Who Are Labor Spies?
In The Detective Business, Robin Dunbar observed,
A spy's business is to deceive his victim, to gain his confidence, to learn his secrets and plans and then to betray him. A sleuth's life is a lie. He is both Judas and Ananias. (1909)
Labor spies are usually agents employed by corporations, or hired through the services of union busting agencies, for the purpose of monitoring, disempowering, subverting, or destroying labor unions, or undermining actions taken by those unions.
| The scope of this topic is quite broad, encompassing a considerable amount of history and a variety of circumstances. | |
| Guard services — Labor spying frequently coincided with, complemented, and facilitated guard services. These two activities of the "labor discipline" agencies must necessarily be discussed together. | |
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| Industrial espionage — Corporations may employ agents for purposes of industrial espionage or sabotage against other corporations. While interesting, such policies or practices are beyond the scope of this article. | |
| Government programs — Government-initiated programs of infiltration, spying, or sabotage such as COINTELPRO may seem similar in many ways, but are also not considered in this article. We are particularly concerned with spying on labor organizations that is conducted by, or for the benefit of, private corporations, or spying conducted by unions, carried out against corporations, against other unions, or against union membership. | |
| Geographic region — If this topic seems somewhat U.S.-centric, that may not be surprising. The book From Blackjacks to Briefcases states that only in the United States has the struggle between management and labor resulted in such a contingent of mercenaries who specialize in breaking strikes. However, even if labor spies have been less common in other countries, their stories are important to balance this history. | |
| About this article — This article is primarily about spies hired during struggles between unions and corporations, or between competing unions. |
"capitalizes the employer's ignorance and prejudice and enters the specifically to identify the leaders of the Labor organization, to propagandize against them and blacklist them and to disrupt and corrupt their union. He is under cover, disguised as a worker, hired to betray the workers' cause."
Labor spies may be referred to as spies, operatives, agents, agents provocateurs, saboteurs, infiltrators, informants, spotters, plants, special police, or detectives. However, Dr. Richard C. Cabot, Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard, observed that labor spies are different from our normal view of detectives. While detectives investigate people suspected of crimes, the labor spy shadows and spies upon people who are not suspected of having committed any crime, nor are they suspected of planning any crime. During the mid-to-late-19th century, a period during which there was intense distaste for the detective profession, the Pinkerton and Thiel detective agencies referred to their field agents as operatives or testers. The Pinkerton logo inspired the expression private eye.
Operatives employed for labor spying may be professional, recruited from the public, or recruited from members of a particular workforce for a specific operation such as strike breaking. They may be directly employed by the company, or they may report to the company through an agency.
Some agencies that provide such operatives to corporations offer full protective and union busting services, such as security guards, training, providing weaponry (including, historically, machine guns), intelligence gathering, research, and strike-breaker recruitment services. Other agencies are more specialized.
Both the spy agencies and the companies that employ labor spies prefer to keep their activities secret. Curiously, some labor leaders have likewise sought to downplay the extent of industrial spying. This, in spite of the fact that "industrial spies have played both sides against each other, and have been at the bottom of a great deal of the violence and corruption of industrial conflict."
The companies seek to avoid embarrassment and bad public relations. The spy agencies also concern themselves with "possible danger attendant upon discovery, and second, because the operative is thereafter a marked man ... his usefulness to the Agency is ended." Therefore, actual labor spy reports, and even records of their existence, are a rare commodity.
Corporations are not subject to freedom of information requirements or sunshine laws, and therefore corporate practices such as spying are rarely subject to public scrutiny. However, historic examples of labor spying that have come to light provide a fairly substantive overview.
Read more about this topic: Labor Spies
Famous quotes containing the word labor:
“I think it is a wise course for laborers to unite to defend their interests.... I think the employer who declines to deal with organized labor and to recognize it as a proper element in the settlement of wage controversies is behind the times.... Of course, when organized labor permits itself to sympathize with violent methods or undue duress, it is not entitled to our sympathy.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)