When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (original) (raw)
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe, North America and large areas of the globe experienced labour unrest and multiple strike waves, some of which developed a quasi-revolutionary momentum. Although considerable research has been done on the formation of labour movements and on the social, economic and institutional realities of labour conflicts, rather less attention has been paid to the repressive policies and practices of employers, and of local and national state authorities. In response to the steady growth of socialism and a renewed burst of revolutionary fears, exacerbated by the long drawn-out effects of economic competition, industrial firms and corporations increasingly resorted to the employment of paramilitary units, special police, vigilantes, professional strikebreakers and private detective agencies against organized labour and in the protection of their assets and investments. These groups typically operated on the frontiers between the legal and the extra-legal, drawing their strength from the language of the law, but often stepping outside it to carry out acts of violence, intimidation, and subversion. The ERC-funded research project PREWarAs hosted by the University of Padua, the University of Oxford Faculty of History and the Oxford Centre for European History (OCEH) invite scholars, at any stage of their academic career, to submit their abstract for a conference devoted to a comparative and transnational examination of industrial vigilantism, strikebreaking and labour violence in the
Introduction. Strikebreaking and industrial vigilantism as a historical problem
Corporate Policing, Yellow Unionism, and Strikebreaking, 1890–1930, 2021
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe, the United States and large areas of the globe experienced labour unrest and multiple strike waves at an unprecedented pace and intensity, some of which developed a quasi-revolutionary momentum. From the bitter conflicts of the pre-war period, through the epochal tremors of war and revolution, to the violent spasms of the 1920s and 1930s, a sense of impending cataclysm, symbiotically associated with fears of revolutionary upheaval and forebodings of social anarchy, ceaselessly haunted those who had assumed the role of guardians of the established order. While much work has been devoted to socialist parties and revolutionary organisations, the multifaceted experiences of anti-labour mobilisation and privately organised coercion have not received the same degree of scholarly attention.
Employers' Organisation and Strikebreaking in Britian, 1880–1914
International Review of Social History, 1984
The historical development of employers' associations and the role these organisations played in strikebreaking has been considerably neglected in industrial-relations history. With a few notable recent exceptions, research has tended to concentrate on the development and struggles of the organisations of men, rather than the masters. This is partly the result of the secrecy and anonymity of employers' associations and their reluctance to allow access to their records or to attract media interest, and partly because the defensive and conservative attitudes and policies of employers' organisations have proved less attractive to historians than the more militant political and social theories that lie at the foundation of trade-union policy. In particular, the strikebreaking activities of employers and their organisations were not widely publicised. As a result, this whole emotive area is shrouded in exaggeration, sensationalism, distortion and the propagation of myths by b...
International Review of Social History, 2009
SummaryThe decades between the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the post-World- War-II institutionalization of organized labor in the US have been impressionistically characterized by labor scholars as the most violent and bloody to be found in any Western, democratic nation. A variety of different forms of labor repression have been identified and studied. Yet because of a lack of systematic data, none have been able to examine directly the incidence and contours of the ultimate form of violent repression in collective contention. We create the conceptual space for pursuing bloodshed and a new data set featuring deaths resulting from labor strikes as a new and promising direction in the American exceptionalism debate and in studies of comparative strikes. Through a painstaking search of the historical record, we produce the first systematic quantitative gauge of striking deaths between 1870 and 1970. These data permit a mapping of fatalities resulting from labor strikes across time...