(FORTUNE Magazine) – A detail curiously omitted in the plethora of commentary on Hardhatgate, as the media nomenclature department may yet decide to baptize the event, is that the spotlighted union behavior was apparently quite legal. At least, the public hearing in mid-June at no point established that master mechanic George Morrison was breaking any laws by pulling down $409,000 for his job last year. The $11,373 in wages he received for the week he lolled in Acapulco was, to be sure, booked as a bonus from Olympia & York; but Morrison's basic deal was specified in a labor contract negotiated fair and square between the Building Contractors Association of New York and Local 14 of the International Union of Operating Engineers. The contractors would now be breaking the law -- or at least violating a legitimate collective bargaining agreement -- if they failed to pay George's rate, which is expected to earn him $500,000 this year. (Maybe two dozen other New York hardhats are pulling down in excess of a hundred thou per capita.) The point we are trying to creep up on here is that Washington Post hireling Richard Cohen was somewhat off target in his op ed sobbing about these disclosures. Cohen is upset that nobody in organized labor is denouncing the extortionate rates. ''You would think that the whole idea of unionism is to figure out a way where some workers could . . . rip off the system,'' is what Richard columniated, and also ''this is not why men once died at Republic Steel.'' On the contrary, it is why men died at Republic Steel in 1937. Assuming them to have in fact died for some cause, it was to establish this principle: workers are entitled to organize and coerce business into paying more than the market says they're worth. Not all unions play this game as successfully or as coercively as New York's Operating Engineers, but coercion and intimidation in the cause of big bucks is what unionism is all about, and if half a million is too much then there must be some ceiling at a lower level where extra-market rates get to be naughty, but we have somehow never been told exactly where the ceiling is or which beaches it is in bad taste for ripoff artists to visit.