Anti-union violence
Anti-union violence may take the form of bullying of or aggression against union organisers or sympathisers in the workplace, or outside the workplace. It may happen at the instigation of management, may be committed by agents hired or recruited by management, or by government bodies or others sympathetic to management's aims. Anti-union violence may occur with specific goals in mind, such as influencing a vote on unionization, eliminating an existing union, or in connection with a labor dispute or strike.
Violence against unions may be isolated, or may occur as part of a campaign that includes spying, intimidation, impersonation, disinformation, and sabotage. Violence in labor disputes may be the result of unreasonable polarization, or miscalculation. It may be willful and provoked, or senseless and tragic. On some occasions, violence in labor disputes may be purposeful and calculated, for example the hiring and deployment of goon squads to intimidate, threaten or even assault strikers.
Historically, labor spying upon workers has been widespread, and is closely connected to violence. Labor spying creates intense bitterness among workers, and the sudden exposure of labor spies has driven workers "to violence and unreason", resulting directly in at least one shooting war.
Incidents of violence during periods of labor unrest are sometimes perceived differently by different parties. It is sometimes a challenge to ascertain the truth about labor-related violence, and incidents of violence committed by, or in the name of, unions or union workers have occurred as well.
History
In the book Violence and the Labor Movement, Robert Hunter observed that workers have every reason to discourage violence, because "every time property is destroyed, or men injured, the employers win public support, the aid of the press, the pulpit, the police, the courts, and all the powers of the State. [Workers] do not knowingly injure themselves or persist in a course adverse to their material interests." Yet labor-related violence has been common throughout history.
Hunter believed that violence during a strike benefits the employer, in that they are able to characterize workers negatively. Writing in 1914, Hunter stated that some employers give vague instructions to their agents to "create trouble", and that there is evidence that some employers directly instruct "incendiaries, thugs, and rioters." With insurance to cover losses, Robert Hunter maintained, injury to property generally helps employers, and cannot hurt them. Hunter summarized, "If the workers can be discredited and the strike broken through the aid of violence, the ordinary employer is not likely to make too rigid an investigation into whether or not his 'detectives' had a hand in it."
We can identify specific examples of such circumstances, such as U.S. Senate testimony in 1936 about an employer who wanted to contract with the Pinkerton agency. Known personally to the author of the book The Pinkerton Story, this employer was characterized as a "sincerely upright and Godly man." Yet Pinkerton files record that the employer wanted the agency "to send in some thugs who could beat up the strikers." In 1936, the Pinkerton agency changed its focus from strike-breaking to undercover services. Pinkerton declined the request from this employer.
The argument that violence benefits employers is not just theoretical, it has frequently played out in a very specific manner. For example, mine owners have used violence as an excuse to demand intervention by state police, the national guard, or even the United States army. Such forces become an occupying army in a strike zone, thereby creating a protective shield for strike-breakers hired by the struck company in order to replace strikers. However, attacks on workers or their leaders could also backfire. "Rather than rendering workers docile, acts of violence frequently led to greater militancy and allegiance to [labor] leaders."
Historically, violence against unions has included attacks by detective and guard agencies, such as the Pinkertons, Baldwin Felts, Burns, or Thiel detective agencies; citizens groups, such as the Citizens' Alliance; company guards; police; national guard; or even the military. In particular, there are few curbs on what detective agencies are able to get away with. In the book From Blackjacks To Briefcases, Robert Michael Smith states that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anti-union agencies spawned violence and wreaked havoc on the labor movement. One investigator who participated in a congressional inquiry into industrial violence in 1916 concluded that,
According to Morris Friedman, detective agencies were themselves for-profit companies, and a "bitter struggle" between capital and labor could be counted upon to create "satisfaction and immense profit" for agencies such as the Pinkerton company. Such agencies were in the perfect position to fan suspicion and mistrust "into flames of blind and furious hatred" on the part of the companies.
