http://www.nilrr.org/hobbs.htm
NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR LABOR RELATIONS RESEARCH
5211 Port Royal Road  Suite 510  Springfield, Virginia  22151
 VIOLENCE: ORGANIZED LABOR'S UNIQUE PRIVILEGE, AMERICAN TERRORISM
 By David Kendrick, Program Director
Copyright 1996, The National Institute for Labor Relations Research
 http://www.nilrr.org/hobbs.htm
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Sixty years after the rise of organized labor's political machine  during the  New Deal  (ROOSEVELTS SOCIALISM) union officials remain the only class of citizens allowed, under federal law, to commit violence against their fellow citizens
Under the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous  Enmons decision, union officials may destroy property, assault employees, and even murder them, and escape prosecution under federal extortion laws, so long as such violence is undertaken to secure what the Supreme Court called "legitimate" objectives, such as wage increases.
Our investigation of  labor violence  has revealed  thousands  of incidents of vandalism, arson, assaults, threats and murder perpetrated by union officials  and their agents compiled  from newspaper reports  over the past two decades.  As discovered from an in-depth investigation of the  New York Daily News strike of 1990 , such violence is often planned by union officials who seek out an employer's vulnerable points, and move on to other points when they fail to exact enough punishment
The scope of this crisis is underscored by the fact that while the Institute has compiled about 500 reports of union violence since 1975 in New York state, the "b New York City Police Department recorded more than 500 violent incidents in the 1990 Daily News strike alone.

The failure of law enforcement to curb strike violence  is particularly troubling.  While the Institute has recorded over  8,500 incidents  of union violence since 1975, only  220 reports of convictions  have been found.  In the Daily News strike, then-governor  Mario Cuomo down-played the violence  and refused to acknowledge any conspiracy on the part of the Newspaper and Magazine Drivers hierarchy to  firebomb newsstands  whose owners sold the Daily News.   Even the F.B.I. declined to investigate the violence, citing the Enmons decision as their chief constraint.
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CUOMOS (DEMOCRAT LIBERAL) WRITE YOUR SENATOR TO OVERTURN THE ENMONS DECISION BEFORE MORE ARE KILLED BY AMERICAN TERRORISTS, UNIONS
When truck driver Eddie York was murdered in 1993  for crossing a United Mine Workers (UMW) picket line , federal authorities could charge his killer with nothing more serious than "incapacitating" a driver on a federal road.  Given the UMW's enormous political influence in West Virginia, no state charges have ever been brought against the UMW militant who made  York's wife a widow and left his children fatherless.

 It is highly impractical to prosecute union militants for violent activities under federal laws targeting organized crime.  It isn't enough to substantiate a criminal act.  Federal law requires proof of at least two commissions of the same crime  to invoke its racketeering law.
 SO, KILL ONE, LET ONE GO?
Meanwhile, with an increasing number of states enacting extortion laws exempting union officials from prosecution  for the so-called "legitimate" objectives cited in Enmons, the federal government's intervention is required to end a regime in which, according to Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek, "They  [unions] have become the only important instance in which governments singly  fail in their prime function -- the prevention of coercion and violence."

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR LABOR RELATIONS RESEARCH
5211 Port Royal Road  Suite 510  Springfield, Virginia  22151  
http://www.nilrr.org/hobbs.htm

VIOLENCE: ORGANIZED LABOR'S UNIQUE PRIVILEGE
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
History of Judicial Involvement

After conducting a series of field hearings in 1933, the Copeland subcommittee of the Senate committee on Interstate Commerce introduced 13 bills intended to prevent the spread of organized crime, including the Anti-Racketeering Act of 1934. (1)  As finally enacted by the House and Senate, the Act made it a felony to obtain money or other "valuable consideration" by the use or threat of force, violence or coercion, so long as the act or threat had a connection to interstate commerce, and that the consideration did not include "the payment of wages by a bonafide employer to a bonafide employee." (2)  How this applied to union violence, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1942.  

After passage of the Anti-Racketeering Act, Local 807 of the Teamsters decided to expand their territory outside of New York City.  In order to persuade truckers from outside New York City to use the local's services, members would greet the truckers with guns and charge a toll equal to one day's union wage.  In some cases, the members of local 807 would drive the trucks into the city.  In other cases, the members took the money and departed.  In no case were the members of local 807 employed by the out-of-town trucking companies.  

