respected by ALL---It's a story that needs to be told --------------R.I.P. Brother John--------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------Story by Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer Lucinda Fleeson- Special Publication (Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine) September 4, 1983----
"JOHN MORRIS, THE GRANDSON OF A MOLLY MAGUIRE, SAYS LOCAL COMPANIES THAT DON'T TREAT THEIR EMPLOYEES RIGHT ARE BETTER OFF OUT OF BUSINESS- OR DOWN SOUTH."
"At 6:30 on a wintry morning last January, Barry Pinhiero, the owner of Oakwood Chair Co., arrived at his factory at 10th and Callowhill Streets, in the deserted industrial fringe north of Center City. About 30 members of the Teamsters Union were out front, blocking the entrances to the building and waving picket signs. 'I knew what it was, instantly,' Pinhiero remembers.
His company was on strike. The siege at Oakwood Chair had begun.
Barry Pinhiero pushed his way through the picket line and went inside. When he looked out the factory window, he felt confident that within a short time, his deliverymen, truck drivers and warehouse helpers would all come back to work.
Barry Pinhiero was wrong. His men stayed on the sidewalk, the strike continued, and the days stretched into weeks, the weeks into months. Frustrated and furious, Pinhiero began to blame it all on one man: John Paul Morris, the boss of the Philadelphia Teamsters. In fact, he came to believe that Morris was single-handedly responsible for ruining his business and his life.
Barry Pinhiero has never met John Morris, but he hates him.
'John Morris?' he said, barely able to control his rage. 'I have two words for him: F--- him.'To people like Pinhiero, John Morris is the kind of union boss who gives unions a bad name. Morris is often called the toughest, meanest union boss in town. When his Teamsters strike, violence often follows. Like many other company owners before him, Pinhiero discovered that a strike led by Morris means smashed windows, glued door locks, sabotaged trucks.
In a Northeastern US city like Philadelphia that is fighting to reverse the trend of layoffs and plant closings, Morris is vilified by some business leaders as "an industrial cancer," a labor Neanderthal whose unyielding demands have driven several companies to shut their doors. Indeed, John Morris has probably negotiated with more Philadelphia companies that have ended up going out of business than any other union leader in town.
It is not a distinction Morris is especially proud of. But it's not something he's ashamed of, either. Companies that don't treat their employees decently don't deserve to survive, he says. In John Morris's world, the needs of the workingman come first, the city's economy second. Period.
This ferocious devotion to the principles of unionism has made John Morris one of the most popular and powerful labor leaders in Philadelphia. As such- more so perhaps than any other union boss around- Morris embodies the conflicts and contradictions that come with the job of being a modern-day labor leader.
A beefy, scrappy Irishman, he is a master of '30s-style hard-nose tactics. Yet Morris, 57, almost always wears a three-piece suit and is usually accompanied by a retinue of attorneys and college-educated aides. He is a balding, pale-skinned man with a withered right arm, yet he revels in his physical mightiness and exudes undeniable charm. At times, he can be the picture of smiling affability, amusing a visitor with an endless stream of yarns and jokes. Yet he also has a temper, and his face can darken with thunderclouds of outrage in an instant.
As secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 115, with 2,500 members, and president of the area Joint Council of Teamsters, with 85,000 members, he is the local chief of a union with one of the worst reputations in the nation. But while national Teamsters leaders are regularly sent to jail for one form of labor racketeering or another, John Morris is regarded by the FBI's Philadelphia labor squad as "Mr. Clean."
Though steeped in the traditions of unionism, John Morris has tried to keep pace with the times. His local's office on Cottman Avenue is ultra-modern and computerized. But surveying the labor scene today, Morris sometimes wonders whether labor has made any progress at all. Indeed, he says, unions have never had such a tough fight to fight as they do today. "It's not the trade union movement in this town that's so tough, it's that management is so bitter," he explains. "I grew up in the day of the coal and iron cops fighting the unions, and let me tell you, the hate here against unions is like the hate there was 100 years ago. There's no one who fights for the poor in this city or this country. The haves will never agree with the have-nots. We represent the have-nots. And because the Teamsters are a little tougher to deal with, because we stick up for our members, they try to make us look like the bad guys."