Agencies sell tactics including violence
Harry Wellington Laidler wrote a book in 1913 detailing how one of the largest union busters in the United States, Corporations Auxiliary Company, had a sales pitch offering the use of provocation and violence. The agency would routinely tell employers — prospective clients — of the methods used by their undercover operatives,
Different types of violence
Some anti-union violence appears to be random, such as an incident during the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in which a police officer fired into a crowd of strikers, killing Anna LoPizzo.
Anti-union violence may be used as a means to intimidate others, as in the hanging of union organizer Frank Little from a railroad trestle in Butte, Montana. A note was pinned to his body which said, "Others Take Notice! First And Last Warning!" The initial of the last names of seven well-known union activists in the Butte area were on the note, with the "L" for Frank Little circled.
Anti-union violence may be abrupt and brutal. Three years after Frank Little was lynched, a strike by Butte miners was suppressed with gunfire when deputized mine guards fired upon unarmed picketers in the Anaconda Road Massacre. Seventeen were shot in the back as they tried to flee, and one man died.
The unprovoked attack was similar to another event, which had occurred twenty-three years earlier in Pennsylvania. During the Lattimer massacre, nineteen unarmed immigrant coal miners were suddenly gunned down at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 1897. The miners, mostly of Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German ethnicity, were shot and killed by a Luzerne County sheriff's posse. In this group as well, all of the miners had been shot in the back. The shooting followed a brief tussle over the American flag carried by the miners. Their only crime was asserting their right to march.
These two shooting incidents bring to mind another; in 1927, during a coal strike in Colorado, state police and mine guards fired pistols, rifles and a machine gun into a group of five hundred striking miners and their wives in what came to be called the Columbine Mine Massacre. In this incident as well, many of the miners were immigrants, and there had been a disagreement over the question of trespassing onto company property in the town of Serene. There was, once again, a tussle over American flags carried by the strikers. Suddenly, gunfire erupted, and six miners died.
Other anti-union violence may seem orchestrated, as in 1914 when mine guards and the state militia fired into a tent colony of striking miners in Colorado, an incident that came to be known as the Ludlow Massacre. During that strike, the company hired the Baldwin Felts agency, which built an armored car so their agents could approach the strikers' tent colonies with impunity. The strikers called it the "Death Special". At the Forbes tent colony,
After deaths of women and children at Ludlow,
The U.S. Army was called upon to put an end to the violence, and the strike sputtered to an end that December.
Anti-union violence may be devious and subtle, as when union busting specialist Martin Jay Levitt assigned confederates to scratch up cars in the parking lot of a nursing home during an organizing drive, and then blamed it on the union as part of an anti-union campaign.
Violence against working people can be an unintentional result of management policy but still deadly, as when garment workers were trapped in the building during the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The doors were locked to allow managers to check the women's purses as they left, to deter theft. Triangle had been the target of a prolonged strike two years before the fire. At least one hundred forty-three workers were killed while trying to escape the flames. The company had "employed extreme measures against strikers who demanded higher wages and safer working conditions."
Sometimes, newspapers play a deadly role instigating violence against unions. During a strike of Colorado coal miners in 1927, newspapers began calling for the governor to no longer withhold the "mailed fist", to strike hard and strike swiftly, and for "Machine Guns Manned By Willing Shooters" at more of the state's coal mines. Within days of these editorials, state police and mine guards fired machine guns, rifles, and pistols against 500 unarmed miners and their wives at the Columbine mine, injuring dozens and killing six.
Another type of violence against unions is devastating to the worker, the family, and entire segments of a community. During the Bisbee Deportation, some 1,300 striking Arizona mine workers were deported from their community at rifle point by 2,000 vigilantes in 1917. The workers and any suspected supporters were loaded onto cattle cars and transported 200 miles (320 km) for 16 hours without food or water. The deportees were dumped in the New Mexico desert without money or transportation, and ordered never to return to Bisbee.
