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Violence against unions may also occur outside the workplace, and may occur with specific goals in mind, such as influencing a vote on unionization, [[Union busting|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 [[Labor spies|spying]], intimidation, impersonation, disinformation, and sabotage.<ref>Robert Michael Smith, From Blackjacks To Briefcases — A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States, 2003, p. 87</ref> |
Violence against unions may also occur outside the workplace, and may occur with specific goals in mind, such as influencing a vote on unionization, [[Union busting|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 [[Labor spies|spying]], intimidation, impersonation, disinformation, and sabotage.<ref>Robert Michael Smith, From Blackjacks To Briefcases — A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States, 2003, p. 87</ref> |
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== Threats == |
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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.<ref>Debra Cassens Weiss, American Bar Association Journal, posted Mar 25, 2011, http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/a_second_indiana_prosecutor_is_out_of_a_job_for_unusual_advice_to_wisconsin/ retrieved April 2, 2011</ref><ref>CBS News, posted March 25, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20047130-503544.html retrieved April 2, 2011</ref> |
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== History == |
== History == |
Revision as of 08:07, 3 April 2011
Anti-union violence, also sometimes known as management violence, may take the form of bullying of or aggression against union organisers or sympathisers in the workplace. Such activity is rarely if ever delivered by employers or senior managers directly, but by front-line managers (e.g. chargehands or foremen) or by other employees incited by management.
In a number of well-known cases, however, violent action has been taken against union workers, and unions have charged that this was at the instigation of management or of government bodies sympathetic to management's aims.
Violence against unions may also occur outside the workplace, and 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.[1]
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.[2][3]
History
Historically, violence against unions has included attacks by detective and guard agencies, such as the Pinkertons, Baldwin Felts, or Thiel detective agencies; citizens groups, such as the Citizens' Alliance; company guards; police; national guard; or even the military.
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.[5]
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.[6] During that strike, the company hired the Baldwin Felts agency, who 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,
"[The Death Special] opened fire, a protracted spurt that sent some six hundred bullets tearing through the thin tents. One of the shots struck miner Luka Vahernik, fifty, in the head, killing him instantly. Another striker, Marco Zamboni, eighteen ... suffered nine bullet wounds to his legs... One tent was later found to have about 150 bullet holes..."[7]
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. 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 were on the note, with the "L" for Frank Little circled.[8][9]
Anti-union violence may be subtle and clever, 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.[10]
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.[12] 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.[13] The company had "employed extreme measures against strikers who demanded higher wages and safer working conditions."[14]
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,[15] and for "Machine Guns Manned By Willing Shooters" at more of the state's coal mines.[16] 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, killing six.[17]
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 at rifle point from their community 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:
I had been having some difficulty with the relief committee of the Denver smelter men. At first we had been giving out relief at such a rate that I had to tell the chairman that he was providing the smelter men with more than they had had while at work. Then he cut down the rations until the wives of the smelter men began to complain that they were not getting enough to eat. Years later, when his letters were published in The Pinkerton Labor Spy, I discovered that the chairman of the relief committe (sic) was a Pinkerton detective, who was carrying out the instructions of the agency...[18]
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 in a much more brutal manner. In 1903-04, the Pinkerton Agency infiltrated the top ranks of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).[19] 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:
As a result of Operative Smith's "clever and intelligent" work, a number of union organizers received severe beatings at the hands of unknown masked men, presumably in the employ of the company.[20]
Friedman offers examples of these incidents:
About February 13, 1904, William Farley, of Alabama, a member of the [UMWA] National Executive Board ... and the personal representative of [UMWA] President Mitchell ... addressed coal miners' meetings ... [on their return trip] eight masked men held them up with revolvers, dragged them from their wagon, threw them to the ground, beat them, kicked them, and almost knocked them into insensibility.[21]
And,
On Saturday, April 30, 1904, W.M. Wardjon, a national organizer of the United Mine Workers, while on board a train enroute to Pueblo, was assaulted by three men at Sargents, about thirty miles west of Salida. Mr. Wardjon was beaten into unconsciousness.[22]
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.[23]
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?"[24] 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."[25]
Perpetrators
On September 10, 1903, during the Colorado Labor Wars, the Colorado National Guard under General Sherman Bell began "a series of almost daily arrests" of union officers and supporters.[26] 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."[27] Bell justified the ensuing reign of terror as a "military necessity, which recognizes no laws, either civil or social."[28]
Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt told a miner during a 1913-14 coal strike, "I am Jesus Christ, and my men on horses are Jesus Christs — and we must be obeyed."[29] On the day that the Ludlow Massacre occurred, Lieutenant Linderfelt, commander of one of two companies of the Colorado National Guard, held Louis Tikas, leader of the Ludlow tent colony of striking miners, at gunpoint. 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.[30] 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."[31]
Recent examples
Well known examples include:
- Chea Vichea, leader of the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC) was shot in the head and chest while reading a newspaper at a kiosk in Phnom Penh on January 22, 2004.[32] He had been dismissed by the INSM Garment Factory (located in the Chum Chao District of Phnom Penh), as a reprisal for helping to establish a trade union at the company.
