"A Shocking Thing"

The enormity of the crime committed against the U.S. and against U.S. labor by racketeering labor bosses has only begun to sink home, despite the procession of headlines from the Senate committee on labor racketeering. Among the first to grasp the full meaning of it all--and the meaning of the anti-labor kickback that is bound to come--is the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s blunt President George Meany. Last week Meany told a union convention in Washington just how shocked he was at what he found out over the last two years.

"We thought we knew a few things about trade-union corruption," he said, "but we didn't know the half of it, one-tenth of it, or the one-hundredth part of it. We didn't know, for instance, that we had unions where a criminal record was almost a prerequisite to holding office under the national union. We didn't know that we had top trade-union leaders who made it a practice to secretly borrow the funds of their union.

"We didn't know that there were top trade-union leaders who used the funds for phony real estate deals in which the victims of the fraud were their own members. And we didn't know that there were trade-union leaders who charged to the union treasury such items as speedboats, perfume, silk stockings, brassieres, color TV, refrigerators, and everything else under the sun.

"What a shocking thing it is to get a report from the Puerto Rican labor office in New York City that [exploited] Puerto Rican immigrants are going to the unemployment desk in that department asking to be referred to jobs where there are no unions. Of course, you can't get much cooperation from a national union the officers of which are practicing the same sort of larceny on a national scale as is being practiced by their so-called local representatives on a local scale.

"Some of these things are still going on . . ."

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