Union violence in the United States
[1] Union violence most typically occurs in specific situations, and has more frequently been aimed at preventing replacement workers from taking jobs during a strike, than at managers or employers.
[1] Protest and verbal abuse are routinely aimed against union members or replacement workers who cross picket lines ("blacklegs") during industrial disputes.
Strikebreakers threaten that goal and undermine the union's bargaining position, and occasionally this erupts into violent confrontation, with violence committed either by, or against, strikers.
They estimated from NLRB records that 80 to 100 acts of violence by union members or supporters occurred each year, most of the attacks on people being unplanned fights with strikebreakers crossing picket lines.
In Reading, Pennsylvania, workers conducted mass marches, blocked rail traffic, committed trainyard arson, and burned a bridge.
[22] "In the 1890s violent outbreaks occurred in the North, South, and West, in small communities and metropolitan cities, testifying to the common attitudes of Americans in every part of the United States.
"[1] Workers with different ethnic origins who worked under very different conditions in widely separated parts of the United States nonetheless responded with equal ferocity when unions came under attack.
Frick had locked out the workers, and later hired three hundred armed guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to break the union's picket lines, resulting in gunfire and flaming barges on the Ohio River.
He was motivated by newspaper reports of, ...Henry Clay Frick, whose attitude toward labor is implacably hostile; his secret military preparations while designedly prolonging the peace negotiations with the Amalgamated; the fortification of the Homestead steel-works; the erection of a high board fence, capped by barbed wire and provided with loopholes for sharpshooters; the hiring of an army of Pinkerton thugs; the attempt to smuggle them, in the dead of night, into Homestead; and, finally, the terrible carnage.
[43] Approximately one hundred structures were damaged or destroyed by dynamite, including bridges, viaducts, railroad tracks and loaded rail cars, machine shops, office buildings, and warehouses in the states of Illinois, Indiana, New York, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Missouri, California and Utah.
As of 2016, the Ironworkers Union website commented on the bombing spree: McNamara, Ryan, Clancy, Butler, Morrin and the others may have done what they thought they had to do to preserve the International Association.
[48] The largest armed insurrection since the American Civil War was touched off by the murders of Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers on the courthouse steps of Welch, West Virginia.
Five members of the United Mine Workers Union, including Donnie Thornsbury, president of UMW Local 2496, were indicted by a federal grand jury, arrested, and charged with conspiracy to damage and disable motor vehicles used in interstate commerce.
[60][61] In 1999, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the union had engaged in "ongoing acts of intimidation, violence, destruction of property", awarding the plaintiff $212,500 in punitive damages.
[62] On the first day of The New York Daily News strike, delivery trucks were attacked with stones and sticks, and in some cases burned, with the drivers beaten.
York, an employee of an environmental contractor, was at the mine to perform government-mandated maintenance of sedimentation ponds, work unrelated to the labor dispute.
Howard Green, a member of the UMW executive board, accused Arch Corporation mine guards of murdering York, to give bad publicity to the union.
[67] For years, officials of Laborers Local 91, in Niagara, New York, directed a strongarm squad[69] of union members to make death threats and to commit criminal acts against nonunion construction workers and work sites.
[71] [72][73] It was reported on September 9, 2011, that members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) frightened security guards, dumped grain, and vandalized property belonging to EGT, LLC, over a labor dispute.
Additionally, hot dog stand operator Clinton Tarver, a popular vendor around the Capital area who was hired to provide catering for AFP, lost his equipment, condiments, coolers, and food in the collapse.
A union worker also punched conservative comedian and Fox News contributor Steven Crowder, resulting in a chipped tooth and a minor cut on the forehead.
[83][84][85] Eleven union members pled guilty to property destruction and arson against non-union construction sites, including the Chestnut Hill Quaker meetinghouse.
The Street Railway & Motor Coach Employees union later won an NLRB representation election, defeating the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.
The rival unions clashed violently from the start, resulting in numerous deaths on both sides, as well as police officers killed trying to prevent the violence.
Some hold that the law allowing and protecting strikebreakers is unfair, so that violence and intimidation are the only ways labor unionists can stage an effective strike.
He is next found committing an aggravated assault upon some man or woman who has remained at work, thereby bringing down upon the heads of the officers and members of the assembly or union directly interested, the condemnation of all honest people, and aiding very materially to demoralize the organization and break their ranks.
[107]Some labor spy agencies advertised their false flag operations; for example, Corporations Auxiliary Company, a labor spy agency which boasted 499 corporate clients in the early 1930s,[108] told prospective clients, In [the event other methods of sabotaging the union fail, our operative in the union] turns extremely radical.
[109]Johnson County, Indiana Deputy Prosecutor Carlos Lam suggested in an email that Wisconsin's Governor Walker mount a "false flag" operation to make it appear that the union[which?]
[112] In the dark of night, Major Ellison and Sergeant Gordon Walter fired sixty shots from their revolvers into the Vindicator and Lillie shaft house.
A jury of non-union ranchers and timbermen unanimously acquitted three accused union men, and some testimony during the trial pointed at a plot by the detectives.
