Union Buster Turns to ‘a Labor of Love’ : His work was ruthless: Teach companies dirty tricks to thwart labor organizers. Marty Levitt now seeks salvation by helping those he hurt.

For hours I lay awake. . .my semi-conscious mind brought me bodies--arms and legs and torsos of people, some dressed in dirty factory clothes, others in starched white uniforms, some in ill-fitted dresses. But no faces. . .A hundred gray men walked together, slowly, coming closer and closer. . .But no faces. Not one. God, no! Please! Just one face. Twenty years. Twenty years worth of victims and not one I could remember.

From “Confessions of a Union Buster”

*

Lying in an alcoholic rehabilitation hospital in Minnesota, the pudgy little man with the golden tongue had finally found something he couldn’t talk his way out of.

He was, at last, beginning to think about all the people he’d screwed over, people who’d had the audacity to try to join a labor union.

Marty Levitt, a 43-year-old minor-league “union buster” who had devoted his adult life to helping crush organizing drives--from a Michigan sausage factory to a Maine paper plant--was having a major-league midlife crisis.

He’d spent his life fooling people, hiding his insecurities behind Scotch and an astonishing gift for feigned earnestness, a gift so strong you could rarely tell where the sincerity ended and Marty’s bull began.

A B.S. artist, they called him, and he relished the epithet. Slick and quick, down and dirty, he boasted. The best consultant a company could hire when employees got disgruntled or malleable enough to sign those little National Labor Relations Board cards requesting a government-supervised union election.

Levitt was no ivory-tower guy, no lawyer. He knew what laws to evade, what threats to make, which workers to intimidate, snoop on or fire to defeat an organizing drive. This wasn’t about the law. It was about winning.

He got work, $15,000 a month in his prime, because companies believed their survival was at stake. He fancied himself an industrial marriage counselor who kept bosses and their workers from tumbling into the confrontational hell of organized labor.

But as he lay in bed in 1987, struggling to recall the face of one worker, any worker, it dawned on Levitt that he could no longer fool himself. He had to do something, some act of redemption. Wasn’t that the eighth step of Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step program, making amends to those you’d hurt? Some grand metamorphosis. Something . . .

*

On a Saturday morning four years later in the cafeteria of Los Angeles Trade Tech, a man wearing the AFL-CIO’s “Union Yes” button on his sports jacket stands before 60 men and women, mostly staffers or rank-and-file members of a variety of L.A. unions.

His voice is mellifluous and controlled, deejay smooth: “I come to you from an extremely dirty business.”

He paces with grand poise while he talks without notes: “I come out of an industry of thieves, where there is no honor. There’s a very tragic epidemic in this country called union busting. It’s a disease. It preys on the ignorance, ego, greed and fear of every employer.”

The union men and women, taking a weekly extension course on how to improve organized labor’s public image, aren’t quite sure what to make of him. He doesn’t look like them. Their faces display the emotional and physical harshness of working life, of jobs where you take orders; he has soft, unlined features and graying blond hair. They are partly repelled, partly skeptical, partly fascinated.

Marty Levitt, dishonored veteran of an industrial guerrilla war, has switched trenches.

He’s trying--amid much cynicism--to make a living as a consultant to unions, teaching them how to anticipate and counter the hardball tactics of what business consultants euphemistically call the “union-avoidance” movement.

His autobiography, “Confessions of a Union Buster,” will hit the bookstores Wednesday. A producer is trying to turn his life into a TV movie. Levitt says he’s solved the drinking problem that five times led him to rehab centers. Now living in Concord, Calif., he’s ready to share his trade secrets with the beleaguered organized labor movement, which today represents less than one-eighth of America’s private-sector workers--down from a one-third share in the 1950s.

It’s as though Darryl Gates quit as Los Angeles police chief and simultaneously joined the American Civil Liberties Union. Levitt is calmly confessing to the working class that his mission was to subvert the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which guarantees the right of employees to unionize without employer interference. He’s talking about how he disrupted union gatherings. How he routinely flooded workplaces with flyers unfairly portraying unions as devious, cash-hungry organizations that wanted workers only for their dues.

Levitt has been trying to sell himself as a union consultant for several years, with relatively little success and one long interruption to dry out.

While he’s told his tale at workshops and conventions of carpenters, steelworkers, garment workers, teamsters and other unions, some of their leaders still wonder: Is Marty Levitt contrite? Or just working another scam?

