Union Violence - Overview

Overview

According to a 1969 study, no major labor organization in American history has ever advocated violence as a policy. However, violence does occur in the context of industrial disputes. When violence has been committed by, or in the name of, the union, it has tended to be narrowly focused upon targets which are associated with the employer in question, or upon others closely associated with the target. If union recognition was extended, an employer was more likely to consider a strike just a temporary rupture in labor relations. Violence was greater in conflicts in which there was a question of whether union recognition would be extended.

Employers and workers have each been on the side of aggressor and victim at different times. The "most virulent" violence in industrial disputes has been committed to deny unions recognition, or to destroy a functioning union.

Union violence most typically occurs in specific situations, and has more frequently been aimed at preventing replacement workers from taking jobs during a strike, than at managers or employers.

Protest and verbal abuse are routinely aimed against union members or replacement workers who cross picket lines ("blacklegs") during industrial disputes. The inherent aim of a union is to create a labor monopoly so as to balance the monopsony a large employer enjoys as a purchaser of labor. Strikebreakers threaten that goal and undermine the union's bargaining position, and occasionally this erupts into violent confrontation, with violence committed either by, or against, strikers. Some who have sought to explain such violence observe, if labor disputes are accompanied by violence, it may be because labor has no legal redress. As early as 1894, workers were declaring,

..."the right of employers to manage their own business to suit themselves," is fast coming to mean in effect nothing less than a right to manage the country to suit themselves.

Occasionally a violent dispute can involve entire unions, when one union breaks another's strike. In 2004, the murder of Keith Frogson in the village of Annesley Woodhouse, Nottinghamshire in England may have been the result of a feud dating from the coal-miner's strike in the 1980s, when Mr Frogson and his alleged killer were members of two opposed unions, the established and militant National Union of Mineworkers and the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers.