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:
“The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and by that right, he has forged chains around his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, of everything, except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“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)
“It is easy to lose confidence in our natural ability to raise children. The true techniques for raising children are simple: Be with them, play with them, talk to them. You are not squandering their time no matter what the latest child development books say about “purposeful play” and “cognitive learning skills.””
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)