In the strike at Oakwood Chair, both sides felt they were the good guys. But in fact neither enlightened management nor progressive unionism was at work. The story of that strike is a Philadelphia classic. Sadly, its disastrous ending is too.
Before Morris arrived at Oakwood Chair, Barry Pinhiero was making a decent living. He viewed himself as just one of hundreds of small Philadelphia businessmen who work hard trying to make it. He and his wife, who also works, own a modest, comfortable two-story house in the Penn Wynne section of affluent Lower Merion Township. The house has a butcher-block dining room table, a good but modest Oriental rug. "It's been a comfortable living, no rich rewards. We only do all right," he says.
At 40, Pinhiero has a serious face that rarely brightens into a smile. Traces of bitterness tug at the corners of his eyes and mouth. Together with his brother Jack, 45, he ran Oakwood Chair, a firm that was founded in 1887 by their grandfather Jacob. For nearly 100 years, the Pinhiero family imported chairs, manufactured chairs, and, most of all, rented folding chairs to Philadelphia universities and institutions for graduations and banquets. Barry and Jack worked every operation of the company, unloading their share of chairs too. In 1980, Oakwood Chair was hired to set up and take down the 22,000 chairs that surrounded Logan Circle during Pope John Paul II's Mass in Philadelphia. It was the firm's proudest moment.
John Morris's Teamster organizers first showed up at Oakwood Chair in 1977. Twice in the next five years, a majority of the nine Oakwood employees signed Teamsters union cards. Twice union representation elections were held; twice the union lost the election.
Morris did not give up. By the summer of 1982, he had become familiar enough with the workings of Oakwood Chair to know that the chair-renting business peaked during the summer, and that the company hired six seasonal employees to help with the increased load. Barry Pinhiero is convinced that one of the seasonal employees he hired last summer was a Teamster plant sent by Morris.
When the organizers returned last summer for a third time, Pinhiero became frantic. He called his attorney, management lawyer Tom Felix at Obermayer, Rebmann, Maxwell & Hippell, and told him that John Morris was back. Felix told him, "Oh, no, not John Morris! He's the worst and the toughest." Morris, he said, had a reputation for going after small companies and putting them out of business.
Pinhiero didn't believe it. "Listen, he's got to care," he remembers telling his lawyer. "We got jobs here. The men care about the company. The union just has to be reasonable." He was certain that some agreement could be worked out.
On Aug. 5, 1982, the Oakwood Chair employees voted 8-5 to become Teamsters. Two workers didn't vote.
To Pinhiero, it was unbelievable. He sees himself as a benevolent employer who treats his employees like family. "You're talking about a class of employees who probably have a 9th or 10th grade Philadelphia education," he explains. "They are black, have no skills...I know everybody's name, everybody's wife, everybody's kid, everybody's problems." He recounts how he went to their funerals and weddings, held mortgages on their houses, even bailed one or two of them out of jail.
"We ran a business where we had a lot of cripples work for us who hadn't worked anywhere before. We gave them a job. We created a training program. We have a man, 40 years old, who had never held a job. We gave him a job. No, they weren't the greatest wages in the world. But we paid them. And it was better than our competitors and we were trying to make it better every year.
When contract talks between Oakwood Chair and Teamsters Local 115 began last September, John Morris's negotiators put these demands on the table: standardization of wages and job classifications; wage scales of between $7 and $9 per hour by 1985; a pension program; health insurance; contributions to the union's scholarship and legal funds; paid vacation, holidays, personal days; overtime rates for holiday and weekend work.
Although the contract the Teamsters were seeking was less than the standard Teamsters drivers' contract, Pinhiero was convinced that their demands would sink his business within a year. He was paying an average wage of $5.35 per hour, according to union records, with no health insurance and only a limited pension program. Pinhiero remembers things a little differently: he says that the Teamsters were demanding $11.35 an hour and that his average wage was $6. At any rate, his last offer to the union was final: an increase of $1 an hour for the union to spend how it saw fit, either to increase wages or pay for some benefits.
The dispute centered on health and welfare benefits- specifically, a pension plan and hospitalization and dental coverage for workers and their families. "In the year 1983, is that too much to ask for employees?" says Morris.
