Barb
Carpe Scrotum
There's just one problem with this:
Unions since the Jimmy Hoffa days have been nothing more than cudgels... they're trying to fix the problems they have with their employers with brute force rather than precision.
Unions used to mean something. Now they're just weapons.
Unions were more violent in the past than they are now.
Because to survive against the government and the Pinkerton thugs they had to be:
Telling Secrets Out of School: Siringo on the Pinkertons
In the following passage from Two Evil Isms, Siringo (who, even when alienated from the Pinkertons, never displayed any sympathy for the labor movement) described how he infiltrated and undermined miners' unions in northern Idaho during the 1892 Coeur dAlene strike.
Pinkerton Detective Agency
And they aren't history, by any means:
"Pinkertons at the CPA" by Matthew Harwood
On Jan. 4, labor union leader Hadi Saleh returned to his Baghdad home after work. Five masked men laid in wait. After he entered, they jumped him, blind-folded him, and bound his hands and feet. The intruders beat and burnt Saleh on his torso and head and then choked him to death with an electrical cord. Before they left, the men strafed Saleh's body with bullets. His membership files were ransacked. This wasn't everyday violence. Saleh was, at the time of his death, international secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) and a strong player in Iraq's born-again labor movement once crushed by Saddam Hussein. The labor leader's killers are widely suspected to be remnants of Hussein's secret police, the Mukhabarat. Saleh's slaying was the most high-profile attack on Iraqi labor officials, many of whom continue to be kidnapped and killed with impunity by the insurgents. In recent months, two more trade unionists have been murdered, one while he was walking home with his children.
In 1912 Charlie Siringo published a book, A Cowboy Detective: A True Story of Twenty-Two Years With A World-Famous Detective Agency, where he claimed that James McParland had ordering him to commit voter fraud in the re-election attempt of Colorado Governor James Peabody. This view is supported by historian Mary Joy Martin who argued in The Corpse On Boomerang Road (2004): "McParland would stop at nothing to take down (unions such as the Western Federation of Miners) because he believed his authority came from "Divine Providence." To carry out God's Will meant he was free to break laws and lie until every man he judged evil was hanging on the gallows. Since his days in Pennsylvania he was comfortable lying under oath. In the Haywood trial and the Adams trials, he lied frequently, even claiming he never joined the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Documents showed he had."
Charlie Siringo, who had worked for more than twenty years under James McParland in the Pinkerton's western division based in Denver, claimed that the agency had been guilty of "jury tampering, fabricated confessions, false witnesses, bribery, intimidation, and hiring killers for its clients... Documents and time sustained many of his assertions."
In the summer of 1917, Frank Little was helping organize workers in the metal mines of Montana. This included leading a strike of miners working for the Anaconda Company. In the early hours of 1st August, 1917, six masked men broke into Little's hotel room in Butte. He was beaten up, tied by the rope to a car, and dragged out of town, where he was lynched. A note: "First and last warning" was pinned to his chest. No serious attempt was made by the police to catch Little's murderers. It is not known if he was killed for his anti-war views or his trade union activities.
Copper Trust to the Press: "It's all right, pal; just tell
them he was a traitor." Solidarity (11th August, 1917)
Under today's laws, and hopefully those will be a sad and shameful footnote in our history, the labor unions that gave us and our children SO much would be considered terrorists. Why? because then, like now, they challenged the "people" who WROTE the fucking law. During the Great Depression the American people were brought to understand in no uncertain terms WHAT caused and profited from their misery. Because of that time the founders original cautions against conglomerate power of government were remembered, and corporations had to wage a PR campaign (helped by government infrastructure and funding) to retool their image as a public GOOD.
They weren't mind you.
They STILL aren't.