Anti-union violence may take the form of sabotage, for example, the effort to destroy a union's finances during a strike, or to create dissension between the strikers and the union. Bill Haywood, Secretary Treasurer of the Western Federation of Miners, wrote in his autobiography about anti-union sabotage during a strike:
In such an event, the violence impacts only the union's bank account and those dependent on it. However, spying may be combined with violence to sabotage a strike by brutally targeting and intimidating key individuals. In 1903-04, the Pinkerton Agency infiltrated the top ranks of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The UMWA declared a strike, which seemed destined to succeed. However, whenever the union sent an organizer to talk to miners, groups of thugs would learn about it. Morris Friedman, the former stenographer of the Pinkerton Agency in Colorado, explained:
Friedman offers examples of these incidents:
And,
Morris Friedman accused the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I), operated by John D. Rockefeller and his lieutenant in Colorado, Jesse Welborn, of responsibility for the beatings during the 1903-04 strike.
Anti-union violence can take the form of abuse and humiliation. During the Telluride strike in 1901, a union man named Henry Maki had been chained to a telegraph pole. Bill Haywood used a photo of Maki to illustrate a poster displaying an American flag, with the caption, "Is Colorado in America?" The poster was widely distributed, and gained considerable attention for the WFM strike. Peter Carlson, author of a book about Bill Haywood, described the "desecrated flag" poster as famous, and "perhaps the most controversial broadside in American history."
Anti-union violence has existed for a very long time, and even when carried out in the name of the law, it may be cruel and indifferent to workers' rights. The Tolpuddle agricultural workers were arrested in 1832, found guilty, and transported as criminals from their homes in England to Australia, simply on the accusation of having sworn an oath to support each other toward improving their lot in life.
Sometimes, there is simultaneous violence on both sides. In an auto workers strike organised by Victor Reuther and others in 1937, "[u]nionists assembled rocks, steel hinges, and other objects to throw at the cops, and police organized tear gas attacks and mounted charges."
Notable perpetrators
On September 10, 1903, during the Colorado Labor Wars, the Colorado National Guard under Adjutant General Sherman Bell began "a series of almost daily arrests" of union officers and supporters in the Cripple Creek District. When District Judge W. P. Seeds of Teller County held a hearing on writs of habeas corpus for four union men held in the stockade, Sherman Bell's response was caustic. "Habeas corpus be damned," he declared, "we'll give 'em post mortems." Bell justified the ensuing reign of terror as a "military necessity, which recognizes no laws, either civil or social."
About the middle of February, 1904, leadership of the Colorado National Guard became concerned that the Mine Owners were failing to cover the payroll of the soldiers. General Reardon ordered Major Ellison to take another soldier he could trust to "hold up or shoot the men coming off shift at the Vindicator mine" in order to convince the mine owners to pay. The implication of the secrecy was, the incident would then be blamed on the union.
However, Major Ellison reported that the miners took a route out of the mine that would not make ambush possible. Reardon ordered Ellison to pursue an alternative plan, which was shooting up one of the mines. Major Ellison and Sergeant Gordon Walter fired sixty shots into two mine buildings. The plan worked, and the mine owners paid up. Ellison would later testify (in October 1904) that General Reardon informed him Adjutant General Sherman Bell and Colorado Governor James Peabody knew about the plan.
A plot by detectives to derail a train, which would then have been blamed on the union, failed when court testimony implicated the detectives moreso than the union officials they'd accused.
Major Ellison, who had been under the leadership of Adjutant General Sherman Bell, testified in October 1904,
Major Ellison's testimony about the shooting plot, and about the staged attacks on striking miners, was corroborated by two other soldiers.
Four months after the Colorado National Guard shooting plot, an explosion killed thirteen miners. The Colorado National Guard, the Mine Owners Association, and the Citizens' Alliance laid blame on the union, and used the explosion as a pretext to beat or kill union members, round up union supporters, ransack and burn the contents of union cooperative stores, and to clear Colorado mining communities of any suspected members or supporters of the Western Federation of Miners.