Since these tactics at least doubled the cost of transporting goods into New York, most if not all of the local trucking companies signed contracts with Local 807.  However, federal charges were filed against Local 807 and some of its members under the anti-racketeering law.  

In 1942, the Supreme Court ruled, to the considerable consternation of Congress, that "bonafide employees" could include individuals who had never applied for a job with the employer.  Additionally the "wage" exception could include other labor representation issues. (3)

In reaction to the Local 807 decision, several attempts were made to amend the Anti-Racketeering Act.  Finally, Congress enacted the Hobbs Act in 1951. (4)  This time, Congress completely eliminated the "wage" exception, under which union officials could extort wage increases, as well as a clause exempting union violence from prosecution if such action would impair the "rights of legitimate labor organizations in lawfully carrying out the legitimate objects thereof...." (5)

But in 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a ruling that still stands today, disemboweled the Hobbs Act of its central purpose to criminalize extortion by union officials and their agents.

In the Enmons (6) case, three members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) were indicted for firing high-powered rifles at three utility company transformers, draining the oil from a transformer, and blowing up a transformer substation during a strike.
However, HERE COME DA JUDGE, HERE COME DA JUDGE
 However, the U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, dismissed the charges on the grounds that, in the context of a strike, the militants' actions were not illegal since they were in pursuit of "legitimate" union objectives.

Although the Hobbs Act had eliminated any mention of "legitimate" objectives which might justify union officials' extortion, a plurality of the Supreme Court decided that Congress had retained an ambiguity.

That ambiguity concerned a requirement for the "wrongful" use of force, violence or fear, as an element of the crime. (7)  The majority opinion agonizes over whether "wrongful" becomes superfluous, unless it is limited to cases in which the ends, as well as the means, are unlawful.  

"[W]rongful" [violence] has meaning in the Act only if it limits the statute's coverage to those instances where the obtaining of the property would itself be "wrongful" because the alleged extortionist has no lawful claim to that property. (8)  (emphasis added)
In short, the plurality held that the Hobbs Act did not reach "the use of violence to achieve legitimate union objectives...." (9)  The Court defined legitimate union objectives to include higher wages in return for genuine services. Legitimate objectives would exclude the extraction of wages for "imposed, unwanted, superfluous and fictitious services" or personal payoffs.  
Either forgetting or ignoring the fact that Congress passed the Hobbs Act in outraged response to the High Court's Local 807 decision 31 years earlier, the Court interpreted the Hobbs Act to punish only those acts punishable under that 1942 ruling

It was this distortion of congressional intent, so blatant that one wonders whether it was deliberate, that Justice William Douglas blistered in his dissent:
 

At times, the legislative history of a measure is so clouded or obscure that we must perforce give some meaning to vague words.  But where, as here, the consensus of the House is so clear, we should carry out its purpose ... [namely that] the regime of violence, whatever its precise objective, is a common device of extortion and is condemned by the Act. (10)
   History of Congressional Oversight
Congress last held hearings specifically on the Hobbs Act in 1984. (11)   Those hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee identified the ineffectiveness of the Hobbs Act as interpreted by Enmons, demonstrating that labor violence was coordinated by union officials. In some cases, union officials facilitated the violence by busing union members to the site of violence.  

As a result of the hearings, several amendments (12) to the Hobbs Act were proposed. The amendments would have dramatically limited the conduct required to be "wrongful", and explicitly extended the Hobbs Act to punish violence used to achieve legitimate union objectives.  The amendments were not enacted.  

In 1985, the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee also held hearings on the need for changes to the Hobbs Act. (13)  In particular, the hearings targeted the violence related to a strike by the Cement Workers Union against the Missouri Portland Cement Company.  

The testimony revealed a pattern of escalating violence which ultimately jeopardized innocent third parties.  Those third parties included firemen called after strikers cut down power lines.  The manager of a trucking terminal and his wife were repeatedly fired on by high powered rifles.  Their sin was allowing some of Portland Cement's truckers to use the terminal. Throughout the strike, the local's president and vice president encouraged the pickets and personally blocked entrance to the plant.  

More importantly, Illinois State Policemen watched repeated instances of criminal conduct without responding.