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:: Friday, March 12, 2004 ::

Employers in '30s Were Nastier, But Millions Joined Unions LaborTalk by Harry Kelber
Were employers kinder and gentler in the 1930s when millions of workers from virtually every trade and occupation responded to the call to join a union? Here's a bit of labor history you may not be aware of.

There were more than 100 strikebreaking agencies in the country; on call for any employer faced with 'labor trouble.' They specialized in breaking up picket lines with lead pipes, baseball bats and the butts of rifles. As a labor reporter, I witnessed a group of these goons bloody a picket line of middle-aged waiters during a strike at a famous New York restaurant.

Pearl L. Bergoff, regarded as the 'King of the Strikebreakers,' wrote a popular book, 'I Break Strikes.' He organized some 300 violent union busting attacks on strikers that resulted in 54 deaths, over a long career that began at the turn of the 20th century. One prominent strikebreaker remarked: 'There's more money in industry than in crime.' Bergoff, who raked in millions for his services in major strikes over the years, boasted he was on good terms with many major industrialists.

In 1936-37. the LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee reported the shocking news that major respected corporations had accumulated 'industrial munitions,' such as submachine guns, tear gas, sickening gas, grenades and rifle ammunition, that could be used in industrial disputes.

These weapons were used during the Little Steel strike of 1937, when Youngstown Steel and Tube and Republic Steel employed a uniformed police force of 400 men, equipped with revolvers, rifles and shotguns to shoot at strikers if they did not disperse.

On May 30, 1937, the Chicago police opened fire on picnicking steel strikers and their families near the Republic Steel plant, killing 10 unarmed workers and injuring more than one hundred.

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