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California vice-mayor under fire after allegedly urging gangs to ‘organize’ over Ice
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Oh man, the parallels with history here are strong...
Back in the day companies would use government to crack down on things like union strikes. So the unions started working with the Mafia for protection.
This didn't work out well for the companies (executives getting carried off, tortured, and executed... That sort of stuff) so the government came up with a compromise: Strong labor laws.
Now we have the government itself violating it's own laws (Bill of Rights), kidnapping harmless people, sending them to faraway prisons to become slaves. Hooking up with organized crime seems like a logical path 🤷
...as in: WTF did you think was going to happen‽
It was more like the mafia realized that if they could take over the labor unions, they could use them to bully and extort money from unionized businesses by threatening labor actions like strikes. And they knew that unions would have a hard time turning down muscle, so they would make union leaders “an offer they couldn’t refuse”. Also the mafia was way more likely to torture a union boss who realized it was a deal with the devil than use violence against a wealthy business owner.
One of the major uses for unions was to give mobsters a steady paycheck. Every Union working on a big civil construction project would inflate their budgets by a few extra men, and those jobs would go to mobsters.
There were two types of jobs. In the first type, the guy had to show up to the job site, but he didn't have to work. Union guys from the old days can tell you about the 3 or 4 guys who did nothing but play cards all day. These jobs went to the lower level workers, often younger, just so they would have a "normal" looking life, and a regular paycheck.
The second type were "ghost" jobs, where the workers never even showed up. These went to the higher level guys, who might hold multiple ghost jobs simultaneously.
Then they would also steer contracts to mobbed-up suppliers, with inferior products, shorted orders, bribes, etc.