- Isidro Gil, a leader of the National Union of Food Industry Workers at the Bogotá, Colombia bottling plant of the Coca-Cola company who was shot dead at the plant on December 5, 1996. Four other leaders of the union have been killed since 1994, as have other union leaders in Colombia.
- Shankar Guha Niyogi, a leader of the Mukti Morcha union movement in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh was killed in Bhilai, on September 27, 1991,[33] allegedly by a hired assassin, in the middle of a major dispute about the regularisation of workers' contracts in the steel and engineering industries. The alleged assassin and two industrialists were convicted of his murder but released on appeal; their release is itself now subject to appeal.
- Victor Reuther, a leader of the United Auto Workers in Detroit, who survived an assassination attempt in 1949, with the loss of his right eye.[34]
Violence against union leaders can occur within a highly charged political context, and is rare in straightforward industrial disputes - not least because historically, management has often had ready recourse to the law to enforce its position. The Tolpuddle martyrs were transported by due process of law rather than by management violence, and in a strike organised by Victor Reuther and others in 1937, the workers were attacked with tear gas and firearms by the police.
See also
References
- ^ Robert Michael Smith, From Blackjacks To Briefcases — A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States, 2003, p. 87
- ^ Debra Cassens Weiss, American Bar Association Journal, posted Mar 25, 2011, http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/a_second_indiana_prosecutor_is_out_of_a_job_for_unusual_advice_to_wisconsin/ retrieved April 2, 2011
- ^ CBS News, posted March 25, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20047130-503544.html retrieved April 2, 2011
- ^ Scott Martelle, Blood Passion, Rutgers University Press, 2008, page 97
- ^ William Dudley Haywood, Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, 1929, page 249
- ^ Zinn, H. "The Ludlow Massacre", A People's History of the United States. pgs 346–349
- ^ Scott Martelle, Blood Passion, Rutgers University Press, 2008, page 98
- ^ Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, University of Illinois Press Abridged, 2000, pages 223-224
- ^ Peter Carlson, Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, 1983, pages 17, 248-249
- ^ Confessions of a Union Buster, Martin Jay Levitt, 1993, page 195.
- ^ Front Cover Ann Harriman, Women/men/management, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996, page 46
- ^ Brenda Lange, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Infobase Publishing, 2008, page 58
- ^ Front Cover Ann Harriman, Women/men/management, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996, page 46
- ^ Ellen Wiley Todd, Abstracts 2000, Abstracts of papers delivered in art history sessions, The Association, 2000, page 197
- ^ Denver Morning Post editorial, November 2, 1927, page 1
- ^ Boulder Daily Camera, November 17, 1927, page 2
- ^ Richard Myers, Slaughter in Serene, The Columbine Coal Strike Reader, The Columbine Mine Massacre, pub. Bread and Roses Workers' Cultural Center and Industrial Workers of the World, 2005, pages 138-139
- ^ The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, William D. Haywood, 1929, pp. 157–58.
- ^ The Pinkerton Labor Spy, Morris Friedman, Wilshire Book Company, 1907, p.152.
- ^ Morris Friedman, The Pinkerton Labor Spy, Wilshire Book Company, 1907, pp. 163–164.
- ^ Morris Friedman, The Pinkerton Labor Spy, Wilshire Book Company, 1907, pp. 163–164.
- ^ Morris Friedman, The Pinkerton Labor Spy, Wilshire Book Company, 1907, p. 164.
- ^ Morris Friedman, The Pinkerton Labor Spy, Wilshire Book Company, 1907, p.164.
- ^ William D. Haywood, The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, 1929, pages 141. There had been an earlier, very contentious strike in Telluride, in 1901.
- ^ Peter Carlson, Roughneck—The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, 1983, page 71.
- ^ Benjamin McKie Rastall, The Labor History of the Cripple Creek District, 1905, page 80
- ^ Peter Carlson, Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, 1983, page 62
- ^ Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters—Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek, 1998, page 207, from Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, page 50.
- ^ Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, Robin D. G. Kelley, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century, Beacon Press, 2002, page 27
- ^ Andrews, Thomas G., Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (Harvard UP, 2008) p. 272
- ^ Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, Robin D. G. Kelley, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century, Beacon Press, 2002, page 52
- ^ "Kingdom of Cambodia: The killing of trade unionist Chea Vichea". Amnesty International. 2004-12-03. Retrieved 2009-04-14.
- ^ "Now a Hero, Then a Hero". Tehelka. 2007-07-14. Retrieved 2009-04-14.
- ^ Saxon, Wolfgang (2004-06-05). "Victor Reuther, Influential Labor Leader, Dies at 92". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-04-14.
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