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Michelle Malkin: Big Labor’s Legacy of Violence
To mark Labor Day 2010, President Barack Obama will join hands with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in Milwaukee and pose as champions of the working class. Bad move. Trumka’s organizing record is a shameful reminder of the union movement’s violent and corrupt foundations.
The new Obama/AFL-CIO power alliance — underwritten with $40 million in hard-earned worker dues — is a midterm shotgun marriage of Beltway brass knuckles and Big Labor brawn. Trumka warmed up his rhetorical muscles last week with full-frontal attacks on former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. He indignantly accused her of “getting close to calling for violence” and suggested that her criticism of Tea Party-bashing labor bosses amounted to “terrorizing” workers.
Trumka and Obama will cast Big Labor as an unassailable force for good in U.S. history. But when it comes to terrorizing workers, Trumka knows whereof he speaks.
Meet Eddie York. He was a working man whose story will never scroll across Obama’s TelePrompTer. A nonunion contractor who operated heavy equipment, York was shot to death during a strike called by the United Mine Workers 17 years ago. Workmates who tried to come to his rescue were beaten in an ensuing melee. The head of the UMW spearheading the wave of strikes at that time? Trumka. Responding to concerns about violence, he shrugged to The Virginian-Pilot in September 1993: “I’m saying if you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you’re likely to get burned.” Incendiary rhetoric, anyone?
A federal jury convicted one of Trumka’s UMW captains on conspiracy and weapons charges in York’s death. According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Legal and Policy Center, which tracks Big Labor abuse, Trumka’s legal team quickly settled a $27 million wrongful death suit filed by York’s widow just days after a judge admitted evidence in the criminal trial. An investigative report by Reader’s Digest disclosed that Trumka “did not publicly discipline or reprimand a single striker present when York was killed. In fact, all eight were helped out financially by the local.”
In Illinois, Trumka told UMW members to “kick the s*** out of every last” worker who crossed his picket lines, according to the Nashville (Ill.) News. And as the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the leading anti-forced unionism organization in the country, pointed out, other UMW coalfield strikes resulted in what one judge determined were “violent activities ... organized, orchestrated and encouraged by the leadership of this union.”
Trumka washed off the figurative bloodstains and moved up the ranks. As AFL-CIO secretary, he notoriously refused to testify in a sordid 1999 embezzlement trial involving his labor boss brethren at the Teamsters union. No surprise. Thugs of a feather: Trumka’s violence-promoting record echoes the riotous Teamsters strikes dating back to the 1950s, when the union organized taxicab companies to target workers with gas bombs, bottles and fists.
And now, Trumka is spearheading a Democratic Party get-out-the-vote campaign by far-left groups — publicized in the revolutionary Marxist People’s World — to “energize an army of tens of thousands who will return to their neighborhoods, churches, schools and voting booths to prevent a Republican takeover of Congress in November and begin building a new permanent coalition to fight for a progressive agenda.”
Take those as literal fighting words. The bloody consequences of compulsory unionism cannot be ignored.
— Michelle Malkin is author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies. Click here for more information. She can be contacted at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
» wrote on 09.05.10 @ 11:33 PM
Unions have long outlived their usefullness—Gov unions should be illegal..
» wrote on 09.06.10 @ 09:25 AM
Alloowing unions into the private sector was the biggest mistake Kennedy made. As for the SEIU, send them back 80 years and you would find them in brown shirts. They are true thugs.
» wrote on 09.06.10 @ 10:16 AM
Fascist party doll Malkin’s distaste for the middle class makes her such a good Republican! “Social Security, wage and hour laws, collective bargaining rights, unemployment compensation, the GI Bill, the interstate highway program, civil rights laws, Medicare, Head Start, and more, provided the national framework necessary to sustain a middle class for the American Majority. This essential framework was not “given” to us by corporate executives and politicians—indeed, they sputtered, spewed and fought every piece of it tooth and nail. Rather, it came from union-led grassroots movements, organizing for structural change.” Jim Hightower
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