On Friday, a United States District Court judge sentenced a former union organizer to six months in prison and three years of probation for his participation in an arson against a nonunion concrete plant. The Albany Times Union has the details:
The May 2003 arson was part of an organized effort by two union officials to sabotage companies that were using non-unionized workers at construction sites.
The sentencing of Michael Kwarta, 32, who had served as a labor organizer and sergeant-at-arms for Local 190 of Glenmont, marked the culmination of a meandering federal investigation into the underworld of Albany’s politically connected laborers’ unions.
The arson triggered a federal grand jury investigation of the union’s ties to elected officials, public contracts and organized crime figures, and also whether top union leaders had authorized the firebombing.
Even though just about everybody in the union knew about Kwarta’s role in the arson — when an accomplice "hurled two Molotov cocktails at an operations trailer filled with computer equipment and it caught fire" — union hierarchy gladly kept him on the payroll for five years until just days before he entered his guilty plea. (Apparently he was just doing his job.)
For all their government-imposed special privileges, union thugs aren’t above the law. Oh, actually, in many ways, they are:
The most egregious example of organized labor’s special privileges and immunities is the 1973 United States v. Enmons decision. In it, the United States Supreme Court held that union violence is exempted from the Hobbs Act, which makes it a federal crime to obstruct interstate commerce by robbery or extortion. As a result, thousands of incidents of violent assaults (directed mostly against workers) by union militants have gone unpunished. Meanwhile, many states also restrict the authority of law enforcement to enforce laws during strikes.
