Pickets at the construction site of a Hilton Garden Inn in the northwestern Indiana town of Hobart slashed 14 tires, cut a telephone line to a trailer and put glue in locks late last week, the project superintendent claims.
The superintendent, Kim Lackey, also said the union-based picket line hurled racial and sexual slurs at the construction workers, many of whom were minorities and women.
“These people acted like a mob of crazy lunatics,” Lackey said in an interview with The Times of Munster.
The newspaper could not reach an organizer for the Indiana/Kentucky Regional Council of Carpenters for comment, but a representative of the Northwest Indiana Building Trades Council said that if violence occurred on the picket line, police should have made arrests.
Union officials have complained that the region’s standard of living cannot be maintained by the wages paid at the site.
The contractor, Tampa Enterprises, is headquartered in Buford, Ga.
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