Suit Against Researcher Thrown out
Wednesday, May 27, 1998; 8:30 p.m. EDT
ITHACA, N.Y. (AP) -- A federal judge has dismissed a
defamation lawsuit against a Cornell University labor
researcher who described a company as ``one of the
nation's most notorious labor law violators.''
Kate Bronfenbrenner was sued by Beverly Enterprises,
Inc. over comments she made about the company during
a town meeting in Pittsburgh in May 1997. A federal judge
for the Western District of Pennsylvania granted a motion
to dismiss the case Friday.
Bronfenbrenner had been invited by several congressmen
to speak at the town meeting on proposed legislation that
would bar major labor law violators from obtaining federal
grants.
Bronfenbrenner zeroed in on tactics U.S. companies use
to beat back unionization drives and counter-strategies
that unions find work best. She described Beverly as ``one
of the nation's most notorious labor law violators.''
Bronfenbrenner maintained that Beverly fired workers for
union activity, harassed and spied on others and illegally
altered wages in a systematic campaign of coercion to
keep unions from gaining recognition at dozens of its
nursing homes.
Not only did Beverly challenge her comments as false and
defamatory, the company also demanded that she open
up her research to inspection as part of pretrial discovery.
``This is a relief not only to me but to the people I
surveyed and to all other researchers in other fields who
have been watching my case very carefully,''
Bronfenbrenner said.
Officials with Beverly, of Fort Smith, Ark., did not return
phone messages seeking comment.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
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Poultry Executives Ordered Arrested
By Dennis Patterson
Associated Press Writer
RALEIGH (AP) -- A hearing on alleged political
influence-peddling involving legislators and agribusiness
began Wednesday with two poultry executives defying
their subpoenas to testify, then relenting after they were
ordered arrested.
The state Board of Elections opened a three-day hearing
Wednesday to determine whether House Republicans
punished the hog industry last year with a two-year
moratorium on new and expanded factory-style operations
because of its failure to raise $200,000 for the party in
1996.
The FBI and the State Bureau of Investigation are
conducting their own inquiries into the allegations.
Republicans deny the allegations.
Among the first witnesses scheduled to appear were
Marvin Johnson, one of North Carolina's largest poultry
processors, and Doug Boykin, an associate at the House of
Raeford Turkeys, one of Johnson's enterprises.
An elections board secretary said Johnson responded with
a defiant refusal to appear. Johnson later sent word that
he could not attend because he was selling turkeys
Wednesday and would be out of town Thursday.
After the board ordered them jailed, the men later agreed
to appear -- Boykin on Thursday and Johnson on Friday.
Boykin was found by SBI agents and about to be hauled to
jail ``when we decided to give him a break,'' elections
board chairman Larry Leake said. Johnson was located in
Maryland.
Nick Weaver, an executive with Goldsboro Milling Co.,
testified that he believed Johnson served as a go-between
for House Speaker Harold Brubaker and livestock
operators because of his connections with the industry
and GOP affiliation.
Weaver said Johnson's refusal to testify was
understandable ``because he's between a rock and a hard
place.''
``If he testifies for the speaker, he upsets the people who
are in business with him, his friends in animal agriculture,''
Weaver said. ``If he testifies for the animal agriculture
industry, then he upsets the speaker and his Republican
friends.''
Republican Reps. John Nichols and Robert Grady testified
Brubaker had indicated the hog industry had not done
enough to support Republicans in the 1996 elections, but
they said they didn't consider his remarks unethical.
However, they said Brubaker indicated that pork
producers might have a bad year in 1997 and told them:
``They didn't come up with enough. We don't owe them a
thing. They'll have to take what they get.'' Nichols and
Grady said the subject of money did not come up during
the conversation.
The influence-peddling allegations surfaced during an
elections board hearing in April. That hearing was held to
consider whether Farmers for Fairness, an association of
the state's largest hog producers, violated campaign laws
by running advertisements criticizing state Rep. Cindy
Watson, a Republican who backed the moratorium last
year.
The Elections Board ruled then that the hog group had
violated election laws by using corporate money to
influence an election. That law was later ruled
unconstitutional by a federal judge.
During those hearings, a consultant for Farmers for
Fairness said the industry believed the moratorium was
intended to punish pork producers for not contributing
enough money to House Republicans.
If the elections panel finds that Republican leaders passed
the moratorium as a retaliatory measure, it may turn its
findings over to prosecutors for possible misdemeanor
charges.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
===================================
May 27, 1998
Cabbies Denied Free Speech, Judge Rules, but Appeal Blocks Protest
By BENJAMIN WEISER
Federal judge in Manhattan ruled last night that the Giuliani
administration was violating the First Amendment rights of taxi drivers
by preventing them from protesting proposed regulations, and ordered the
city to allow 250 of them to demonstrate Tuesday in a
caravan.
But the city's lawyers, who had argued that a protest of such scale could
cause gridlock and endanger the lives of people in ambulances
caught in traffic, immediately appealed the ruling and obtained a stay.
The taxi drivers had gone to court on Friday to receive permission to hold
the demonstration by 250 to 500 drivers after the police, on
the orders of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, prevented them from entering
Manhattan the day before for a similar organized protest. The
city had told the drivers over the weekend that it would permit a largely
symbolic procession Tuesday of no more than 20 drivers.
