LABOR: New Deal

After years of exploiting unionism to build personal empires, two of the leading robber barons of the labor movement last week began to feel the restraints of the three-month-old Landrum-Griffin labor-reform bill:

Maurice A. Hutcheson, 62, who inherited the presidency of the 850,000-member A.F.L.-C.I.O. United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America from his father, William L. (“Big Bill”) Hutcheson, was sued by two Baltimore members for failure to treat his office as a “position of trust,” as defined by Landrum-Griffin. The charges grew in part out of the Senate rackets committee hearings, where Hutcheson refused to answer questions, and out of a grand jury investigation, which led to Hutcheson’s indictment on a charge of bribery in an Indiana state highway scandal. Specific complaints against Hutcheson and some of his lesser officers: accepting at least $107,935.07 in employer bribes, leasing valuable union property to Hutcheson kinsmen at token rates, spending union funds in efforts to bribe state officials to quash the bribery indictment, dipping into the multimillion-dollar “special organizing” fund for uncounted amounts, destroying union records of the takings. The suit demanded court protection for the complaining members and their local union (Local 101, Baltimore) against the Carpenter practice of strong-arming down all opposition, begged the court to set a receivership over Carpenter property to run the union’s affairs.

James Riddle Hoffa, 46, Teamster boss, built much of his empire by refusing truck service to companies picketed by labor racketeers seeking shakedown money out of phony organizational or recognition strikes. Landrum-Griffin’s provisions outlaw the shakedown forms of organizational picketing, also prohibit Hoffa from automatically rejecting “hot cargo” from any company with labor troubles. Last week, at a Chicago meeting of his huge Central States Conference, Hoffa declared that he would not only observe the new law’s restrictions, but also bitterly laid out a go-it-alone policy as far as all non-Teamster unions are concerned: “Our members will refuse to honor lines set up for organizational or recognition purposes. But in primary strikes, other unions will have to indemnify us against loss if they want our support.”