United States Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management
The United States Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management was a select committee created by the United States Senate on January 30, 1957 and dissolved on March 31, 1960. The select committee was directed to study the extent of criminal or other improper practices in the field of labor-management relations or in groups of employees or employers, and to recommend changes in the laws of the United States that would provide protection against such practices or activities. It conducted 253 active investigations, served 8,000 subpoenas for witnesses and documents, held 270 days of hearings, took testimony from 1,526 witnesses, and compiled almost 150,000 pages of testimony. At the peak of its activity in 1958, 104 persons worked for the committee.
The select committee's work led directly to the enactment of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act on September 14, 1959.
Background and creation
In December 1952, Robert F. Kennedy was appointed assistant counsel for the Committee on Government Operations by the then-chairman of the committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Kennedy resigned in July 1953, but rejoined the committee staff as chief minority counsel in February 1954. When the Democrats regained the majority in January 1955, Kennedy became the committee's chief counsel. Soon thereafter, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations, under the leadership of Democratic Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas, began holding hearings into labor racketeering.Much of the Permanent Subcommittee's work focused on a scandal which emerged in 1956 in the powerful trade union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In the mid-1950s, Midwestern Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa began an effort to unseat Dave Beck, the union's international president. In October 1955, mobster Johnny Dio met with Hoffa in New York City and the two men conspired to create as many as 15 paper locals to boost Hoffa's delegate totals. When the paper locals applied for charters from the international union, Hoffa's political foes were outraged. A major battle broke out within the Teamsters over whether to charter the locals, and the media attention led to investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Beck and other Teamster leaders subsequently challenged the authority of the Permanent Subcommittee to investigate the union by arguing that the Senate's Labor and Public Welfare Committee had jurisdiction over labor racketeering, not Government Operations. McClellan objected to the transfer of his investigation to the Labor Committee because he felt the Labor chairman, Senator John F. Kennedy, was too close to union leaders and would not thoroughly investigate organized labor.
To solve its jurisdictional and political problems, the Senate established on January 30, 1957, an entirely new committee, the Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, and gave it broad subpoena and investigative powers. The new select committee was given a year to complete its work, and charged with studying the extent of criminal or other improper practices in the field of labor-management relations or in groups of employees or employers. Half the membership was drawn from the Committee on Government Operations and half from the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. McClellan, Ervin, McCarthy, and Mundt were drawn from Government Operations, and Kennedy, McNamara, Ives, and Goldwater from Labor. An equal number of Democrats and Republicans sat on the Select Committee.
Senator McClellan was named chair of the Select Committee, and Republican Senator Irving Ives of New York vice chair. Democrats and liberals, primarily, criticized the committee for not having a neutral attitude toward labor. Only three of the committee's eight members looked on organized labor favorably, and only one of them was strongly pro-labor. The committee's other five members were strongly pro-management, and that included Senator McClellan. McClellan hired Robert F. Kennedy, a 31-year-old attorney from Massachusetts, as the subcommittee's chief counsel and investigator. Kennedy, too, did not have a neutral opinion of labor unions. Appalled by stories he had heard about union intimidation on the West Coast, Kennedy undertook the chief counsel's job determined to root out union malfeasance and with little knowledge or understanding of or even concern over management misbehavior. The biases of the Select Committee members and its chief counsel, some observers concluded, led the committee to view corruption in labor-management relations as a problem with unions, not management, and management as nothing more than a victim.
Senator McClellan gave Robert Kennedy extensive control over the scheduling of testimonies, areas of investigation, and questioning of witnesses. This suited McClellan, a conservative Democrat and opponent of labor unions: Robert Kennedy would take the brunt of organized labor's outrage, while McClellan would be free to pursue an anti-labor legislative agenda once the hearings began to draw to a close. Republican members of the Select Committee voiced strong disagreement with McClellan's decision to let Kennedy set the direction for the committee and ask most of the questions, but McClellan largely ignored their protests. Robert Kennedy proved to be an inexpert interrogator, fumbling questions and engaging in shouting matches with witnesses rather than laying out legal cases against them. McClellan and Kennedy's goal had been to refer nearly all their investigations to the Justice Department for prosecution, but the department refused to do so because it concluded that nearly all the legal cases were significantly flawed. A frustrated Robert Kennedy publicly complained about the Justice Department's decisions in September 1958.