But Judge Robert P. Patterson of Federal District Court in Manhattan said
that the drivers were seeking to use "their means of
livelihood, yellow cabs, to symbolize their protest" and that the city had
not justified restricting the protest to such a small number.
The judge said that the protest against the "regulations governing cab
drivers in the City of New York is a fundamental right in this
country grounded in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."
The judge said that a procession 20 cabs was too small "to make a
significant impact on the citizens of this city" or on the Taxi and
Limousine Commission, which will consider the proposed new regulations at a
hearing tomorrow.
Late last night, Judge Dennis G. Jacobs of the United States Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan granted a stay of
Judge Patterson's ruling, and suggested that both sides return to the court
Tuesday to argue their case before a panel of the court. But
the judge's action will likely block Tuesday's scheduled protest.
As Judge Patterson announced his ruling from the bench after a day of
testimony from taxi drivers and police, a group of about 15
drivers in the audience smiled and several clapped. "We are very happy,"
said one, Jaswant Singh.
Vijay Bali, another driver and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said: "Numbers
count. That is what we can also show with the numbers, that we
can be peaceful."
But yesterday's hearing was anything but peaceful. The city's Corporation
Counsel, Michael Hess, argued that "there is no real
constitutional right to vehicle and vehicular parades like this."
At another point, Hess complained that if 500 taxicabs were allowed to drive
in a caravan protest, the city would hear from 500 street
vendors the following day, saying that they have the same rights. His
comments were in reference to the vendors' opposition to new
regulations that would remove their carts from some congested city blocks.
Lawyers for the drivers argued that the Mayor had acted more out of spite in
preventing the protest because he was angry over a yellow
cab strike on May 13.
"The conclusion is inescapable," Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil
Liberties Union said. "There is simply no rational explanation
other than that the strike precipitated the Police Department's" decision to
block Thursday's demostration.
In his ruling, the judge said cabdrivers in the past have conducted at least
four larger processions through Manhattan -- in some cases,
testimony showed, involving more than 1,000 vehicles -- without opposition
from the police or City Hall.
But he also said that he was concerned about a flier that was circulated
among drivers that called for cab drivers to bring traffic to a
halt by obstructive tactics, such as paying tolls with small change and
driving slowly, and to "make Manhattan a parking lot."
Last Friday, Mayor Giuliani cited the anonymous flier as one of the reasons
why his administration responded to head off last Thursday's
planned protest.
Judge Patterson ordered that drivers involved in Tuesday's protest comply
with the city's traffic and parking regulations. "Furthermore,"
he said, "any attempt by additional drivers to increase congestion along the
proposed route or elsewhere to bring traffic to a halt, or
make Manhattan a parking lot, may be punishable" by the city or the court.
The object of the protest is the city's 17-point plan to tighten taxi
regulation, such as measures that would suspend, for 30 days, the
hack license of any driver who accumulated six penalty points in 18 months.
Six penalty points is equivalent to two traffic infractions;
running a red light, for instance, is worth three points. They have also
criticized a proposal to raise some fines to $1,000.
It was unclear yesterday whether the Mayor's proposals had enough support on
the Taxi and Limousine Commission to pass at
tomorrow's meeting. Five of the eight commission members must vote yes for
the proposals to pass. Three of the members -- including
the chairwoman, Diane McGrath-McKechnie -- were appointed by the Mayor and
are considered safe votes, according to several
commissioners and industry leaders. Of the remaining five, one, Alberto
Torres, said yesterday that he did not expect the commission
would have enough information by the end of tomorrow's meeting to pass the
rules. Another member, Sandra Silverman, said that she
had reservations about some of the rules.
Silverman, a holdover from the Dinkins administration, said that the plan to
suspend a cab driver's license after only six penalty points,
seemed onerous.
Earlier in the day, several drivers' groups announced that regardless of the
judge's ruling, there would be a 24-hour strike beginning at 5
A.M. this morning. The work stoppage was announced in a flier signed by the
New York Taxi Workers Alliance and the United Yellow Cab
Drivers Association -- two of the main forces behind the last two cabbie
protests -- along with six other groups representing Pakistani,
Chinese and Bangladeshi cabbies and others.
In response, the Taxi and Limousine Commission reinstated an emergency rule
allowing livery drivers to pick up passengers who hail
them on the street.
"The public must be served," Allen J. Fromberg, the commission's spokesman,
said last night, "and the Mayor's emergency rule provides
for that service."
Whether the livery businesses would send their drivers out was unclear.
Fidel F. Del Valle, a former commission chairman who now
represents a coalition of livery businesses that run more than 1,500 cars,
said the answer was no.
"We will not pick up street hails," Del Valle said.
No sooner had the drivers groups called for a strike, however, than a
coalition of taxi owners and leasing agents representing 7,000 of
the city's 12,000 yellow cabs issued a plea for cabbies not to strike. The
group -- an alliance of the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade,
the New York City Taxi Safety Committee and the League of Mutual Taxi Owners
-- recommended that cabbies instead make their
presence felt at the commission's hearing tomorrow
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
