Making a Living

Standing before Senator John McClellan's labor rackets investigating committee in the Senate caucus room one day last week, Committee Counsel Robert Kennedy pointed to a set of charts listing 15 union locals and their officers. These locals, he explained, are only a part of the 58 whose 125,000 members comprise the Teamsters Union Joint Council 16, "the biggest ruling body of the Teamsters in New York City." Teamsters Union Joint Council 16 controls the flow of all goods moving through the city. Said Kennedy: "If the Teamsters are controlled or run by hoodlums or gangsters, or run by people who have an obligation to hoodlums and gangsters, or Communists, then the lifeblood of New York City, and really of the U.S., can be cut off ... We are going to get into mass extortions, misuse of power, and mistreatment of individual union members." Then, with a parade of witnesses, Counsel Kennedy showed how Racketeer Johnny Dio and his friend, Jimmy Hoffa, took over in New York with just such purposes in mind.

The parade started with sad-faced Sam Zakman, 44, sometime union organizer and former Communist who was a commissar with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. "I always liked the organizing field," Zakman explained simply, although he admitted he "wasn't very successful at it." One day in 1950 Zakman approached one Sam Berger, then manager of an International Ladies Garment Workers Union local in New York, asked Berger to help him pick up a charter for a union. 'I had a family to support," said Zakman. "Here was a chance to organize a trade [i.e., cab drivers] that never had been organized in New York ... It would have been a good thing ... a nice living."

The Driver's Seat. Zakman got his charter to "organize the unorganized" from the United Automobile Workers, A.F.L. (no kin to Walter Reuther's U.A.W.-C.I.O.), later known as the Allied Industrial Workers. Who put up the money for office rent and expenses? Dio. Who became the local's business manager? Dio. Zakman began to feel put upon: Racketeer Dio was padding the local's payroll with his own boys, among them an organizer named Benny ("The Bug") Ross.

"There is a fellow," testified Zakman with reluctant admiration, "that did everything wrong, and organized better than the rest of them ... He would just walk into a shop and pull the switch and say, 'Everybody out on strike.' He didn't believe in elections. He was a hard worker." Predictably, the organization of cab drivers failed, Zakman was eased out of the union, and Johnny Dio finished up in the driver's seat, using the union for his own devices.

Lester Washburn, former president of the U.A.W.-A.F.L., told the committee that he tried to get Dio out, instead ran head-on into trouble. Witness Washburn, now a Wisconsin resort owner, told the committee that he went for help to Sam Berger's boss, President David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Dubinsky told him: "Dio's no good. Get rid of him." And although Dubinsky finally dropped Berger, Washburn said that he never helped on the Dio problem. In fact, added Washburn, he discovered later that one I.L.G.W.U. official had actually hired Johnny Dio to organize a plant in Roanoke, Va. Dubinsky's explanation to Washburn: "Sometimes we hire people to do certain jobs, but we don't let them get on the inside of the organization."

Tributes. Once in power in New York, Mobster Dio's union locals, already in control of 5,000 members, got down to some reorganization work. With Jimmy Hoffa's help, the Dio-controlled units of U.A.W.-A.F.L. moved over into the Teamsters Union--and thus became part of the all-powerful Joint Council 16, now headed by Hoffa Pal John O'Rourke.

Unlike legitimate locals, which are formed from the ground up, Dio's paper locals had charters and officers to start with; next they needed rank-and-file members--or at least the Dio-style equivalent : dues and welfare contributions.

Time and again, the money came in from dishonest small businessmen, who happily paid tribute to Dio locals in return for labor peace. From young (22) John McNiff, executive secretary of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, came some details. Working chiefly with Negro and Puerto Rican people, who have been victimized most by crooked unions, A.C.T.U. found that the standard procedure begins when "the union approaches the employer or is called by him to ward off unionization by a group genuinely interested in protecting the workers. A contract is signed which has all or most of the following characteristics: a wage scale a few cents above the legal minimum of $1 an hour . . . two to four holidays, no sick leave, little or no vacation pay, no welfare benefits, no seniority." Result: no union meetings are ever held, workers rarely see copies of their union contracts, are fired when they protest, never run an election, find that their dues have been collected from the bosses without their authorization, discover that in some places they are making less than ever.

Concluded McNiff: "The social effects of this collusion have already been felt by the taxpayers. Much criticism has been leveled at the Puerto Rican and Negro workers in New York City because they allegedly 'overflow' the welfare rolls. [Collusion] has made it virtually impossible for an unskilled Puerto Rican worker, supporting a family, to earn over $45 a week. This situation is costing New York City over $25 million a year in welfare payments alone."

What happens when the workers try to join forces against a dishonest employer? Says McNiff: "He simply picks up his cheap machines from Brooklyn, and with the help of the Dio-Hoffa-O'Rourke axis moves to the Bronx, where he finds another friendly union to dominate, and intimidates a new crop of unskilled and unlettered workers."

The Sweethearts. Before the week was out, the McClellan committee got firsthand testimony from five uncomfortable petty employers who found it more profitable to sign "sweetheart contracts" with paper locals than with legitimate unions. In all five cases, the sweetheart contracts called for near-minimum wages, few if any of the basic benefits common to all labor-management contracts in the U.S. In some cases employers paid union dues out of management funds for only a small group of their employees, thus were able to use the liberal benefits of labor laws to keep other unions from organizing their shops. They were all variations on the same theme: no real union representation, little or no benefit for employees, safety for dollar-grabbing employers, big and sure incomes for Dio and the rest of the racketeers.

As these tales of bribery and collusion dribbled to an end, the focus sharpened repeatedly on the men who have been charged with ruling this system of ruthless exploitation. This week Chairman McClellan would be ready to show the world the top dog himself. Scheduled to take the stand: Johnny Dio.

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