AFSCME Squeezes A Critic

It was Roy Commer's misfortune last October that the jurors who heard his Federal lawsuit claiming he was deposed as president of the Civil Service Technical Guild for criticizing the president of his international union did not grasp just how corrupt that international was a decade ago.

During the 1990s, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees ignored a letter from one District Council 37 local president alleging that a union contract vote was rigged, a charge by a candidate from another local that he was improperly thrown off the ballot, and the failure of its second-largest local to submit to required audits for four consecutive years. Something more than inattentiveness was behind this blindness: in each case the accusations were being made against officials who were political supporters of AFSCME President Gerry McEntee. Those allegations all turned out to be true, and were key components of the corruption scandal in which more than two dozen DC 37 officials were convicted of criminal charges.

Mr. Commer was a victim of the peculiar sort of justice exercised by the head of the AFSCME Judicial Panel, Kangaroo John Seferian. One of his accusers within the Tech Guild was later found to have neglected his duties and allowed a bookkeeper to embezzle $2.4 million from the local; while the man was removed from his post as local treasurer, he was not stripped of his union membership, as Mr. Commer was.

It wasn't enough for AFSCME to prevail in the civil suit. Mr. McEntee's lawyers demanded that Mr. Commer pay court costs, and a Federal Judge has held him liable for as much as $10,000 in that area.

But he also dismissed some AFSCME expenses as overly indulgent, notably the $500-a-night hotel rooms in which it put up defense witnesses in the case. Ironically enough, that kind of puttin' on the ritz exemplifies the greed and excesses within DC 37 that first incensed Mr. Commer and put him in AFSCME's cross-hairs to begin with. Mr. McEntee should hereafter be known as Half a Grand Gerry, and he personifies what ails the labor movement in this country.