The way Pinhiero saw it, if Oakwood Chair had to increase its labor costs, it would have to raise its bids on chair-rental contracts. Oakwood would simply lose all of its bids. Pinhiero began to feel he had only two choices: fight the union or go under. At the same time, he became convinced that John Morris was picking on him because Oakwood Chair had crossed picket lines in 1977 during a bitter strike by Teamster-organized janitors and cleaning women at the University of Pennsylvania.
Morris, however, contends that his organizers arrived at Oakwood Chair for one reason and one reason only: The employees asked them to come. "I didn't go after this company; the employees came to me," says Morris. "The truth is that companies like Pinhiero don't want to pay their employees. As much as they believe they're being just and fair, they don't want to pay them."
When the Oakwood Chair Employees talk about their boss, they do not paint him as Barry the Benevolent or Barry the Enlightened Manager.
Carlos Matos, 34, a swarthy, bearded man, was the leader of the unionization drive. In the spring of 1982 he began working at Oakwood Chair for $4.40 an hour and within three months had raises to $6.60. "That guy Pinhiero made you feel like dirt," says Matos. Once, a load of chairs shifted in a truck and fell on him. When he told his boss about the accident, Matos claims, Pinhiero called him a liar. "He has always dealt with a certain kind of person who he could push around. Now we started a union and Barry has lost all of his power. Now he can no longer sit at the top, Big Daddy. Now if we're asked to do something that is not right, we can question him and he can't fire us."
It was the employees, Matos says, who wanted union and who carefully began looking for the right one. "We chose Morris because we know he's honest and he doesn't get bought by the company."
Walter Carter, 45, was one of the men who didn't support the union, but he expressed few regrets that the Teamsters had won at Oakwood Chair. In his 14 years at Oakwood Chair, Carter saw dozens of employees come and go, but only one man, he claims, was ever eligible to receive unemployment. "Everybody else was fired- either for some petty reason or harassed to the point where they quit... No matter how hard everybody worked, we were never fast enough, we never got a pat on the back. When the Pope was here, we put up 22,000 chairs in six hours. Nobody ever got a congratulatory word."
The real nastiness began in November. On the 23rd of that month, according to testimony this spring before the National Labor Relations Board, Jack Pinhiero went to Matos and offered him $3,500 and a company car if he would file a petition with the board to decertify- kick out- the union. Then, in January, according to and NLRB complaint, the Pinhieros began telling workers that the firm would go out of business if the Teamsters weren't voted out. The Pinhieros also told their employees, the complaint continues, that they would negotiate with anyone but John Morris and that if the workers would just drop the union, everybody would get raises and medical benefits anyway.
All of these alleged actions are illegal, and Oakwood Chair was charged with unfair labor practices by the NLRB. (The case has not been settled, but the Pinhieros have agreed to sign a consent decree in which they admitted no wrongdoing but promised to cease all such actions in the future.)
Throughout last winter, contract negotiating sessions were a disaster. All the union people did, Pinhiero claims, was yell and scream and call him names. Morris says, "If there was some sort of conciliatory action on their part, we could have compromised. But they put a dollar on the table and that was it."
On Jan. 24, the Teamsters struck. The nine employees did not show up for work that day and instead picked up picket signs. They were joined by organizers and other members of Local 115.
One night, as the strike continued, Jack and Barry Pinhiero sat in Barry's house having pizzas and beers. Their day had begun at 4:30 a.m. when they tried to sneak a delivery truck past the picket line. Jack, who has a friendly face, smiled gamely even when talking about how the union, as he saw it, was taking his business away from him. Barry was more serious, concerned. He displayed his hands, black from assembling chairs during the strike.
"Unions and management have got to cooperate to succeed," Barry mused. "But these people just don't give a damn. I don't think that the nine men mean very much to them. Except that once they got to be their bargaining agent, they've got their image to protect. Their image is more important to them than the business or the men." Hesitating a moment, Barry stammered, "Have you met John Morris? Have you talked to him? Do you have any idea what makes him tick, what makes him the way he is?"
When Barry Pinhiero's grandfather Jacob was founding Oakwood Chair in 1887, John Morris's grandfather was recovering from seven years in prison that had left him half-blind. His name also was John Paul Morris. He was convicted in 1876 along with nine others in one of the most famous trials of the notorious Molly Maguires, the renegade Irish immigrants who were accused of violence against the coal-mine barons of northeastern Pennsylvania.
