Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (10 page)

Then the sanitation workers and AFSCME received a ray of hope from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King knew about the labor unions’ long history of sanctioning racial discrimination in employment, which union officials had not yet fully repudiated.
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But he supported the rights of working men and women as part of his civil rights mission.
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He therefore agreed to speak at a pro-strike rally of fifteen thousand people in downtown Memphis, and then to come back and lead a march through the city’s streets.

The procession, however, quickly turned violent—marchers and police clashed; youths broke away and began looting local stores.
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Having declared for many years he would never lead a violent march, Dr. King returned to his motel under his advisors’ recommendations and then went home to Atlanta.
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But Dr. King soon announced he would return to Memphis for another march on April 5.

And on that well-publicized return to Memphis, escaped convict James Earl Ray shot King to death. Ray had been planning to murder King in Atlanta, but he soon learned through the newspapers of King’s Memphis visit. Dr. King’s stalker arrived in Memphis on April 3, and was able to learn from the thoughtlessly informative local papers not just the motel, but also the very room number where his target was staying.

Always philosophical about the possibility of his being assassinated, Dr. King refused to maintain any security detail. On the night of April 3, King addressed a large crowd and gave his famous and prophetic speech. He said, “I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
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The next day, early in the evening, Dr. King was standing on his motel balcony. A single fatal shot by Ray brought down the great civil rights leader. Although the assassination was not connected with the sanitation workers’ strike, Wurf would make sure that AFSCME would be forever linked with Dr. King’s martyrdom when the history of the labor movement was written.

Tragic as the assassination was for our nation, it was somewhat less tragic for Wurf and AFSCME, who quickly used the crisis to their advantage. Wurf might have agreed with President Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who made the famous statement, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Emanuel explained further that what he meant by that is that a crisis gives you “an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
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Dr. King’s assassination gave Wurf the opportunity to end the strike on terms favorable to AFSCME.

On the very evening of the murder, Wurf called William Welsh, then an assistant to Vice President Hubert Humphrey and later to become AFSCME’s political director.
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Unless the White House quickly intervened to settle the strike in favor of the sanitation workers, Wurf warned, violence would be the rule of the day. “I don’t know what buttons to press,” Wurf said, “but, g——, Memphis is going to burn.”
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The day after the King assassination, the White House dispatched Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds to Memphis to prevent the violence that Wurf had predicted by bringing the strike to an end. The strike was quickly settled with the city, and indeed, riots did not occur in Memphis.
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Sanitation workers continued to lug tubs with forty to fifty-five gallons of trash through people’s backyards for low pay, but were now represented exclusively by the AFSCME local union complete with dues checkoff. AFSCME then quickly proceeded to go after other city employees in Memphis.
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Fortunately for Jerry Wurf and his cohorts, very few of the millions of Americans who sympathized with the plight of Memphis sanitation men during their strike in 1968 paid any attention to how it actually turned out for them. In the minds of many Americans, the Memphis sanitation strike led by AFSCME and Wurf was linked forever to the tragic death of Martin Luther King Jr.

The association between King’s assassination and the Memphis strike thus “identified AFSCME, in the public mind, as a union linked to the surging civil rights movement.” Wurf suddenly became a “unionist of national stature.”
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The AFSCME website today still proclaims proudly, “During the 60s, AFSCME’s struggles were linked with those of the civil rights movement.”
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But it took another thirteen years, until late 1981, for the city of Memphis and the AFSCME Local union to eliminate the back-breaking tubs with the introduction of curbside collection and wheeled garbage bins.
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Nonetheless, the AFSCME victory over the city of Memphis and other union victories greased the skids for even greater union takeovers of our government workers.
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Cascades of government workers in cities and states across America were going over the union falls—and worker freedom was going over those same falls in a barrel.

This was not the end of the story of union coercion in Memphis. Within a few short years, both the firefighters and police workers were unionized. Soon after, they struck. The story of these strikes shows us the true danger of unionizing critical public safety workers. Once organized,
they can and will strike—even if striking is illegal. And when public safety workers go on strike, citizens are truly left unprotected.
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In July 1978, the local affiliate of the International Association of Fire Fighters ordered more than 1,400 firefighters to go out on strike. This union wasn’t aiming for decent pay or better working conditions with this strike. Not even close: this strike was over “shift differential”—the fact that firefighters received less additional pay for working less desirable shifts than other city employees received.
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Faced with striking firefighters, the new mayor, J. Wyeth Chandler, cobbled together a force of 150 substitute firefighters made up of supervisors, National Guard troops, the few firefighters who did not go on strike, and National Parks Service firefighters. Many members of this skeleton crew were not even familiar with the streets in the city of Memphis.

From the beginning, the strike was marked by widespread violence, vandalism, and other misconduct. Within twenty-four hours of the strike, tire slashing, headlight smashing, engine tampering, and destruction of medical equipment put most of the fire department’s ambulances out of operation.
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Using vandalism, union strikers took away the tools that the substitute firefighters would need to keep the population safe. What better way to pressure a city than put its population in real danger of being without essential safety services?

