The Union News.: Community organizing: Racketeering, extortion

9/20/08

Community organizing: Racketeering, extortion

Related UFCW-Smithfield Foods stories: here
More RICO stories: here

RICO trial has UFCW on defense

Smithfield Foods' racketeering and extortion lawsuit against a union is headed to trial in federal court in Richmond. U.S. District Judge Robert Payne rejected the United Food and Commercial Workers International's motion for a ruling in its favor Tuesday. He also struck down some of the defenses the union wanted to use at trial.

Smithfield claims the union illegally used boycotts, a negative public relations campaign and other tactics in an attempt to force the company to allow unionization at its massive hog-slaughtering plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

The union says it did nothing wrong in applying economic pressure to persuade the union to allow a fair union election at the plant.

(wric.com)

Summary of Saul Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals'

Rules for Power Tactics:
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Because Alinsky was sensitive to criticism that he wasn't ethical, he also included a set of rules for the ethics of power tactics. You can see from these why his ethics were so frequently questioned.

Rules to test whether power tactics are ethical:
1. One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
2. The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.
3. In war the end justifies almost any means.
4. Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
5. Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
6. The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
7. Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.
8. The morality of means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
9. Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition to be unethical.
10. You do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral garments.
11. Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness," or "Bread and Peace."

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9/20/08

Community organizing: Racketeering, extortion

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