The Ungentle Art

"We expect," growled Arkansas' Democratic Senator McClellan, "to develop in these hearings what may be a classic example of the use of force and violence in labor-management relation." John McClellan was as good as his word: last week his labor-investigating Senate committee heard testimony as fascinating as it was ugly about the ungentle art of teamster and building trades' union organizing in the industrial city of Scranton (pop. 127,600), hard by the Pennsylvania anthracite coal mines.

Some of the Scranton union tactics were as simple as a tooth-busting fist. Others were more ingenious; e.g., threatening to douse the milk, eggs and butter of a nonunion dairy truck with kerosene, and pouring sugar into the gasoline tank of a steam roller on a highway construction job. (One of the goons gave his left-over sugar to a girl friend for household use.) Soft-spoken William E. Cochran, a construction foreman for a nonunion firm, told how the threats of union goons drove him to the Scranton city solicitor. James McNulty, for protection. McNulty, it turned out, was also lawyer for the building trades' unions. Cochran said he was warned that if union members committed any crime, such as pushing over a wall of Cochran's new house, City Solicitor McNulty would defend the unionists. And in fact, several days later, the wall was damaged.

A Nervous Type. But the Scranton unions' bullyboy art was at its ugliest in two other cases, one of dynamiting and one of stink-bombing.

Witness Edward Pozusek, 50, a nonunion Wilkes-Barre contractor, told of landing deep in trouble with the unions while building a house in Scranton. He was approached on the job by officials of the laborers', carpenters' and electrical workers' unions. Asked one: "Who the hell allowed you to come here to Scranton to build?" Replied Pozusek: "Mister, it so happens I am American-born, and I am allowed to earn a living in any part of this country as long as I earn it legally." Said the union official: "You will just pick up your tools and get the hell back to Wilkes-Barre, where you belong." Snapped Pozusek: "Look, mister, I am not looking for trouble. I don't pretend to be smart or tough, and I am only going to tell you one thing--that I am a nervous type, and don't come here and start trouble for me, because somebody is going to get hurt." Said the unionist: "Trouble? You don't know the first damn thing about trouble. Why, we'll give you so much trouble here that you'll get ulcers." Answered Pozusek: "Ulcers? That don't worry me, because I am getting the damn things for the last 15 years."

At that point the details were filled in by Witness Paul Bradshaw, Teamsters ex-steward who decided to sing after taking the rap for what was to happen next to Pozusek. Bradshaw testified that he and some other union goons were instructed by Carpenters' Business Agent Joe Bartell to go over to the Pozusek project 'and "saw the joists to the breaking point--not to saw all the way through." Bartell explained that "nine -times out of ten, he [Pozusek] will never notice it, and when the home is built and the people move in, the thing will collapse and he will have ulcers." The union toughs tried to carry out their orders, but the Pozusek place was "really put together," and the saw trick did not work. They were not defeated: they dynamited it.

A Sense of Humor. Bradshaw's girl friend, gushing, giggling Helen Canfield, 26, a member of the Teamsters Union by virtue of her job as an egg-candler at an A. & P. warehouse, had the time of her life telling how the union enforcers stink-bombed Scranton's nonunion Sonny Boy Bakery.

"I thought that was very amusing to me, because, well, I have smelled rotten eggs, sir, and that is what a stink bomb smells like," she burbled. "Mr. Hubshman [Robert Hubshman, a Teamster slugger] and Mr. Brady [Philip Brady, business agent for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Scranton] had discussed this with me, and I can't call them 'mister'--I am so used to calling them Bob and Billy and so on. Bob, he said to me, 'Wait until they try soap and water to clean that up.' Because, he said, 'Only ammonia will take it out and they will never think of ammonia. They will try soap and water and it will make it that much worse, and it will go into the cellar and it will ruin all of the flour that is stored there.' And he said, 'Wait until they turn on the oven,' he said, 'then they will be running outside.' When he was telling me all of that, I wanted to go up and take a look, and I thought it would be fun, really."

Egg-Candler Canfield was less amused when she herself was arrested on a charge of conspiring to obstruct justice (she had lied in giving Boy Friend Bradshaw an alibi for the dynamiting). Said she to the McClellan committee: "There was a state policeman stood there for a while watching us, and after him Detective Welch came in to see we didn't leave the room, and after him [Detective] Wojciechowski came in, and since this was early in the morning and I was not allowed in the ladies' room, and it was 2 o'clock before we were arraigned and I had no breakfast and I had no lunch and I had to go to the ladies' room and finally I got very disturbed. I decided I will forget I am a lady--supposed to be--and I said, 'Mr. Wojciechowski, if you are not going to let me out of here, you lend me your hat.' " Mr. Wojciechowski let her out.

Guest List. Among those arrested and convicted last October for their part in Scranton's classic example of union violence, after a campaign touched off by the city's newspapers, were Carpenters' Business Agent Bartell, Electrical Workers' Business Agent Brady, Laborers' Business Agent Anthony Bonacuse, and Teamsters' Secretary-Treasurer John Durkin, who is also a vice president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor. Yet all still hold their union jobs--a fact that places a real burden of proof on the national A.F.L.-C.I.O. Executive Council in its war against labor racketeering.

Not only have Scranton's Big Four avoided union punishment, the McClellan committee noted, but they were honored, after their convictions, at a $15-a-plate testimonial dinner laid on by local A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders. Among the guests: an international vice president of the Laborers Union, the A.F.L.'s regional representative in Indiana, the director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Committee on Political Education, and Joseph Keenan, a vice president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. itself.

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