Pearl Louis Bergoff (April 23, 1875 or 1878-August 11, 1947) [1] [2] [3] was an American strikebreaker noted for violent tactics from the early 1900s through the 1930s.
Bergoff was born in Detroit, Michigan. [4] His birth date is given as April 23, 1875 in his 1918 draft registration and a 1920 passport application and the same date in 1878 in a 1924 passport application. [1] [2] [3] At his death in 1947, The New York Times reported that he gave his age to the hospital as 62, but that other sources indicated he was 68. [4] He was named Pearl because his mother wanted a girl. [5]
His father Julius, who was born in Germany, [1] [2] was an itinerant fish-trader and land speculator, and abandoned the family when Bergoff was 13. [6]
Bergoff worked as a spotter on the Metropolitan Street Railway in Manhattan. His job was to watch conductors to verify that they recorded all the fares they accepted.[ citation needed ] He opened the Vigilant Detective Agency in 1905. [5]
Bergoff was in the employ of strikebreaker James A. Farley (1874–1913) in 1906, working as the bodyguard to Stanford White, when White was murdered by Harry Kendall Thaw at Madison Square Garden. By selling his diary of the sensational crime to the New York World , Bergoff raised the money to fund the company founded with his brother Leo, the Bergoff Brothers Strike Service and Labor Adjusters, [7] which was established in 1907, with offices in the Schubert Building at 39th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. [5]
The company's early strikebreaking actions were characterized by extreme violence. A 1907 strike of garbage cart drivers resulted in numerous confrontations between strikers and the strikebreakers, even when protected by police escorts. Strikers sometimes pelted the strikebreakers with rocks, bottles, and bricks launched from tenement rooftops. [8] When longshoremen went on strike in 1907, the steamship companies hired Bergman, who brought in black and Italian immigrant strikebreakers. Bergoff relied on thugs from the Monk Eastman gang to "ride herd on the assembled scabs." [5]
In 1909, the Pressed Steel Car Company at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, fired forty men, and eight thousand employees representing sixteen nationalities walked out under the banner of the Industrial Workers of the World. The company hired Bergoff's agency, who in turn hired strikebreaking toughs from the Bowery, and shipped vessels filled with unsuspecting immigrant workers directly into the strike zone. Other immigrant strikebreakers were delivered in boxcars, and were not fed during a two-day period. Later they worked, ate, and slept in a barn with two thousand other men. Their meals consisted of cabbage and bread. [9]
At the end of August a gun battle erupted, leaving six dead, six dying, and fifty wounded. Public sympathy began to swing away toward the strikers. There were violent confrontations between strikers and strikebreakers, but also between strikebreakers and guards when terrified workers demanded the right to leave. One Austro-Hungarian immigrant who managed to escape informed his government that workers were being held against their will, resulting in an international incident. In addition to kidnapping, strikebreakers complained of deception, broken promises about wages, and tainted food. [10]
Early in September the company acknowledged defeat and negotiated with the strikers. Twenty-two had died in the strike. But Bergoff's business was not hurt by the defeat; he boasted of having as many as ten thousand strikebreakers on his payroll. He was getting paid as much as $2,000,000 per strikebreaking job by large industrial clients. [11]
Even before the strike was over, [12] and then in more detail in 1911, the strikebreakers appeared before federal panels to describe their own living and working conditions after they were brought to the conflict. [13] Held inside the plant or in boxcars against their will, fleeced, stolen from, physically threatened, and given rotten food, one hearing witness collapsed and was diagnosed with ptomaine poisoning. [12] By August 28, 200 of the strikebreakers had responded by banding together in their own improvised union. They had quit work and were camping on the nearby banks of the Ohio River in an attempt to collect back wages, naming Chief of Police Farrell of the Coal and Iron Police and Pearl Bergoff's lieutenant Sam Cohen as those most responsible. Lawyer for the strikebreakers was the ambitious William N. McNair, who alleged that this treatment amounted to peonage. (McNair would later serve one term as Mayor of Pittsburgh in 1934.)
During these hearings, Bergoff explained that "musclemen" under his employ would "get... any graft that goes on", suggesting that was to be expected "on every big job." Other testimony indicated that Bergoff's "right-hand man", described as "huge in stature, weighing perhaps 240 pounds", surrounded himself with thirty-five guards who intimidated and fleeced the strikebreakers, locking them into a boxcar prison with no sanitation facilities when they defied orders. [14]
Bergoff settled in Bayonne, New Jersey, built the biggest office building in the city (which still stands), and sent strikebreakers to the Bayonne refinery strikes of 1915–1916. [ citation needed ] He was hired to break a strike at the Erie Railroad in 1920, for which he was paid $2 million. He also broke strikes of street cleaners and the Interborough Rapid Transit and Brooklyn Rapid Transit in New York City. [4]
Bergoff once said that he had earned $10 million, and his annual salary from 1914 to 1924 was reputed to have been $100,000, plus dividends of $200,000 to $400,000. [4]
Bergoff's business declined around 1923. He went into the land business in Florida, then returned to New Jersey and strikebreaking around 1930 with renewed success. [6] A sympathetic article in the January 1935 Fortune lists a few of the "172 strike jobs" Bergoff's firm had handled, with notes such as "1907, Munson Steamship Line stevedores. First fatality" and "1910, Philadelphia Rapid Transit, motormen, conductors. Streetcar strikes are most fun; strikebreakers pocket fares."