Chief Counsel Kennedy resolved to investigate a wide range of labor unions and corporations, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the United Auto Workers, Anheuser-Busch, Sears, and Occidental Life Insurance. The Select Committee also established formal liaisons with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Narcotics Bureau, Department of Labor, and other federal agencies as well as state and local offices and officials involved in law enforcement.
File:William Langley reads newspaper.png|thumb|In April 1956 The Oregonian ran a series reporting its investigation of corruption involving the Teamsters and local officials. The series would ultimately win the Pulitzer Prize, and lead to the indictment of several officials, and the conviction and removal from office of district attorney William Langley. This Associated Press photo depicts Langley reading the Oregonian's initial report the day it was published.
Investigations
The Select Committee focused its attention for most of 1957 on the Teamsters union. Teamsters President Dave Beck fled the country for a month to avoid its subpoenas before returning in March 1957. The Select Committee had a difficult time investigating the Teamsters. Four of the paper locals were dissolved to avoid committee scrutiny, several Teamster staffers provided verbal testimony which differed substantially from their prior written statements, and union records were lost or destroyed. In Oregon, The Oregonian newspaper ran a series of investigative pieces that earned reporters a Pulitzer Prize, and prosecutors indicted about 30 people. Working with the FBI, the Select Committee electrified the nation when on February 22, 1957, wiretaps were played in public before a national television audience in which Dio and Hoffa discussed the creation of even more paper locals, including the establishment of a paper local to organize New York City's 30,000 taxi cab drivers and use the charter as a means of extorting money from a wide variety of employers. The 1957 hearings opened with a focus on corruption in Portland, Oregon, and featured the testimony of Portland crime boss Jim Elkins. With the support of 70 hours of taped conversations, Elkins described being approached by two Seattle gangsters about working with the Teamsters to take over Portland vice operations. The colorful testimony brought the committee's investigations national media attention from the outset. As 1.2 million viewers watched on live television, evidence was unearthed over the next few weeks of a mob-sponsored plot in which Oregon Teamsters unions would seize control of the state legislature, state police, and state attorney general's office through bribery, extortion and blackmail. On March 14, 1957, Jimmy Hoffa was arrested for allegedly trying to bribe an aide to the Select Committee. Hoffa denied the charges, but the arrest triggered additional investigations and more arrests and indictments over the following weeks. Less than a week later, Beck admitted to receiving an interest-free $300,000 loan from the Teamsters which he had never repaid, and Select Committee investigators claimed that loans to Beck and other union officials had cost the Teamsters more than $700,000. Beck appeared before the Select Committee for the first time on March 25, 1957, and notoriously invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 117 times. Beck was called before the McClellan Committee again in May 1957, and additional interest-free loans and other potentially illegal and unethical financial transactions exposed. Based on these revelations, Beck was indicted for tax evasion on May 2, 1957.The Beck and Hoffa hearings generated strong criticisms of Robert Kennedy. Many liberal critics said he was a brow-beater, badgerer, insolent, overbearing, intolerant, and even vicious. Hoffa and other witnesses often were able to anger Kennedy to the point where he lost control, and would shout and insult them. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, one of Robert Kennedy's mentors and a close friend, criticized Kennedy for presuming the guilt of anyone who exercised his Fifth Amendment rights. Noted attorney Edward Bennett Williams accused the Select Committee of bringing witnesses into executive session, ascertaining that they would exercise their Fifth Amendment rights, and then force them to return in public and refuse to answer questions—merely to generate media attention. The Chicago American newspaper so strongly criticized Robert Kennedy for his overbearing, zealous behavior during the hearings that a worried Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. rushed to Washington, D.C. to see for himself if Robert Kennedy was endangering John Kennedy's political future.
During much of the summer and fall of 1957, the Select Committee investigated corruption in the Bakery Workers Union, United Textile Workers, Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union, and Transport Workers Union. In the late fall, the committee focused its attention on union-busting, and examined the behavior of companies such as Morton Packing Company, Continental Baking Company, and Sears, Roebuck and Company.
While continuing to investigate and hold hearings on other unions and corporations, the McClellan Committee also began to examine the behavior of Jimmy Hoffa and other Teamsters officials. Senator McClellan accused Hoffa of attempting to gain control of the nation's economy and set himself up as a sort of private government. The Select Committee also accused Hoffa of instigating the creation of the paper locals, and of arranging for a $400,000 loan to the graft-ridden International Longshoremen's Association in a bid to take over that union and gain Teamsters control of the waterfront as well as warehouses. Johnny Dio, who by late summer 1957 was in prison serving time on bribery and conspiracy charges, was paroled by a federal court in order to testify at the Select Committee's hearings. But in a two-hour appearance before the Select Committee, Dio invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 140 times, and refused to answer any of the committee's questions. But despite the problems encountered in interrogating Dio, the Select Committee developed additional testimony and evidence alleging widespread corruption in Hoffa-controlled Teamster units was presented in public in August 1957. The worsening corruption scandal led the AFL-CIO to eject the Teamsters on December 6, 1957.