Life for the penniless Irish Catholic immigrants who worked in the coal mines was brutal. They were paid 60 cents a day to dig underground. They lived like feudal serfs in company-owned houses and owed their souls to the company store. Labor historians aren't sure whether the Molly Maguires existed as a cohesive secret society or whether they were the fictional creation of mining-company cops and detectives who wanted an excuse to hunt down union organizers. Whatever the case, as violence erupted in coal country, the so-called Mollys were brought to trial and sometimes hung, their coffins run through town as a warning.
There is no dispute that John Paul Morris, John Morris's grandfather, was somehow involved the day that seven men went to a stable and shot Bully Boy Thomas, a hired company thug who liked to discipline coal miners by beating the hell out of them. Bully Boy survived, and seven so-called Mollys went to jail.
When young John Morris was born on Feb. 20, 1926, in Mahanoy City, and throughout his childhood, the Mollys were something his family never talked about. But unions- in particular, the United Mine Workers of America and their president, John L. Lewis- were honored. "When John L. Lewis or the district head of the mine workers would walk through town, people would consider him a respected person. A person of prestige," recalled Morris.
Morris's father, Henry, ran a small piano business. He also was a deal-maker, and young John was allowed to accompany him and watch. What Henry Morris offered was his talent as a professional spoiler in city or county elections. Before an election, Henry Morris and his friends would approach political leaders and try to win jobs for their friends in exchange for political support. If they couldn't get the jobs they wanted before the elections, then Henry Morris would run as an independent candidate against the organization. Then the political bosses would have to negotiate with him to drop his candidacy. Eventually he always did, after winning as many jobs as he could. It was a life that allowed Henry Morris to raise 12 kids and send many of them to college. Morris's brothers include a lawyer, a cattle rancher and two businessmen.
At 15, Morris was a popular student and a guard on the football team when he fell victim to an accident that changed his life. He remembers it only partially: "I was going down the street and my mother called me. There was a storm, it was wet, and I was probably walking through water. I turned around to see what my mother wanted and as I looked up, I put my hand up. I ran into the wire. A high-tension wire had come down. I put my hand up to block it."
Four thousand volts of electricity ran through Morris. He was on the wire for 7-1/2 minutes before he was pulled off. His heart had stopped. Bystanders said he had pushed kids out of the way of the wire, but he doesn't remember it. Morris spent four months in the hospital undergoing the first of a series of operations. When he got out, he had lost most of fingers of his right hand, which was twisted into a mass of scars.
Although Morris had nearly died and suffered the kind of maiming that can forever weaken the spirit, the accident had the opposite effect on him. He got out of the hospital and played football again. "It was sort of an effort to prove that I wasn't handicapped," he recalls.
It was on the football team during World War II that Morris led his first strike. His high school decided that although they gave the swimming and basketball teams letter sweaters, they couldn't afford to give them to the football team. "We asked the school to give us sweaters," Morris recalls. "They said that football wasn't compulsory. So we decided that we wouldn't play football for them. We got the sweater."
The strike taught him something- that being a troublemaker sometimes is necessary. "Anytime you get into a concerted activity that requires pressure, you got to offend somebody. You got to hurt somebody's feelings... But I've always considered what the right thing to do is. There are certain things that you've got to say, there's right and wrong."
Morris's football ability was good enough to win him an athletic scholarship to the University of Scranton. But, after only a year, he quit to marry his high school girlfriend, Jean McCarthy. He was 20; she was 18. There were no jobs and no future in Mahanoy City, so they moved to a small apartment near Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. She worked as a clerk in the corset department at Lit Brothers and joined the Retail Clerks Union; he was a checker marking goods in the shipping and receiving department and joined Teamsters Local 169.
It was then that Morris began his union activity in earnest. He became a shop steward, and within a year was the chief steward. In 1950, he and other Lit Brothers employees decided it was unfair that they were scheduled to work 40 hours a week, spread out over 6 days. Without informing the company or the union leaders, Morris called all the Teamsters union members out into the parking lot one day and told them they were on strike. After staying out a day and a half, they won a five-day work week.
In 1951, Morris left Lit Brothers and became a full-time Teamsters organizer, specializing in overseeing strikes. By 1955, he was making a name for himself, and was rewarded with a local of his own. Nationally, the Teamsters had swelled in numbers, and Dave Beck, then the national president, had visions of unlimited growth. Because some of the larger locals had become unwieldy, Beck decided to split them up. So, in February 1955, Morris was issued a charter to start a new local, Local 115 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America. He was the secretary-treasurer, the chief operating position in a Teamsters local. The union began with 18 Lit Brothers employees.