“He strikes me as a cheesy hustler,” says David Sickler, the AFL-CIO’s Western regional director. “He made a living fighting us and now he wants to make a living showing us how bad he was to us.”

In most union organizing drives, particularly those that involve more than 100 employees, companies retain a consultant or lawyer skilled in the interpersonal dynamics of union elections.

Workers will be required to attend company meetings where they’ll be told--or shown, through elaborate videotapes--that unions are corrupt institutions that don’t really care about their welfare.

Even though many unions won’t call strikes these days for fear workers will be permanently replaced, employers warn that the union would like nothing better than to put would-be members on the picket line. Consultants routinely advise management to hold separate meetings for low-level supervisors, who are implored to spread anti-union gospel. Workers receive further one-on-one lobbying, or get letters at home from the company president promising a better day if they’ll just say no to the union. “Please don’t let a third party come between us,” a standard plea goes.

These techniques are perfectly legal. When done most effectively, they carry a coercive power that most unions don’t have the money or power--or, sometimes, the smarts--to overcome.

Marty Levitt’s behind-the-scenes role, he says, was to further strengthen management’s hand by counseling dirty, illegal tricks: Find excuses to fire or suspend employees who are members of the union organizing committee. Plant drugs in their lockers. Call wives anonymously to suggest that their husbands weren’t really at a union meeting the other night. Threaten to move the plant to Mexico if workers vote for a union.

Union busting has been variously estimated at a $100-million to $1-billion annual enterprise, depending on whom you call a buster. Levitt and some labor partisans go so far as to apply the epithet to all law firms devoted to management-side labor law. That’s an unfair generality, but it reflects the spiteful nature of labor disputes, the emotion of which is unchanged from days when companies got rid of unions by simply beating up or shooting union organizers.

“It’s a tough world, with big companies and big unions doing terrible things to each other, and after a while the (crap) just doesn’t smell anymore,” says Robert Duvin, a management lawyer from Cleveland who dismisses Levitt as a “fringe character” and objects to being tarred with the same brush.

These days, when unions hire Levitt, they are looking less for advice than for a way to unite workers by putting a human face on a shadowy enemy.

“A lot of what he tells our people, they don’t want to believe because they’re shocked. They want to believe the employer is good,” says Judy Burnick, business manager for an office workers local in Milwaukee that represents 1,800 employees at Northwestern Mutual Life’s corporate headquarters. The local hired Levitt for two months this spring to advise them in contract negotiations.

Before labor audiences, Levitt puts on his old mask. You pretend you’re supervisors, and I’ll show you what I used to do when I came into a company, he says: I’m going to probe, to see whether any managers are “soft” on unions. I’m going to show you how consultants make managers their “hostages,” particularly front-line supervisors who have daily contact with workers and are the best instruments of propaganda and pressure.

“You’re going into a war!” Levitt warns the supervisors. “Your employees are going to be voting for you or against you. This is going to be your victory or your defeat. . . . Your flexibility, your direct relationship with your employees, will be determined by what happens.”

To make the point, he picks out one supervisor.

“Sir, are you married?”

“Yes,” the man says.

“Do you love your wife?”

“Yes.”

“Do you sleep with your wife?”

Hesitation. “Yes.”

“Would you like it if your mother-in-law slept between you and your wife every night of the week?”

Before the supervisor can answer, Levitt booms: “Well, picture the laziest, loudest-mouthed employee in your department. That man is going to be a union steward. He is the mother-in-law between you and your employee. Each time you do anything, the steward will be complaining about it . . . “

For more than a decade, as its share of the American work force plummeted to 16%, the 14-million-member AFL-CIO has complained loudly, without much good, that these increasingly aggressive employer tactics represent an unfair assault on unions, and that the National Labor Relations Board, by tolerating such, has robbed labor of a “level playing field.”

The Clinton Administration has promised a reversal. But so did former President Jimmy Carter, and labor lost anyway. In the late 1970s, White House-supported legislation that would have made it far harder for employers to delay or defeat union representation drives fell victim to a three-week Senate filibuster. Three years later, President Ronald Reagan took the unprecedented step of firing 11,400 striking government air-traffic controllers en masse.

Labor has been in retreat ever since.

As cheaper foreign competition eliminated millions of better-paying, unionized industrial jobs, “union avoidance” became a business buzzword. U.S. employers, desperate to slash labor costs, sent many union jobs to Mexico and Asia or, in some cases, shut down plants in heavily unionized sections of the nation and sent the work to “right-to-work” states, where laws make it harder for unions to organize an entire plant.