As the Hoffa hearings occurred in August 1957, the Select Committee met in executive session to restructure its organizations and set its agenda for the future. The Select Committee had succeeded in securing the removal of Beck as Teamsters president and seemed on the verge of sending Jimmy Hoffa to jail as well, but the committee had also been strongly criticized for its handling of witnesses and its apparent one-sidedness in exposing union but not management corruption. To guide the Select Committee's investigations in the future, McClellan established a set of eleven areas of investigation for the committee, nine of which involved labor misdeeds and only one of which involved management misbehavior. The management-oriented area came last on the committee's list of priorities, and there were no staff assigned to investigate the issue.
Under the new guidelines, the Select Committee's schedule of hearings slowed. In January 1958, Chairman McClellan asked for and received permission from the Senate to extend the deadline for completing the committee's work for another year. For a short time early in the year, the Select Committee investigated the International Union of Operating Engineers, and uncovered a limited financial scandal at the top of the union. But the main focus of the committee for the first half of the year was the United Auto Workers. Republicans on the Select Committee, notably Barry Goldwater, had for several months in late 1957 accused Robert Kennedy of covering up extensive corruption in the UAW. The Republicans pointed to a lengthy, ongoing, and sometimes violent strike which the UAW was conducting against the Kohler plumbing fixtures company in Wisconsin. Walter Reuther, president of the Auto Workers, told Select Committee investigators that the Kohler Company was committing numerous unfair labor practices against the union and that the union's books were in order. Despite no evidence of any mismanagement or organized crime infiltration, Kennedy and McClellan went ahead with hearings on the UAW in February 1958. The five-week series of hearings produced no evidence of corruption. A second set of hearings into the UAW in September 1959 lasted just six days, and once more uncovered no evidence of UAW malfeasance. The September 1959 hearings were the last public hearings the embarrassed committee ever held.
As the UAW hearings were winding down, the Select Committee issued its first Interim Report on March 24, 1958. The report roundly condemned Jimmy Hoffa and accused the Teamsters of gathering enough power to destroy the national economy. Refocusing its attention back on the Teamsters, the Select Committee held a short set of hearings in August 1958 intended to expose corruption by the Hoffa regime. But a number of witnesses recanted their written testimony and the hearings led nowhere.
In February 1959, the Select Committee's attention turned to an investigation of organized crime. McClellan had won yet another one-year extension of the Select Committee's existence in January, giving it additional time for more investigations. This new focus was a natural outgrowth of the committee's previous investigations, but it also reflected the committee's frustration at uncovering no additional scandals like the one which had rocked the Teamsters. Through much of the spring and summer of 1959, the committee held a series of public hearings which brought a number of organized crime figures to the public's attention, including Anthony Corrallo, Vito Genovese, Anthony Provenzano, Joey Glimco, Sam Giancana, and Carlos Marcello. Although more muted and less frequent, criticisms of the Select Committee and Robert Kennedy continued. Kennedy's moralism about labor racketeering, several high-profile critics concluded, even endangered the Constitution. Although McClellan wanted to further investigate organized crime, the Select Committee had reached the limits of its jurisdiction and no further investigations were made.
By September 1959, it was clear that the Select Committee was not developing additional information to justify continued operation. A second interim report was released in August 1959 once again denouncing the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa. Robert F. Kennedy resigned as the Select Committee's chief counsel on September 11, 1959, and joined Senator John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign as campaign manager. Committee members became more involved in passing legislation to deal with the abuses uncovered.
Although his committee had already been dissolved by 1960, McClellan began a related three-year investigation in 1963 into the union benefit plans of labor leader George Barasch, alleging misuse and diversion of $4,000,000 of benefit funds. McClellan's notable failure to find any legal wrongdoing led to his introduction of several pieces of new legislation including McClellan's own bill on October 12, 1965, setting new fiduciary standards for plan trustees. Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York also introduced bills in 1965 and 1967 increasing regulation on welfare and pension funds to limit the control of plan trustees and administrators. Provisions from all three bills ultimately evolved into the guidelines enacted in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.