Anti-union violence in the United States
Violence against unions may be isolated, or may occur as part of a campaign that includes spying, intimidation, impersonation, disinformation, and sabotage.
On some occasions, violence in labor disputes may be purposeful and calculated,[2] for example the hiring and deployment of goon squads to intimidate, threaten or even assault strikers.
[6] 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.
If the secret agents of employers, working as members of the labor unions, do not always investigate acts of violence, they frequently encourage them.
[11] 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.
[11] 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.
[12] 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.
[13] 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.
Three years after Frank Little was lynched, a strike by Butte miners was suppressed with gunfire when deputized mine guards suddenly fired upon unarmed picketers in the Anaconda Road Massacre.
[18][19] The miners, mostly of Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German ethnicity, were shot and killed by a Luzerne County sheriff's posse.
While the Columbine mine shooting was a surprise, newspapers played a deadly role in conjuring the atmosphere of hate in which the violence occurred.
[24] Within days of these editorials, state police and mine guards fired on the miners and their wives, injuring dozens and killing six.
[28] 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.
[29] 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.
[32] 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.
[33] Morris 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.
Wardjon, a national organizer of the United Mine Workers, while on board a train en route to Pueblo, was assaulted by three men at Sargents, about thirty miles west of Salida.
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.
"[36] 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.
[37] Professor James H. Brewster, a faculty attorney with the University of Colorado who was investigating the strike for Governor Ammons, was aware that militia Lieutenant Karl Linderfelt was guilty of abuse and beatings of innocent citizens, including a small Greek boy "whose head was split open".
A court martial found Lieutenant Linderfelt guilty of assaulting Tikas with a Springfield rifle, "but attaches no criminality thereto.
[44] 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.
[46] A 1969 study of labor conflict violence in the United States examined the era following the 1947 passage of the Taft–Hartley Act and noted that attacks on strikers by company guards had all but disappeared.
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.
