Penalty for defying pickets: death

AFL-CIO official sent to plot strategy for grocery strike has a scary history

FOR RELEASE: January 30, 2004

By Mark Mix

The AFL-CIO hierarchy's recent decision to charge its secretary-treasurer, former United Mine Workers (UMW) President Richard Trumka, with "turning around" the three-and-a- half-month-old California supermarket strike is an ominous development.

Californians unfamiliar with Trumka's past may not immediately appreciate the significance of his vow to instill "a whole new attitude" in supermarket companies. But mineworkers and their loved ones in UMW-stronghold states like West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania know Trumka has a long history of inciting violence against employees as a means of changing the attitude of employers.

As a consequence of one particularly horrendous incident, Trumka and some of his former cohorts were forced to fork over an undisclosed sum, which media speculation put in the millions, to settle a wrongful-death civil suit out of court.

In spring 1993, Trumka ordered more than 17,000 miners in seven states out on strike. One of his objectives was to ensure that coal operators force miners to pay union dues as a job condition. Almost from the beginning, this strike was rife with violence.

Thugs vandalized homes, fired shots at a mine office and cut power to another mine, temporarily trapping 93 miners underground.

West Virginia heavy-equipment operator Eddie York wasn't as fortunate as the trapped miners. On July 22, 1993, this husband and father of three was shot in the back of the head as he drove past militant UMW strikers away from a work site. He died instantly. UMW goons then pounded would-be rescuers with stones.

Trumka's public reaction to the strike violence was chilling. He implied, as quoted in the Washington Times on Sept. 3, 1993, that employees who work during a strike deserve whatever happens to them: "I'm saying if you strike a match and put your finger in, common sense tells you you're going to burn your finger."

In June 1994, a federal jury found UMW strike captain Jerry Dale Lowe guilty on conspiracy and weapons charges in the death of York. By then, York's widow Wanda had already filed a $27 million lawsuit. In addition to Lowe, it named Trumka and several other UMW officials, charging that union strike tactics and directives had contributed to Eddie York's death.

For four years, UMW lawyers zealously fought Wanda York's suit. But the course of the legal battle suddenly changed after federal prosecutors announced on June 23, 1997, that they would release evidence from Lowe's criminal trial to her attorneys. After that bombshell, it took UMW lawyers just two days to reach a secret settlement with Wanda York.

Incredibly, UMW lawyers' defense strategy for Trumka and his cohorts until the very day of the settlement was reached was to insist that strike captain Lowe was innocent - even though a previous UMW-financed appeal of his conviction was dismissed without comment by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Union lawyers apparently couldn't afford to concede Lowe had committed the crime and claim he had acted alone. Why not? Perhaps because there was overwhelming evidence, now buried as a result of the settlement, that proved Lowe worked with other union bosses, not alone.

Today, Californians have a right to ask "strategist" Trumka if he intends to win the grocery strike by resorting to the same tactics that led to Eddie York's death. As the Charleston (W. Va.) Daily Mail pointed out right after the York settlement: "It's not acceptable for [union officials] to come down from Washington, whip their more impressionable members into a frenzy, and say 'Who? Us?' when somebody gets killed."

For Trumka to concede such an obvious point now would offer cold comfort to Wanda York and her three children.

But it might ease concerns that the York family's tragic history is about to repeat itself in Southern California.