It's a perfectly legitimate collective bargaining tactic(see full story from laborunionreport at redstate.com)The union violence as a ‘legitimate union activity’ that the AFL-CIO’s Newman is referring to is a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case called United States vs. Enmons, in which the Supremes upheld a District Court ruling determining that unions could not be found in violation of an anti-racketeering law called the Hobbs Act if the violence was in pursuit of legitimate union objectives.
In 1946 Congress passed the Hobbs Act, aimed at a wide spectrum of union violence. Among other things, it defined criminal extortion as “the obtaining of property . . . by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence or fear [emphasis added].” In using the word “wrongful,” Kendrick says, “Congress left a narrow opening through which the U.S. Supreme Court would push a bulldozer in 1973.” In its decision in United States v. Enmons, the Court upheld a lower court ruling that three electrical union members indicted for sabotaging a substation and other violence had done nothing illegal because they were pursuing “legitimate” union objectives.
Actually, the ‘sabotage’ to the substation (referred to above) was described in the Enmons decision as the “firing high-powered rifles at three Company transformers, draining the oil from a Company transformer, and blowing up a transformer substation owned by the Company.” However, since it was done during a lawful strike, it did not fall under the Court’s definition of extortion under the Hobbs Act.
Class struggle(in Marxist ideology) the conflict of interests between the workers and the ruling class in a capitalist society, regarded as inevitably violent.