Companies put less importance on bargaining with unions and more on hiring experts to coach them on either how to defeat organizing drives or how to encourage decertification elections. A vicious cycle ensued: Employer aggressiveness, mixed with global pressures and the recession of the early 1980s, led to more contract concessions, fewer strikes--and even more employer boldness against unions. Consultants’ roles and specialty labor law firms grew.

That pressure was piled atop growing public ambivalence about the role of unions, and routine tales of corruption in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and numerous East Coast construction unions. In addition, some union members felt that their leaders were more interested in perks and political connections than the shop-floor concerns of the rank-and-file.

Under this weight, union organizing sank. Last year, American unions organized only 69,113 new members through 2,712 National Labor Relations Board elections. That was 24% fewer new members than just three years before. The net effect was further reduced because 19,245 other Americans ceased union membership last year, thanks to 418 other elections in which workers at various companies decertified their unions as bargaining agents.

Against that backdrop, you might think that organized labor, so desperate to call attention to the chilling role that consultants play, would welcome the selling of Marty Levitt, warts and all. You might think that labor would clasp Levitt to its bosom.

You would be wrong.

Labor is still a religion, born in an age of clearer values and more oppressive times. It doesn’t trust people who have made their living attacking it, no matter how much helpful hype they may offer now.

While a few union leaders welcome Levitt--”He’s a barometer of what the corporate world breeds in its animosity for organized labor,” says Mike Strater, head of a Santa Monica food workers local--labor’s higher-placed executives cringe at the prospect that Levitt’s book, and potential movie deal, may suddenly make him the most visible American associated with organized labor.

Says AFL-CIO leader Sickler: “I have a real problem with that concept.”

Marty Levitt doesn’t have a problem with it. He’s never been big on morality.

“I was a very insecure person,” he says, sitting in the den of his home in Lafayette, a lushly wooded community a half-hour north of Oakland. “That insecurity enabled me to be dishonest, to be manipulative. If I could outtalk anybody, I didn’t have to worry about duking it out. . . . It’s very easy for me to justify things.”

He grew up, he says, a spoiled Jewish kid in Cleveland, an American labor town. It is the home of Bill Presser, one of the more disreputable early leaders of the Teamsters Union whose son, Jackie, in the 1980s became Teamsters president--and an FBI organized-crime informant.

But the collectivist spirit of labor that has long percolated through urban Jewish communities never struck Levitt. His father was a soloist--he sold dry goods, then nudie magazines, then ran a bookstore that, his son says, fronted for a bookie joint.

“My upbringing through my dad was: ‘Always focus on this and this’ “--Levitt gestures to his mouth, then his ears--”and you’ll be OK. That was the only skill he had to offer me.”

Those skills sufficed to give Marty a middle-class life and put him through three years at Ohio University, where he majored in English “because it was easy.”

The social revolution was percolating when he stepped on the campus in 1962, but Levitt missed it. “I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he recalls.

In 1969, at age 25 and with no prospects, Levitt read a blind ad in the Wall Street Journal offering travel and opportunity to someone with an understanding of the National Labor Relations Act. He had never heard of it, but he mailed a resume and wound up meeting and working with John Sheridan, a former union organizer who’d become one of the nation’s preeminent union-avoidance consultants.

It was here, Levitt says, that he first learned two things that would poison his life--how to bust unions and how to drink.

Sheridan, who says his consulting work has no taint of union busting, says Levitt came to him with larceny in his heart: “Over the years I’ve trained about 155 people. There were maybe two I wish I’d never met.”

One was Levitt.

“I think of the movie ‘Elmer Gantry,’ where the guy is screwing everybody’s wife but can still stand up and convince everybody he believed in God,” Sheridan continues. “I don’t think Marty knows what the hell the truth is.”

They parted company three years later and Levitt hooked up with Modern Management Inc., another Midwest consulting firm whose principals had split off from Sheridan. He left in 1974 after a year, failing to pay back a $5,000 loan from the firm, he says.

“He’s redefined the term chutzpah, “ says Tom Crosbie, a Modern Management founder, who Levitt describes in his book as a “diabolical” union buster.