Starting a local from nothing- no members, no dues- was a risky assignment. From the beginning, it was understood that Local 115 would not be the union that got the plums: trucking companies and beer and soda distributors. No, Local 115 was the local that was to organize the leftover companies that did not pay big wages or employ many workers but that did require almost as much effort by a union boss as a larger company. Nevertheless, within three years, Local 115 was off the ground. Morris organized 300 more Lit Brothers employees, then branched out to tobacco jobbers, dental-supply plants, metal plants.
Then came 1957 and the McClellan hearings, a US Senate investigation into Beck and the Teamsters that was to inaugurate more than two decades of disclosures about corruption within the mighty Teamsters. Morris still talks about the 1957 hearings as if they were personal tragedies. In a way they were- his beloved union and all the good he felt it stood for in helping the common workingman was now the stuff of headlines. And all the news was rotten. Many people began viewing the Teamsters as fat-cat truck drivers led by crooked cigar-chomping union bosses who lived in high style off the hides of their own members. "It made it difficult to organize," Morris recalls. "And the more difficult it became, the harder we had to work."
(Morris today declines to comment on his union's national leaders or the convictions of three of them: Beck, Jimmy Hoffa and Roy Williams. But he does note, "More bankers go to jail every year than union leaders, and we don't read about that on page one.")
By the '70s, John Morris was becoming a Philadelphia legend. Everybody who was anybody in Philadelphia labor or politics knew and talked about "Johnny Morris." (Although the world calls him "Johnny," he is just plain "John" to friends.) Morris was the strategist during the bitter four-month strike by Cheltenham Township trash collectors in 1975, when 250 Montgomery County policemen in riot gear were called in to keep the peace and collect trash. Owners of small businesses who had dealt with Morris began commiserating with each other and keeping tabs on companies that had closed down after Local 115 strikes. Since Local 115 had more strikes than any other and its picket lines were problem-prone, the Philadelphia police department's civil affairs unit became quite familiar with Morris. But the unit also became familiar with the type of companies Morris organized. "We'd go into some of these companies and the conditions were 19th-century," said one officer. "The workers were usually black and often not paid more than minimum wage."
The legend was embroidered with stories of intimidation, like the owner of the Tim Malloy Co. in Philadelphia who went to work one day during a Local 115 strike to discover that his door had been bricked up, or the official from DeSoto Chemical Co. of Pennsauken, NJ, who was bargaining with Morris last year when Morris picked up an ashtray and threw it at him.
But if Local 115 was sometimes less than nice, so too were many of its management adversaries. For instance, during a dispute in 1975 with Haddon House Food Products of Medford Lakes, NJ the NLRB found that the company had illegally fired a woman employee with three children and an unemployed husband because she was seen talking with a union organizer. More recently, in February 1982 DeSoto Chemical Co. announced one afternoon that it was consolidating its paint operations in Southern plants and all the employees, most of whom had worked there for 10 years or longer, could pick up their belongings because they no longer had jobs. The Morris legend gained added luster in 1979 when portions of some taped mob conversations were made public. The taped conversations had been obtained by Charles Allen, a confessed mob hit-man who turned state's evidence and wore a wire to record some of the illegal dealings of friends and associates. One of the taped conversations occurred in 1975 when Morris represented 50 employees on strike at Haddon Food. Allen, representing an allegedly mob-infiltrated union, Local 170 of the Bartenders union, claimed he went to call on Morris to try to arrange a secret deal for the company. Morris said no deal, and later two reputed mobsters were recorded talking about how Morris wouldn't even listen to Anthony (Tony Pro)Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamster official reputed to be a top organized crime leader.
By 1981, Morris had become so popular among his fellow Teamsters and so powerful in city and state politics that he was able to topple the president of the Teamsters Joint Council (53), Gordon Grubb, the secretary-treasurer of Local 830. (Grubb is serving a three-year prison term for accepting kickbacks from his members.) For Morris, the ascent to power was complete. Moreover, he had done it with his "Mr. Clean" reputation intact.
(see blog for part 2)
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