Labor Spy Techniques
A letter from the Burns Detective Agency declared to the employer, "ithin the heart of your business is where we operate, down in the dark corners, in out-of-the-way places that cannot be seen from your office..."
| “ | To stop a union proponent—a pusher, in the anti-union lexicon—the buster will go anywhere, not just to the lunch room, but into the bedroom if necessary. The buster not only is a terrorist; he is also a spy. My team and I routinely pried into workers' police records, personnel files, credit histories, medical records, and family lives in search of a weakness that we could use to discredit union activists. | ” |
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- Martin Jay Levitt, 1993, Confessions of a Union Buster
Labor spies may employ techniques of surreptitious monitoring, "missionary" work, sabotage, provoking chaos or violence, frameups, intimidation, or insinuating themselves into positions of authority from which they may alter the basic goals of an organization. A National Labor Relations Board chairman testified about the results of these techniques:
The mystery and deadly certainty with which this scheme 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.
As one example of the impact of spying, a union local at the Underwood Elliot Fisher Company plant was so damaged by undercover operatives that membership dropped from more than twenty-five hundred, to fewer than seventy-five.
Read more about this topic: Labor Spies
Famous quotes containing the words labor, spy and/or techniques:
“It’s not the suffering of birth, death, love that the young reject, but the suffering of endless labor without dream, eating the spare bread in bitterness, being a slave without the security of a slave.”
—Meridel Le Sueur (b. 1900)
“Living, just by itself—what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom’s the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you’ve got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that’s terribly exciting—or he’ll come along and nibble your brain.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)