John Sheridan is a union buster. At least that’s how union organizers see him. He prefers to see himself as a management consultant in “proactive employee relations.” For the past 33 years, when employers have wanted to thwart union organizing drives, win contract concessions, get rid of unions, or take preemptive action to head off even the potential of a union, they’ve called on Jack Sheridan.
Sheridan, now 58, also says he’s ashamed of many of his fellow antiunion organizers, who engage in illegal and unethical tactics to bust unions. His hero is Saul Alinsky, the radical prolabor and community organizer, who–like Sheridan–developed his organizing prowess in Chicago. Sheridan describes Reagan’s firing of the striking air traffic controllers in 1980–one of the turning points in management’s deepening hostility to unions–as “stupid and unfair.”
Sheridan also helped Darling maintain control of the workers in the big west-side local, whose union hall was said to have the world’s longest bar. If a member rose to make a point during a business meeting in the darkened auditorium, he says, “Our job was to hit them with the [spot]light” to intimidate the worker. He also helped Darling run his annual holiday show, which featured top-name entertainers and such exotica as pink-dyed, sequined pigeons trained to fly through the auditorium and land on a Christmas tree. One year Sheridan and his colleagues had to do the training.
The distinctiveness of American business-labor relations stems in large part from this country’s culture of extreme individualism. Unlike the European aristocracy, with its traditions of responsibility for the whole of society, the American elite (especially after the Civil War) celebrated the mythic “self-made” and unrestrained businessman, the embodiment of American liberty and the source of all social wealth. Although businesses might temporarily combine to fight unions or workers, in general they preferred individualistic competition with each other (until the strongest could consolidate power as a monopoly or trust). Certainly they rejected any European-style general accord between business and labor. As American unions developed, they were both more fragmented and less political than their European counterparts, giving American unions a cast that has made them especially vulnerable to management attacks and the economic turmoil of recent years.
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Shefferman, described by Sheridan as a temperamental “hunched gnome” who was an avid reader and loved doling out favors, was no saint: he invented the “vote no committee,” Sheridan wrote, which “required the manipulation, by remote control, of a group of workers within the workplace, to run their own, anti- or counter-union campaign, which not surprisingly, usually turned out to be in the best interests of management.” Just in case a union came close to organizing Sears, Sheridan says, Shefferman had ready in his safe a supply of buttons, cards, signs, and even a contract to create an “independent” union.
Shefferman also made “use of techniques like infiltration, intimidation, and vandalism,” a fact that came out during a Senate investigation in the late 50s, as Donald R. Katz noted in his history of Sears, The Big Store. The Senate inquiry also revealed that Shefferman had purchased furniture from Sears at a discount for Teamsters president Dave Beck’s home. Although that gave the appearance of a payoff, Sheridan believes the purchase was the innocent by-product of a friendship between Shefferman and Beck’s two sons.
The novice Sheridan organized for management in nine different union elections over a year and a half involving largely black work forces and white employers. By Sheridan’s account, “The people we represented wanted to use racial arguments to win elections, and I wouldn’t let them. I would characterize my efforts as getting people not to do stuff, to restrain them.” For example, he says he persuaded one employer that threatening to have a car dealer repossess the car of a union sympathizer might backfire, and he tried to convince managers they’d have a better chance of keeping the union out if they stopped calling their workers “niggers.”
