Post by Judge Sam on Jul 21, 2009 22:16:08 GMT -5
There are still a bunch of extra flavor materials I found before the game started that I want to share with you all. I won't be able to arrange them into summarized stories with pictures but you should check them out if you're interested, maybe read one a day or something.
This is a newspaper article about a battle between Colorado miners union and the mine owners. Was tons of these in the 1900s and this one is pretty interesting.
It's not just the US that is being affected by evil union busters. The practice has spread through the rest of the western world. This is a report from a British agency documenting some of the scariest things from US union busters and how it is spreading to their shores.
A National Labor Relations Board chairman testified about the results of these union busting techniques:
The mystery and deadly certainty with which this scheme [labor spying] operated was so baffling to the men that they each suspected the others, were afraid to meet or to talk and the union was completely broken.
A labor spy observed, "Those labor unions were so hot, crying about spies, that everything was at fever pitch and they look at each other with blood in their eyes."
[youtube]Once in a while, a worker is impeccable. So some consultants resort to lies. To fell the sturdiest union supporters in the 1970s, I frequently launched rumors that the targeted worker was gay or was cheating on his wife. It was a very effective technique... ”
Martin Jay Levitt, 1993, Confessions of a Union Buster[/youtube]
Pinkerton operatives drove out all but five officers in a United Auto Workers local in Lansing, Michigan. The remaining five were Pinkertons.
Bill Haywood, a leader of the WFM and the IWW during the period 1899-1918, offered an opinion indicative of the growing frustration of union leaders:
A detective is the lowest, meanest and most contemptible thing that either creeps or crawls, a thing to loathe and despise. ... That you may know how small a detective is, you can take a hair and punch the pith out of it and in the hollow hair you can put the hearts and souls of 40,000 detectives and they will still rattle. You can pour them out on the surface of your thumbnail and the skin of a gnat will make an umbrella for them.
When a detective dies, he goes so low that he has to climb a ladder to get into Hell— and he is not a welcome guest there. When his Satanic Majesty sees him coming, he says to his imps, "Go get a big bucket of pitch and a lot of sulphur, give them to that fellow and put him outside. Let him start a Hell of his own. We don't want him in here, starting trouble."
In 1944, historian J. Bernard Hogg, surveying the history of labor spying, observed that Pinkerton agents were secured "by advertising, by visiting United States recruiting offices for rejectees, and by frequenting water fronts where men were to be found going to sea as a last resort of employment,"[54] and that "[to] labor they were a 'gang of toughs and ragtails and desperate men, mostly recruited by Pinkerton and his officers from the worst elements of the community.'"