The government intervention on behalf of the employers is bound to intensify as capitalist decay gets worse. The wealthy rulers aim to intimidate rank-and-file fighters who would dare to stand up for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. One example of this is the Freeman coal bosses, who have escalated their attacks in Illinois by calling on FBI agents in their siege against striking miners.
This provocative interference into the affairs of the union deepens the employing class's prerogative to poke into the business of any union and to decide who its leaders should be. Last year a "federal election monitor" overturned the election of former Teamsters president Ronald Carey, just days after the union's strike victory against UPS. And four months ago a court- appointed review board expelled Carey from the union, supposedly for his failure to stop campaign fraud in the Teamsters.
The employers and the big-business media are pushing a major propaganda campaign to portray themselves as opponents of corruption in the union movement. Working people should reject this facade and demand an immediate halt to the government investigation of District Council 37 and an end to all government intrusion in union affairs. The internal affairs of a union belong to its members alone.
It is a deadly trap for trade union activists to have FBI or other government officials intervening in the union. Labor history is replete with government frame-ups of union fighters. For several years after World War I, the FBI served as a political police force, carrying out the arrest or deportation of some 3,000 unionists in the infamous Palmer Raids in 1920. Working-class fighters can find the lessons of this history in Pathfinder books and pamphlets like Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay by Leon Trotsky and Karl Marx, and New International no. 6, which features the article "Washington's Fifty-Year Domestic Contra Operation," by Larry Seigle.
In his four-volume series on the rise of the Teamsters as a fighting union in the 1930s, Farrell Dobbs explains how communists and other union militants defended their democratic rights. In Teamster Bureaucracy Dobbs tells the story of how "the unions were gradually brought under the domination of an officialdom ready to act in `partnership' with the employing class," which assured the labor skates huge salaries, expense accounts, and other perks.
Learning these lessons are key to recognizing that corruption in the unions will only be ended through the course of broader labor struggles and an accompanying rise in class consciousness. A growing layer of working people will understand and act on the truth that the unions must be transformed into instruments of struggle and turned away from reliance on "friends" among the capitalist politicians.