The history of union busting in the United States dates back to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution produced a rapid expansion in factories and manufacturing capabilities. As workers moved from farms to factories, mines and other hard labor, they faced harsh working conditions such as long hours, low pay and health risks. Children and women worked in factories and generally received lower pay than men. The government did little to limit these conditions. Labor movements in the industrialized world developed and lobbied for better rights and safer conditions. Shaped by wars, depressions, government policies, judicial rulings, and global competition, the early years of the battleground between unions and management were adversarial and often identified with aggressive hostility.
Contemporary opposition to trade unions known as union busting started in the 1940s, and continues to present challenges to the labor movement. Union busting is a term used by labor organizations and trade unions to describe the activities that may be undertaken by employers, their proxies, workers and in certain instances states and governments usually triggered by events such as picketing, card check, worker organizing, and strike actions. Labor legislation has changed the nature of union busting, as well as the organizing tactics that labor organizations commonly use.
Strikebreaking and union busting, 1870s–1935
Hiring agencies specialising in anti-union practices have been an option available to employers from the bloody strikes of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, until today.From Blackjacks To Briefcases — A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States, Robert Michael Smith, 2003, page xiv.
Working with owner John D. Rockefeller, Charles Pratt's Astral Oil Works in 1874 began to buy refineries in Brooklyn to decrease competition. Around this time, the coopers' union opposed Pratt's efforts to cut back on certain manual operations, as they were the craftsmen who made the barrels that held the oil. Pratt busted the union, and his strategies for breaking up the organization were adopted by other refineries.
In 1907, Morris Friedman reported that a Pinkerton agent who had infiltrated the Western Federation of Miners managed to gain control of a strike relief fund, and attempted to exhaust that union's treasury by awarding lavish benefits to strikers.The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, William D. Haywood, 1929, pages 157-58. However, many attacks against unions have used force of one sort or another, including police action, military force, or recruiting goon squads.
Physical attacks against unions Unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were devastated by the Palmer Raids, carried out as part of the First Red Scare. The Everett Massacre (also known as Bloody Sunday) was an armed confrontation between local authorities and IWW members which took place in Everett, Washington on Sunday, November 5, 1916. Later, communist-led unions were isolated or destroyed and their activists purged with the assistance of other union organizations during the Second Red Scare.
In May 1886 the Knights of Labor were demonstrating in the Haymarket Square in Chicago, demanding an eight-hour day in all trades. When police arrived, an unknown person threw a bomb into the crowd, killing one person and injuring several others. "In a trial marked by prejudice and hysteria" a court sentenced seven anarchists, six of them German-speaking, to death - with no evidence linking them to the bomb.Tindall and Shi, 1984, p. 829.
Strikes also took place that same month (May 1886) in other cities, including in Milwaukee, where seven people died when Wisconsin Governor Jeremiah M. Rusk ordered state-militia troops to fire upon thousands of striking workers who had marched to the Milwaukee Iron Works Rolling Mill in Bay View, on Milwaukee's south side.
In 1914 one of the most bitter labor conflicts in American history took place at a mining colony in Colorado called Ludlow. After workers went on strike in September 1913 with grievances ranging from requests for an eight-hour day to allegations of subjugation, Colorado governor Elias Ammons called in the National Guard in October 1913. That winter, Guardsmen made 172 arrests.Kick et al., 2002, p. 263.
The strikers began to fight back, killing four mine guards and firing into a separate camp where strikebreakers lived. When the body of a strikebreaker was found nearby, the National Guard's General Chase ordered the tent colony destroyed in retaliation.
"On Monday morning, April 20, two dynamite bombs were exploded, in the hills above Ludlow ... a signal for operations to begin. At 9 am a machine gun began firing into the tents [where strikers were living], and then others joined." One eyewitness reported: "The soldiers and mine guards tried to kill everybody; anything they saw move". That night the National Guard rode down from the hills surrounding Ludlow and set fire to the tents. Twenty-six people, including two women and eleven children, were killed.Kick et al., 2002, p. 264.
Union busting with police and military force For approximately 150 years, union organizing efforts and strikes have been periodically opposed by police, security forces, National Guard units, special police forces such as the Coal and Iron Police, and/or use of the United States Army. Significant incidents have included the Haymarket Riot and the Ludlow massacre. The Homestead struggle of 1892, the Pullman walkout of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903 are examples of unions destroyed or significantly damaged by the deployment of military force. In all three examples, a strike became the triggering event.
Pinkertons and militia at Homestead, 1892 – One of the first union busting agencies was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which came to public attention as the result of a shooting war that broke out between strikers and three hundred Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike of 1892. When the Pinkerton agents were withdrawn, state militia forces were deployed. The militia repulsed attacks on the Carnegie Steel plant, and prevented violence against strikebreakers crossing picket lines, causing a decisive defeat of the strike, and ended the power of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers at the Homestead plant. Federal troops end the railroad blockades by the American Railway Union, 1894 – During the Pullman Strike, the American Railway Union (ARU), out of union solidarity, called out its members according to the principle of industrial unionism. Their actions in blocking the movement of railroad trains were illegal but successful, until twenty thousand federal troops were called out to ensure that trains carrying US mail could travel freely. Once the trains ran, the strike ended. National Guard in the Colorado Labor Wars, 1903 – The Colorado National Guard, an employers' organization called the Citizens' Alliance, and the Mine Owners' Association teamed together to eject the Western Federation of Miners from mining camps throughout Colorado during the Colorado Labor Wars.
Strikebreaking by governmental injunction In May 1895, in the case of In re Debs, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the right of the federal government to use injunctions to end labor strikes.
The case stemmed from an injunction against Eugene Debs, president of the American Railway Union, and other strike leaders during the Pullman Strike of 1894. President Grover Cleveland sided with the Pullman Company during the strike, and Cleveland's attorney general Richard Olney sought a court order to end the strike from federal judge Peter S. Grosscup, whom he knew to hold anti-union sentiments. In July 1894, Grosscup issued an injunction, described as an "omnibus injunction" due to its wide scope, that forbade Debs and other union officials "from in any way or manner interfering with, hindering, obstructing or stopping" the railroads entering Chicago, as well as from communicating with their subordinates in the union. In July 1894, Debs and four other union leaders were arrested and charged with violating the injunction. In December 1894, US circuit court judge William A. Woods found Debs and the other union leaders to be in contempt of court for violating the injunction and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from three to six months.
The practice of strikebreaking by governmental injunction continued until the passage of the Norris-La Guardia Act in 1932, which prohibited federal courts from issuing injunctions against nonviolent labor disputes, including strikes, picketing, and boycotts by labor unions.
Anatomy of a corporate union buster
Corporations Auxiliary Company, a union buster during the first half of the 20th century, would tell employers,
Our man will come to your factory and get acquainted... If he finds little disposition to organize, he will not encourage organization, but will engineer things so as to keep organization out. If, however, there seems a disposition to organize he will become the leading spirit and pick out just the right men to join. Once the union is in the field its members can keep it from growing if they know how, and our man knows how. Meetings can be set far apart. A contract can at once be entered into with the employer, covering a long period, and made very easy in its terms. However, these tactics may not be good, and the union spirit may be so strong that a big organization cannot be prevented. In this case our man turns extremely radical. He asks for unreasonable things and keeps the union embroiled in trouble. If a strike comes, he will be the loudest man in the bunch, and will counsel violence and get somebody in trouble. The result will be that the union will be broken up.Harry Wellington Laidler, Boycotts and the labor struggle economic and legal aspects, John Lane company, 1913, pages 291-292
In the period 1933 to 1936, Corporations Auxiliary Company had 499 corporate clients.John J. Abt, Michael Myerson, Advocate and activist: memoirs of an American communist lawyer, University of Illinois Press, 1993, page 63
College students as strikebreakers in the Interborough Rapid Transit strike of 1905 Following a walk out of subway workers, management of the trains Interborough Rapid Transit in New York City appealed to university students to volunteer as motormen, conductors, ticket sellers and ticket choppers. Stephen Norword discusses the phenomenon of students as strikebreakers in early 20th Century North America: "Throughout the period between 1901 and 1923, college students represented a major, and often critically important source of strikebreakers in a wide range of industries and services. ... Collegians deliberately volunteered their services as strikebreakers and were the group least likely to be swayed by the pleas of strikers and their sympathizers that they were doing something wrong."
Jack Whitehead, the first "King of Strike Breakers" There were a significant number of strikes during the 1890s and very early 1900s. Strikebreaking by recruiting massive numbers of replacement workers became a significant activity.
Jack Whitehead saw opportunity in labor struggles; while other workers were attempting to organize unions, he walked away from his union to organize an army of strikebreakers. Whitehead was the first to be called "King of the Strike Breakers"; by deploying his private workforce during strikes of steelworkers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Birmingham, Alabama, he became wealthy. By demonstrating how lucrative strikebreaking could be, Whitehead inspired a host of imitators.From Blackjacks To Briefcases — A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States, Robert Michael Smith, 2003, page 40.
James Farley inherits the strikebreaker title