During a coal strike just a decade later and less than two hundred miles away, Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt told a civilian who had been abused by a soldier, "I am Jesus Christ, and my men on horses are Jesus Christs — and we must be obeyed." Professor James H. Brewster, a faculty attorney with the University of Colorado who was investigating the strike for Governor Ammons, was aware that Karl Linderfelt was guilty of abuse and beatings of innocent citizens, including a small Greek boy "whose head was split open". Referring to Linderfelt's character, Brewster would later testify,
Professor Brewster sent a telegram to Governor Ammons requesting Linderfelt's removal. No action was taken. In a subsequent face to face meeting with the governor, three months prior to the Ludlow Massacre, Brewster again insisted that Linderfelt be removed, but again, Ammons declined. In later testimony, Professor Brewster stated that Linderfelt was the reason for the massacre.
On the day that the Ludlow Massacre occurred, Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt, commander of one of two companies of the Colorado National Guard, had Louis Tikas, leader of the Ludlow tent colony of striking miners, at gunpoint. Tikas was unarmed, and the miners would later explain that he approached the militia to ask them to stop shooting. While two militiamen held Tikas, Linderfelt broke a rifle butt over his head. Tikas and two other captured miners were later found shot dead. Tikas had been shot in the back. Their bodies lay along the Colorado and Southern railroad tracks for three days in full view of passing trains. The militia officers refused to allow them to be moved until a local of a railway union demanded the bodies be taken away for burial. A court martial found Lieutenant Linderfelt guilty of assaulting Tikas with a Springfield rifle, "but attaches no criminality thereto. And the court does therefor acquit him."
Professor Brewster also testified, "K. E. Linderfelt has two brothers (in the militia) who are quite reputable; don't confuse them."
Congressional investigation
In 1916, the Commission on Industrial Relations, created by the U.S. Congress, issued a final report on its investigation of industrial unrest. The main report concluded, in part,
On the question of violence in industrial disputes, the Commission stated, in part,
Two alternate reports were also issued by the Commission. One of these reports noted violence by labor unions, most notably a campaign of violence by the structural iron workers which included the Los Angeles Times bombing, ostensibly in defense of the closed union shop.
Contemporary anti-union violence
By the early 1900s, public tolerance for violence during labor disputes began to decrease. Yet violence involving strikebreaking troops and armed guards continued into the 1930s. The level of violence that anti-union agencies engaged in eventually resulted in their tactics becoming increasingly public, for there were a very great number of newspaper and muckraking articles written about such incidents. Resources that once were allocated to overt control over workforces began to be assigned to other methods of control, such as industrial espionage. After the Great Depression in 1929, the public no longer considered companies unassailable. Yet legislation related to employer strategies such as violent strike breaking would have to wait until after World War II. Beginning in the 1950s, employers began to embrace new methods of managing workers and unions which were still effective, but much more subtle. In 1973, Warren R. Van Tine observed that from a very early period,
While the level of violence in the United States decreased significantly by the 1950s, it did not drop to zero. Violence still occurs in labor disputes, for example, when one side miscalculates. Bringing in outside security forces, as one example, can lead to violence in modern labor disputes.
The use of cameras and camcorders may have an impact on levels of violence in labor disputes today.
Recent examples
Internal union violence
There are occasions that violence may be committed against a union or union member by other unions, or even within a union.
Threats
Sometimes, threats of violence cause damage to union members or supporters. Other times, threats against unions or their members may backfire. For example, Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox was fired after suggesting that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker should use live ammunition against pro-union protesters involved in the 2011 Wisconsin protests. More recently, a Deputy Prosecutor in Indiana's Johnson County, Carlos Lam, suggested that Governor Walker should mount a "false flag" operation which would make it appear as if the union was committing violence. After initially claiming that his email account was hacked, Lam admitted to sending the suggestion and resigned.
Cullen Werwie, press secretary for Governor Walker, states that Walker's office was unaware of Lam's email. According to CBS News, Werwie also commented, "Certainly we do not support the actions suggested in (the) email. Governor Walker has said time and again that the protesters have every right to have their voice heard, and for the most part the protests have been peaceful. We are hopeful that the tradition will continue."
Violence in Latin America
Violence in other parts of the world
See also
References
Retrieved from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence
