How to fight the bosses' goons

Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and

Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

On 26 May, 1937, United Automobile Workers (UAW) organisers stood on the overpass that led to the main gate of Ford's Dearborn, Michigan, factory. Their weapons were leaflets. Their target was the appalling working conditions of the workers at Ford.

Confronting them were members of Ford's "Service Department" — ex-boxers, former wrestlers and thugs from Detroit's criminal underworld — armed with brass knuckles, knives, guns and blackjacks. Their target was trade unionism.

The "Battle of the Overpass" resulted in dozens of UAW organisers and activists being beaten and kicked unconscious, their limbs, skulls and backs broken. The Dearborn police — the chief of police was an ex-Ford "serviceman" appointed by the town's mayor, Clyde (cousin of Henry) Ford — stood by and watched.

This battle is just one of the violent episodes recounted in Stephen Norwood's history of strikebreaking and intimidation of trade unions in the United States.

In the first four decades of the 20th century, the toll of murdered and injured unionists at the hands of private mercenary armies, with the passive or active support of police, was immense.

Moving on from amateur beginnings — when university students, Boy Scouts and the YMCA provided the scabs — now the professionals took over. In the years when universities were the exclusive preserve of the privileged classes, students treated a bit of scabbing as a lark and a chance to test their "manhood" in physical battle, but for the "entrepreneurs" who built a lucrative industry devoted to labour spying and the rapid transport of large mercenary armies of strikebreakers it was a serious business.

Expanding on the work of the private detective agencies, such as the Pinkertons, which had been used from the 1860s by large capitalist companies to spy on, and occasionally shoot, their workers, the new private armies upped the violence.

Recruited from the "industrial reserve army" of the desperately unemployed and seasonally employed, from African Americans in the southern states denied access to jobs in the industrialised north and from criminal gangs, these scab armies descended in their thousands on striking workers with Wild West bravado and deadly firepower.

In the street car and subway strikes of the early century, the scab armies chalked up hundreds of casualties in the major cities. In 1907 in San Francisco, 30 strikers were shot dead and 1000 injured as scabs shot to kill strikers and sympathisers attempting to keep scab trams off the rails.

African Americans were easily recruited strike-breaking fodder. Denied jobs in northern industry, ignored by most northern trade union leaders and misled by the southern black elite, scores of thousands of African-American scabs were decisive in breaking the 1904 national meat industry strike, the 1905 teamsters strike in Chicago and the 1919 national steel strike. The teamsters strike was Chicago's most violent strike ever with 21 dead and 400 injured.

US unions had made a rod for their own backs by their failure to unionise African Americans. Many unions discriminated against African Americans in closed-shop industries and, where the unions did have African-American members, they were segregated.

However, scabbing did not open up employment for African Americans. "Thanks for coming but these jobs remain white" was the attitude of the bosses after a strike was broken. The lesson that unions were essential to African Americans' employment prospects, but that these unions had to be multi-racial to prevent scabbing and division by employers, was finally learnt by the mid-1930s, when, under the radical and non-racial Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the African-American strikebreakers virtually disappeared.

Strikebreaking, violent enough in manufacturing and transport industries, reached military proportions in the mining industry. Scab armies teamed up with police and militia (emergency forces of civilian-soldiers) to smash strikes and repress civil liberties. In West Virginia, Baldwin-Felts detectives ("more numerous than mosquitoes in a southern swamp") broke up gatherings of more than three people. Newspaper offices sympathetic to the union were destroyed.

Mine-owners in Pennsylvania armed their own Coal and Iron Police, licensed by the Pennsylvania police. Scabs, detectives, company cops and state cops went on a rampage of violence, brutality, sexual abuse and rape. Tent colonies of striking miners evicted from their homes in company towns were terrorised and shot at.

Ludlow, Colorado, 1913; Calumet, Michigan, 1913; Matewan, West Virginia, 1920 — these icons of employer and state savagery arose murderously from US class history.

Another ghoulish glow comes from Henry Ford, much-honoured in the corporate hall of infamy, and his innocuous-sounding Service Department "dedicated to the suppression of unionism through physical intimidation and espionage".

One in every 25 Ford employees was a strikebreaking goon. Ford was the last of the major car companies to be unionised (in 1945) thanks to the brutality and spying of the "servicemen" who prowled the plants looking for "slackers" and unionists, sacking suspects at will and killing and maiming when needed.

Dubbed "Ford's Gestapo" by the UAW-CIO, they killed four people and wounded 28 in a UAW-Unemployed Council march on the Dearborn Ford plant in 1932. No "serviceman" was ever arrested in their decade-long (1932-41) violence against unionists.

Ford's rivals were not disgraced when it came to anti-union thuggery. General Motors was Pinkertons' largest client and they used armed vigilantes to oppose the unions, including the Black Legion (the largest US fascist group in the 1930s) recruited from the Ku Klux Klan. The black-robed fascists killed or arranged for "accidents" to happen to union organisers; they bombed UAW offices and the homes of strikers.

GM and Chrysler spies infiltrated the unions. Stool-pigeons and informers, coerced from among financially stressed workers under threat of losing their jobs, made life precarious for unionised workers.

Yet, in spite of all the spying and violence, unions triumphed in the battle for recognition and the democratic right of workers to combine to defend their living standards and employment rights. The unions countered the violence and intimidation with massive solidarity.

The UAW, for example, created flying squadrons, large mobile groups of unionists and sympathisers who supplied morale and physical protection for besieged picket lines. The Women's Emergency Brigade — drawn from relatives, wives and supporters of auto unionists — was often in the thick of the fighting.

Mass pickets of tens of thousands turned the occupied car factories of the magnificent sit-down strikes of 1936-37 into impregnable fortresses, ensuring that production lines stayed idle and the police neutralised, prompting the car barons to sue for peace.

After decades of violence and spying, the unions were victorious against the "right" of profit to rule roughshod over the creators of that wealth — the working class. Mercenary muscle was used by the US capitalist class to defend monotonous and physically exhausting production line labour, insecure and irregular jobs, 15-minute lunchbreaks, and at Ford, the right of "servicemen" to follow workers to the toilet to inspect the pan to make sure they were not skiving off work.

Violence never quite disappeared from the US capitalist class' anti-union arsenal after the 1930s, particularly in the south, but most shooting is now done by video to build dossiers on individuals for blacklisting.

Intimidation has become more sophisticated with "permanent replacement workers" used in 20% of strikes in the 1980s, as strikers were permanently sacked and replaced with scabs, a move pioneered by US President Ronald Reagan when he sacked 13,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1982.

Tony Abbott wants to return to the era of feudal employment relations in a union-free world, and employer and state violence is still rife against unions in the Third World. The lessons provided by the union struggles for existence in the US earlier this century remain valuable tools to oppose today's union-busters.

From Green Left Weekly, August 14, 2002.
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