Union Goons Harass Workers – “They acted like a mob of crazy lunatics”
The Northwest Indiana Times reports that “[n]onunion workers at the Hilton Garden Inn construction site . . .” in Hobart, Indiana, “. . . were victims of an attack that went well beyond a union-based picket line.”
Project Superintendent Kim Lackey was cited in the report:
“We were verbally harassed and property was damaged,” she said. “These people acted like a mob of crazy lunatics.”
Lackey said that Friday, the day of the union pickets, workers at the site found evidence of vandalism, including 14 slashed vehicle tires, a cut phone line to the trailer and epoxy glue in the locks on the gate and the framer’s trailer.
Lackey and other workers said the union representatives spewed both racially and sexually biased slurs at them, including targeting Hispanics, blacks and women.
“They were totally out of line,” she said.
Indeed!
As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Friederich A. von Hayek wrote, “[T]he coercion which unions have been permitted to exercise . . . is primarily the coercion of fellow workers.”
Walter Williams, a respected economist and syndicated columnist, has been more blunt.
“The union struggle is not against employers,” Mr. Williams wrote. “It is against workers. One way you see this is to ask: Who gets beat up or killed during a strike? It’s not the owners or management; it’s workers who’ve disagreed with the union and wish to work.”
The coercive powers union officials wield courtesy of federal labor law not only rob individual employees of fundamental freedoms, but exert a damaging and corrupting influence on work places, the economy, and other aspect of everyday American life.