By now, Levitt’s life was spinning out of control. Living in the Bay Area with a young son, he and second wife Alice both drank heavily. He worked as an independent consultant, running a campaign against a restaurant-workers union in Oakland. Then, with no moral qualms, Levitt worked as a union organizer in Reno. That only lasted a few months.

In 1976, his only brother, troubled by drug addiction, fatally shot himself and a grieving Levitt drank more heavily until the money ran out and he filed for bankruptcy.

The family moved into a cottage behind his wife’s parents’ home in Northern California, and Levitt moved back to management’s side, finding steady work advising restaurants how to bust unions.

His book paints the rest of the 1970s as a blur: a second son; Alice’s affair with a cocaine dealer; a depressed Levitt committing himself to psychiatric hospital, then later to another alcoholic rehab facility.

He wrote a bad check for a $10,000 certificate of deposit, then took that CD to another bank and used it as collateral for a $10,000 loan.

Levitt knew he’d be caught, telling Alice: “I think my life is now in a countdown.”

He served four months at a Marin County honor farm. When Levitt got out, he went back to his parents’ home in Cleveland, feeling ruined and certain their marriage was over.

He couldn’t sit around the house and smoke forever, so one day in 1980 he went looking for work. He got lucky.

He talked a retirement community into retaining him to fight off a union. The long, profitable association led to other nibbles, and soon, Levitt says, he commanded fees of up to $1,000 a day.

Alice and the boys returned, and the family settled on five acres in the ritzy Cleveland suburb of Gates Mills. Levitt had never been good at saving money, but it didn’t seem to matter. Now there was plenty.

The golden tongue was back.

“He’s the best I’ve ever seen at appearing sincere and getting to people, being able to knock the door down,” says former colleague Crosbie. “He has the ability to uncover, to show empathy . . . for what’s hidden in that person that nobody else knows, for a suspicion that person has--he’ll play to all that.”

Crosbie should know.

By 1983, Levitt had so much work that he offered to refer some--for a percentage--to Crosbie’s Modern Management. Despite the fact Levitt had stiffed him a decade earlier, Crosbie agreed. This arrangement, too, would soon crumble.

But before it did, Levitt had what he describes as a life-changing experience.

It happened at an eastern Ohio coal company the United Mine Workers was trying to organize. Modern Management and Levitt got the union-busting job. There, Levitt claims to have been appalled by what he saw: workers bullied, supervisors intimidated, union supporters fired unjustly.

“I saw so much filthy stuff. I’d never seen the results of my work before,” he says. “I’d always worked behind the scenes. I never met the people, the workers. They were faceless. They were names on charts and cards. I never got feedback about what lives may have been traumatized or ruined. This was like I was seeing myself in a cracked mirror.”

In particular, Levitt remembers one miner who apparently broke down because of company anti-union pressure, brought a gun into the company office and shot out the walls. Company workers who supported the union say that’s an exaggeration--the weapon was an ice pick--but they remember the campaign.

“It was so terrible,” says one union activist, who claims he was fired after the vote. “They were calling people’s wives on the phone to tell them that if we voted ‘yes,’ the mine would close down.”

The union was convinced it had 80% support. It lost the election 298-93.

Levitt went into alcoholic rehab again, but later returned to Scotch. It was not until his next trip to rehabilitation, forced on him by Alice in 1987, that the faceless visions began.

Meanwhile, his wife sold their home, gave the proceeds to her parents and moved back to Northern California with the kids.

When Levitt left rehab, he turned himself in: He telephoned the AFL-CIO’s “Report on Union Busters” newsletter in Washington and told its editor that he was getting out of the field.

Then, in a decision Levitt says still shames him, he took one more union-busting job for a medical facility.

His public conversion began when Brotherhood of Carpenters officials, having read in the AFL-CIO newsletter about Levitt’s pledge to stop union busting, invited him to address a 1988 conference in San Diego. It would be the first of many apologies. A small number of other curious unions invited him too.

Another months-long trip to alcoholic rehab in 1991 darkened his reputation. Now he’s praying the book’s publication will redeem him. At 49, separated again from Alice and the boys and living in an apartment, he’s painfully aware of the skepticism he faces:

“Every time I go before a labor group I have to prove myself. The nasty shots I get from some, I have to endure and rise above it. But I feel more comfortable because this is the rest of my life. Without sounding corny, it’s a labor of love.”

Coming from the pudgy little man with the golden tongue, it doesn’t sound corny at all.

It sounds absolutely sincere.