On the first weekend of the strike, three times as many fires were reported as normal—stretching the skeleton crew very thin. At the sites of some of the blazes, union militants physically blocked their substitutes from getting to the fires. And so Memphis burned. In just two days, fires caused an estimated $3 million in damage to the city.
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The Memphis police director reported that union agents were responsible for setting 90 to 95 percent of the fires. That’s actual arson on the part of the firefighters union. The police director exclaimed, “Last night was one of the most unreal scenes I’ve ever seen. It was like a World War II newsreel.”

After three days, the city’s firefighters returned to work, complying with a court injunction against the strike. But Memphians barely had time to catch their breath before the next illegal public-safety strike. Less than one week later, police went out on strike. What were they
aiming for? They wanted an arbitration clause added to their contract so that future disputes between the police and the government employers would be sent to a neutral arbiter.

Once again, violence and intimidation were the order of the day. Officers who returned to work heard from anonymous phone callers threatening to “make your families pay,” to “take it out on your wife and kids,” and to “teach you a lesson.”
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Union members trashed twenty-five police vehicles and three fire trucks and blew up a tear-gas bomb in the county administrative building, all in pursuit of that all-important arbitration clause.

While this strike raged, the firefighters rejected the tentative contract that they negotiated the previous month and went out on a second illegal strike. Now, Memphis had police and firefighters
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out on strike at the same time, creating a public service emergency. To add to the crisis, Memphis sanitation and teachers union bosses launched sympathy strikes in support of the police and fire unions. Within eight days, Memphis was brought to its knees. The mayor was forced to cut a deal with these various government employee unions—and that deal included a provision giving all the illegal strikers amnesty, except for those who had actually been caught committing felonies.
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That, naturally, was a small number, since the police were striking—so who would arrest the felons?

Rather than avoiding strife, unionizing our essential public safety workers actually puts our government in the position of being unable to protect our public safety in the case of strike. Breakdown in government services is possible only when government workers are unionized. Strikes of public safety workers actually create emergency situations, causing citizens to panic.
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And citizens’ fears make public safety worker strikes both short and enormously effective.

And with greater unionization
of government public safety workers, strikes increased dramatically. In New York City, where unions were king, the unions were no kinder to their subjects—illegal strikes and violence were the order of the day. On July 1, 1975, sanitation workers staged a wildcat (illegal) strike, letting garbage pile up in the city—in the heat of the summer, just as Jerry Wurf had advised for a successful garbage strike. During the strike, police officers marched on City Hall, blocking access ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge and carrying signs that read, “Cops Out, Crime In” and “Burn City Burn.”
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Even the liberal
New York Times
editors admitted, “Last week’s illegal sanitation strike… was the end product of three decades in which one New York mayor after another systematically fostered the growth of centralized union power.”
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Instead of bringing cooperation and labor peace, growing union power resulted in greater strike activity.

In Pomona, California, in 1975, police officers went on strike and then proceeded to vandalize cop cars and stop volunteers from assuming police duties. “I am ashamed of this kind of activity on the part of policemen,” said a police captain there. “The citizens feel the officers have abandoned them, and they have.”
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That same year, policemen went on strike in San Francisco. When the mayor threatened to fire them, the officers firebombed his home.
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Firefighters in Dayton, Ohio, let fires burn out of control during their strike in 1977.
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The same thing happened in St. Louis that year.
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From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, sanitation, public safety, and public hospital strikes hit not just Memphis, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, but also Kansas City, St. Louis, Huntsville, and many other American cities, large and small.
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Time and again, homes and businesses were destroyed and lives were jeopardized as a consequence of government employee union strikes, most of them illegal. As Al Shanker, the legendary head of the American Federation of Teachers, explained, “One of the greatest reasons for the effectiveness of the public employee’s strike is the fact that it is illegal.”
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He was making the point that illegal strikes inflict harm on cities and frighten residents, which make these strikes even more successful than legal strikes. And calling an illegal strike rarely hurts the union or its members—after illegal strikes, unions have almost always been able to negotiate for amnesty for the illegal strikers as part of the strike settlement agreement.

Americans who live in towns and cities that have given power over their public safety workers to the government employee unions can never again truly rely on those workers to protect their safety. Union objectives come first, even when life and property are at stake. Once the union toughs like Jerry Wurf got their feet wedged in the government door, they had no qualms about breaking into the house, stealing the silverware, and then setting the structure ablaze.

Strikes by public safety workers charged with protecting our citizens are very different from strikes by factory workers. In the private sector, strikes by workers put economic pressure on the owners of a business. The owners will seek to end the strike before it becomes too costly for the business or drives too many of the business’s customers to its competitors.

In contrast, strikes by public sector workers are not economic, but rather undermine the whole role of government—to protect its citizens. As labor policy analysts Armand Thieblot and Thomas Haggard noted, “When strikes involve employees charged with protection of public safety they are inherently violent.” They continue, “Denial of protection is itself a form of violence.”
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The point is that the job of the fireman or policeman is to protect citizens, and failing to do this job is itself a form of extortion.
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