21st Century Trade Union Conspiracy Trial
It’s fitting that the return of the trade union conspiracy trial would take place in Philadelphia, the city of the infamous Philadelphia Cordwainers Trial of 1805, the first known trade union conspiracy case in America. Beginning with the genesis of the first combinations of wage laborers in eighteenth-century England, trade unionism has been perceived and prosecuted as a conspiracy against private property—and rightly so. What is a trade union but a permanent conspiracy against private property and the inviolable right to private property? Engels designated trade unions as schools of war in The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1845, and the processes underlying workers’ control and workers’ power made manifest in trade unionism then remain in operation today.
A car bomb erupts in the parking lot of the Pittston Coal Group’s Lebanon, Virginia headquarters in 1989. A scab UPS driver in Florida is stabbed multiple times with an icepick when he attempts to defend a delivery truck from having its tires punctured in 1997. Ten thousand tons of grain in Longview, Washington, are dumped from hoppers onto railroad tracks and rail cars have their brake lines cut by longshoremen in 2011. While the various sections of the political left were enamored with the promise of the September 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike and its dissident rank-and-file leadership, community coalition-building and grassroots mobilizations, three months later over Christmas 2012, members of Ironworkers Local 401 in Philadelphia were sabotaging the active construction site for a Quaker Meeting House that was being built with non-union labor by cutting steel beams and bolts, setting fire to a crane and carving up set concrete with an acetylene torch.
Lacking all of the ideological pretenses of the Chicago teachers’ strike, the actions and fate of the Philadelphia ironworkers were ignored by all but labor’s enemies. According to the FBI, “the indictment charges RICO conspiracy, violent crime in aid of racketeering, three counts of arson, two counts of use of fire to commit a felony, and conspiracy to commit arson. Eight of the 10 individuals named in the indictment are charged with conspiring to use Ironworkers Local 401 as an enterprise to commit criminal acts. Joseph Dougherty, 72, of Philadelphia, the financial secretary/business manager of Local 401, was one of the eight individuals charged with racketeering conspiracy.”[1] One night of sabotage in December 2012 garnered the full attention of the Federal government’s repressive apparatus.
Thoughts on this?
First off, I'll qualify
First off, I'll qualify everything that follows this by saying I only read the quote. Don't have the time or inclination right now to read an article that long.
Jesus fucking christ. What a sad, pitiful existence that must have driven the attacker and their target into those circumstances. This was my main thought: that it's really not the business of radicalism to get emotionally tied up in punitive actions against scabs or any kind of trade union patriotism. Any impulse to do so should be resisted. Clearly, some shady shit is going on here if ordinary people are getting ice picked in disputes. It's a brutalized, low condition to find oneself in. At least one court room report of this Dougherty character and his union presented an image of him as a sleazebag in a pin stripe suit who had earned/extracted the close minded loyalty of some in the union. It also provided a picture of organized harassment and coercion against nonunion workers. (Keeping in mind that the article was in the Philly Inquirer.)
Philly Inquirer
I mean, I see in this evidence of a deeper impulse to control the working class and extract loyalty from it. I see submissiveness to authority. It all seems pretty primitive. Dougherty just walks with a big stick and little else it would seem.
To better illustrate where my train of thought is going, we have these two stories: During SEPTA strike, Good Samaritan gives free rides to elderly and disabled
Info on the SEPTA strike: http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/01/us/philadelphia-transit-strike/index.html
So the first one is obviously just propaganda meant for stupid, sentimental people. It conveys the strikers as hardhearted and selfish. But it provides evidence of a much wider failure to understand that both the isolated elderly and disabled of the city, as well as the striking workers, are vulnerable groups who need to be rallied around. (This failure probably a product of a kind of managed dereliction of reason, like white flight or anything else that leads people to shit where they eat and then say it tastes good.) These two thoughts can actually coexist and might even strengthen each other. How that might be accomplished eludes me. I'm just spitballing here!
Rather than doing the work of bringing two disparate circumstances together--that of the militant unionist and the nonunion worker and/or scab--it seems to mindlessly extol the ends over the means. I guess that makes me a weakling or something, I dunno. Dash me against the stones and then put a pick in me, if you'd like.
As a final thought--an intuition, more like--I'd offer that one night of action garnering the full attention of a Federal crackdown is not evidence of its power but instead its weakness.
I don't think that the
I don't think that the article is a simple endorsement of the particular actions. Never the less they ought to be defended. We're not talking about a lone worker lashing out. We're talking about case after case where property is destroyed or people stabbed in the *practical self defense of the class*.
That said, I think it *does* come from a place of weakness. When workers are pressed by injunction, scabs, the national guard, the union official's indifference, etc. to the point of no alternative (not to mention violence perpetrator by scabs against union pickets) what does one expect them to do?