Word: extortion
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Creating Shortages. The building unions have been able to extort outsize increases because they control most of the labor supply. Contractors get their manpower for each project through union hiring halls. Unions generally dictate crew sizes and working conditions. If a contractor refuses to schedule regular overtime, he is given the dregs of the labor pool. Unions have been able to create artificial labor shortages by restricting admission; most insist on a tortuous apprenticeship training of three to five years. Local unions usually do their own bargaining, city by city and craft by craft. When one powerful unit wins...
Democratic Congressman Allard Lowenstein of New York, a leader of last year's dump-Johnson movement and this year's M-day program, puts his case starkly: "This government, God willing, will respond to the wishes of the people, not to a tiny blackmailing minority that is trying to extort something, but to the massive wishes of people who have a right to express their views." Yet there is an inevitable element of coercion. The protest's sponsors plan monthly moratoriums, with each round to be a day longer than the previous one. If that plan works?a doubtful proposition?...
...associate status, in which favors and profits flow back and forth. As in certain other areas, LCN is content to get a cut while leaving active management to a relative outsider. Another big layoff man, Sam DiPiazzo, once told of an attempt by Giancana's Chicago family to extort 50% of his six-figure take. As DiPiazzo related the story, he was forced to go before a committee in Chicago, where he haggled the bite down to a mere $35 a day. His big bargaining point was that he cooperated with "the Little Man," Louisiana Family Boss Carlos Marcello...
...Radcliffe Institute scholar was arraigned in Concord, N.H. on Dec. 24 on a charge of using the mails to try to extort $50,000 from a retired New Hampshire businessman...
...them return with luggage loaded with wristwatches, diamonds or electronic equipment. An applicant for a government contract in New Delhi may find his documents interminably lost between offices unless he helps them along with "speed money" for well-placed civil servants. In Indonesia, soldiers stop autos at gunpoint to extort fees from travelers, wander into shops to demand goods for nothing. In Thailand, the wise businessman bidding on a government contract might end his visit to a government official by letting a well-filled wallet slip to the floor and exclaiming: "Why, you've dropped your wallet with...