Slap shots from Beverly 
Beverly Enterprises runs some 750 nursing homes across the country. It is also a persistent labor law violator, the subject of hundreds of complaints brought by the National Labor Relations Board. Alarmed by Beverly's record of abuse, in May 1997 several congressional representatives of western Pennsylvania - where the company operates 42 nursing homes - held a Town Hall meeting in Pittsburgh to examine the company's labor practices.
Photo: ©Dewey Neild
Several expert witnesses were invited to testify, including Dr. Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University, whose research includes solid empirical work on corporate sabotage of union organizing (see Labor Party Press July 1997 issue). At the meeting, Bronfenbrenner testified that "Beverly stood out in my findings...for the consistency and intensity of their union avoidance efforts."
In February 1998, Beverly retaliated against Bronfenbrenner with a defamation suit. If that weren't outrageous enough, Beverly submitted a 19-page request for discovery, in which it is demanding every piece of raw data collected in Bronfenbrenner's research - including phone records and confidential interviews with unions. Bronfenbrenner called Beverly's action "an attempt to intimidate scholars from publicly criticizing corporate practices, and ultimately silence all public discussion of corporate behavior." Beverly's suit prompted a statement of protest from Scholars, Artists and Writers for Social Justice that was signed by 800 academics.
But Bronfenbrenner isn't the first victim of Beverly's harassment. In another slap suit, the company claimed that Rosemary Trump, president of SEIU Local 585 in Pittsburgh, slandered Beverly twice. The first time was in 1996, when she confronted Beverly's vice president for labor and employment, Donald Dotson, at a Dole-Kemp rally. Trump accused Dotson of "devoting [his] entire career to busting unions," labeled management a bunch of "criminals," and impled that Dotson was anti-semitic.
Trump's second act of defamation, according to Beverly, was her statement before the same hearing at which Bronfenbrenner testified. Here Trump recounted Dotson's unsavory employment history: director of the National Right to Work Foundation, chair of the NLRB under Reagan, and now pitchman for a notorious violator of workers' rights.
The action against Trump was dismissed on March 7. The judge agreed with Trump's lawyers that her Town Hall statement enjoyed testimonial immunity. As for her confrontation with Dotson, the judge relied on the legal distinction between defamation and mere verbal abuse - the latter is not actionable - and considered Trump's comment to be no more than insulting. He cited several precedents to support his ruling. For instance, National Association of Letter Carriers v. Austin (1974) found that calling a nonunion worker a "scab" or a "traitor to his God, his country, his family, and his class" is not defamatory. Nor is there anything actionable in referring to an employer as a "Little Hitler" operating a "Nazi concentration camp," according to Yeager v. Local Union 20 (1983). And most importantly, according to Crawford v. United States Steelworkers (1985), it is not slanderous to label management "c---suckers" or "mother----ers."
All this is good to know. The ruling also bodes well for Bronfenbrenner.
- Philomena Mariani
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