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labor racketeering has attracted a good deal of attention from law enforcement agencies, legislators, and journalists, but surpris- ingly little attention from corruption scholars. While the origin of the term "labor racketeering" is obscure, it has come to be associated with a type of corruption perpetrated by union officials under the direc- tion of, or in conjunction with, organized crime (Cohen 2003, 575-76, 587-91; Jacobs 2006, 11-12). Organized crime bosses exploit unions and union members through alliances with corrupted or intimidated union officials (Jacobs 2006, 234). In return, union officials provide mobsters access to the union treasury, pension and welfare funds, no-show jobs with the union, and support in establishing and enforcing employer cartels (Jacobs 2006, 14, 65, 80). Some organized crime members have held formal union office (Jacobs 2006, 20, 50, 203-04). In addition, of course, corrupt union officials, whether or not connected to organized crime figures, engage in "ordinary" organizational corruption, such as misappropriation of funds. The most distinctive form of corruption by union officials is taking employers' bribes to ignore violations of the collective bargaining contract, or even to allow employer to operate nonunion shops (Jacobs 2006, 102).
A hISTory of uNIoN CorrupTIoN AS A SubfIeld of CorrupTIoN STudIeS
There are enough disparate union-corruption and racketeering studies by social scientists, historians, and journalists to constitute a union- corruption specialty. Chicago sociologist John Landesco was the earliest social scientist to shine a light on union corruption.1 His pioneering work, Organized Crime in Chicago (1929), provided an in-depth descrip- tion and analysis of the symbiotic relationship between organized crime factions and corrupt union officials and employers, all this before the emergence of Italian-American organized crime. Landesco documented how gangsters leveraged control over unions into control over businesses by threatening uncooperative companies with strikes, labor troubles, and sabotage. He identified 23 racketeer-controlled trades, observing that racketeers used their control over the unions' labor monopoly to force businesses to join employer associations. They then charged the employers "dues" in exchange for enforcing cartels. Employers also paid off corrupt union officials, and the gangsters with whom they were allied, to avoid having to comply with collective bargaining agreements.
In 1938, Harold Seidman, a university-based political scientist, published Labor Czars: A History of Labor Racketeering, describing how labor...