. But mineworkers and their loved ones in UMW-stronghold states like West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania know Trumka has a long history of inciting violence against employees as a means of changing the attitude of employers.

As a consequence of one particularly horrendous incident, Trumka and some of his former cohorts were forced to fork over an undisclosed sum, which media speculation put in the millions, to settle a wrongful-death civil suit out of court.

In spring 1993, Trumka ordered more than 17,000 miners in seven states out on strike. One of his objectives was to ensure that coal operators force miners to pay union dues as a job condition. Almost from the beginning, this strike was rife with violence.

Thugs vandalized homes, fired shots at a mine office and cut power to another mine, temporarily trapping 93 miners underground.

West Virginia heavy-equipment operator Eddie York wasn't as fortunate as the trapped miners. On July 22, 1993, this husband and father of three was shot in the back of the head as he drove past militant UMW strikers toward a work site. He died instantly. UMW goons then pounded would-be rescuers with stones.

Trumka's public reaction to the strike violence was chilling. He implied, as quoted in the Washington Times on Sept. 3, 1993, that employees who work during a strike deserve whatever happens to them: "I'm saying if you strike a match and put your finger in, common sense tells you you're going to burn your finger."

In June 1994, a federal jury found UMW strike captain Jerry Dale Lowe guilty on conspiracy and weapons charges in the death of York. By then, York's widow Wanda had already filed a $27 million lawsuit. In addition to Lowe, it named Trumka and several other UMW officials, charging that union strike tactics and directives had contributed to Eddie York's death.

For four years, UMW lawyers zealously fought Wanda York's suit. But the course of the legal battle suddenly changed after federal prosecutors announced on June 23, 1997, that they would release evidence from Lowe's criminal trial to her attorneys. After that bombshell, it took UMW lawyers just two days to reach a secret settlement with Wanda York.

Incredibly, UMW lawyers' defense strategy for Trumka and his cohorts until the very day of the settlement was reached was to insist that strike captain Lowe was innocent - even though a previous UMW-financed appeal of his conviction was dismissed without comment by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Union lawyers apparently couldn't afford to concede Lowe had committed the crime and claim he had acted alone. Why not? Perhaps because there was overwhelming evidence, now buried as a result of the settlement, that proved Lowe worked with other union bosses, not alone.

Today, Californians have a right to ask "strategist" Trumka if he intends to win the grocery strike by resorting to the same tactics that led to Eddie York's death. As the Charleston (W. Va.) Daily Mail pointed out right after the York settlement: "It's not acceptable for [union officials] to come down from Washington, whip their more impressionable members into a frenzy, and say 'Who? Us?' when somebody gets killed."

For Trumka to concede such an obvious point now would offer cold comfort to Wanda York and her three children.

But it might ease concerns that the York family's tragic history is about to repeat itself in Southern California.