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From the May-June 2009 issue of Union Democracy Review #179
A case study: Harassing union democracy attorneys
By Leon Rosenblatt
Attorney Rosenblatt represents, pro bono, members and officers of shipbuilders Lodge S6 at the Bath Iron Works in Maine in their legal challenge to the imposition of a trusteeship over their shipbuilders local by the International Association of Machinists. His experience is typical of the ordeal faced by lawyers for union reformers. Here are some excerpts from his letter published in our $100+ Club News.
This case simultaneously is exciting and maddening. LMRDA cases tend to be that way. My clients - Mike Keenan, Troy Osgood, Mike Cyr, and Cathy London - are very, very talented union leaders. The IAM defendants are very, very bad.
In the past year I have put in more than 850 hours. If I were a normal lawyer, charging a normal fee for service, that would be more than $200,000. So, my decision to represent these plaintiffs was, in effect, a decision to donate more than $200,000 to the cause of union democracy. With luck, I'll be paid some or maybe even all of that back someday, but that is far from certain. First, I have to get by summary judgment. This is when judges, who act as gatekeepers for the legal system, throw out cases without allowing plaintiffs to have a jury trial. Motions for summary judgment are granted with shocking regularity. (Most Americans who think they have an inviolate right to redress of their grievances would be surprised at the reality.) Then I have to win at trial. And then, after trial, I have to convince a judge that my representing these plaintiffs conferred a "common benefit" on the membership. Then I have to prevail in the certain appeal. Lawyers who win LMRDA cases usually are paid cents on the dollar.
I should mention that while I am donating $200,000-plus of my time to the cause, the IAM has, count them, three private practice lawyers and two in-house lawyers working on this case. All five are being paid by the IAM's membership.
A common weapon defense lawyers use is to inundate plaintiffs with paper. That certainly has happened here. The first batch of paper I received in discovery consisted of about 7,000 pages. Just to make it more difficult and time consuming for me, they enclosed many duplicates. Of those 7,000 pages, there were probably 100 or 150 that are significant.
After that first batch of 7,000 documents arrived, the IAM's lawyers kept on sending me more, in dribs and drabs, most of it irrelevant, some of it repetitive. The total now exceeds 8,000.
Mike Keenan and I flew to Washington, D.C. to take IAM President Buffenbarger's and IAM Vice President Tucker's depositions. Then I had to go to Maine repeatedly for depositions of my clients and the remaining defendants. Just to make the process more intimidating for the plaintiffs, the IAM paid a great deal of the members' money to have the depositions videotaped. Eleven depositions were taken in all. At no time did the IAM have fewer than two lawyers present; sometimes three, four and even five.
Deposition transcripts are expensive. That was a cost I did not want to carry, so the plaintiffs have been raising money. There was a party up in Brunswick with a band and food. Collections have been taken at the shipyard gates, and members have been very generous. But raising money is a struggle. My clients have joined the fundraising with their organizing. They have just come out with t-shirts, with a picture of one of BIW's warships under the headline, "Bath Shipbuilders for Democracy." The tag line is, "If there aren't things worth fighting for, we wouldn't build ships."
Also in this case, the IAM's lawyers are exceptionally crafty. The key legal issue in the case is whether or not the trusteeship was imposed for a proper reason. In trying to establish it was, the defendants' attorneys reproduced in their summary judgment motion many pages of deposition testimony favorable to their argument. But they carefully omitted from their submission the pages that were unfavorable. In order to show the judge the union misrepresented the record, I had to go through thousands of pages to pull out the pages the union's attorneys were trying to withhold from court. This is a normal practice in litigation, but it is especially mean-spirited and duplicitous in LMRDA litigation. Union defendants are nastier than most corporations who are sued. Corporations take law suits as a normal part of business. Unions take law suits as a challenge to their rule, and they try to smash every rank and filer who deigns to challenge them, as a lesson to other members of their omnipotence....
Articles on the IAM:
IAM election needless. All 20 officers
coast in
IAM Maine
shipyard local reminds us: It's hard to resist a repressive trusteeship
Relentless
attack on democracy in the Machinists Union
IAM
Local 2339N: Nasty aftermath to a Trusteeship
Maine
shipbuilders protest vs. IAM trusteeship
Court to IAM:
Inform members of their rights
U.S. Appeals Court says:
Let your people know!
Update:
Still Subverting Union Democracy in 2005
SHORTS:
photocopying hiring hall records, longshore reform victory, peace pipe
for SEIU and CNA? and more.
Links
to IAM member websites
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