In September 1934, Bergoff was hired in response to a textile workers strike in Georgia and duly took two-hundred men to the South. When Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge found out that Bergoff and his men were in the state, he had the Georgia National Guard detain and deport them to New York. [15]
In December 1935 Bergoff was the subject of a book-length exposé by the labor editor of the New York Post, Edward Levinson. The book was called I Break Strikes!. Labor leader Walter Reuther credited this examination of Bergoff's practices as a major impetus to the creation of the La Follette Committee. [16]
Bergoff's involvement in the violent Remington Rand strike of 1936–1937 resulted in his program of anti-union activities, the "Bergoff Technique", being republished and repackaged as the Mohawk Valley formula. [6] It also resulted in the federal indictments of James Rand Jr. and Bergoff for violation of the 1936 Byrnes Act prohibiting the movement of strikebreakers across state lines.
Both men were acquitted on November 18, 1937. But it would be his last major engagement. With his business model outlawed, and his private detective license subsequently revoked by the state of New York, Bergoff retired from public view.
He died on August 11, 1947, in New York City. He was survived by his wife, Libby, a son and a daughter. [4]
Pinkerton is a private security guard and detective agency established around 1850 in the United States by Scottish-born American cooper Allan Pinkerton and Chicago attorney Edward Rucker as the North-Western Police Agency, which later became Pinkerton & Co, and finally the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. It is currently a subsidiary of Swedish-based Securitas AB.
Union violence is violence committed by unions or union members during labor disputes. When union violence has occurred, it has frequently been in the context of industrial unrest. Violence has ranged from isolated acts by individuals to wider campaigns of organized violence aimed at furthering union goals within an industrial dispute.
A strikebreaker is a person who works despite a strike. Strikebreakers are usually individuals who were not employed by the company before the trade union dispute but hired after or during the strike to keep the organization running. Strikebreakers may also refer to workers who cross picket lines to work.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1922, commonly known as the Railway Shopmen's Strike, was a nationwide strike of railroad workers in the United States. Launched on July 1, 1922, by seven of the sixteen railroad labor organizations in existence at the time, the strike continued into the month of August before collapsing. A sweeping judicial injunction by Judge James Herbert Wilkerson effectively brought the strike to an end on September 1, 1922.
In the United States Senate, the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, or more formally, Committee on Education and Labor, Subcommittee Investigating Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor (1936–1941), began as an inquiry into a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) investigation of methods used by employers in certain industries to avoid collective bargaining with unions.
There were two related incidents between miners and mine owners in the Coeur d'Alene Mining District of North Idaho: the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho labor strike of 1892, and the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho labor confrontation of 1899. This article is a brief overview of both events.
Union busting is a range of activities undertaken to disrupt or prevent the formation of trade unions or their attempts to grow their membership in a workplace.
The Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike, or the Paint Creek Mine War, was a confrontation between striking coal miners and coal operators in Kanawha County, West Virginia, centered on the area enclosed by two streams, Paint Creek and Cabin Creek.
The Westmoreland County coal strike of 1910–1911, or the Westmoreland coal miners' strike, was a strike by coal miners represented by the United Mine Workers of America. The strike is also known as the Slovak Strike because about 70 percent of the miners were Slovak immigrants. It began in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and ended on July 1, 1911. At its height, the strike encompassed 65 mines and 15,000 coal miners. Sixteen people were killed during the strike, nearly all of them striking miners or members of their families. The strike ended in defeat for the union.
The Remington Rand strike of 1936–1937 was a strike by a federal union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) against the Remington Rand company. The strike began in May 1936 and ended in April 1937, although the strike settlement would not be fully implemented until mid-1940.
Labor spying in the United States had involved people recruited or employed for the purpose of gathering intelligence, committing sabotage, sowing dissent, or engaging in other similar activities, in the context of an employer/labor organization relationship. Spying by companies on union activities has been illegal in the United States since the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. However, non-union monitoring of employee activities while at work is perfectly legal and, according to the American Management Association, nearly 80% of major US companies actively monitor their employees.
The Mohawk Valley formula is a plan for strikebreaking purportedly written by the president of the Remington Rand company James Rand, Jr. around the time of the Remington Rand strike at Ilion, New York in 1936/37.
The history of union busting in the United States dates back to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution produced a rapid expansion in factories and manufacturing capabilities. As workers moved from farms to factories, mines and other hard labor, they faced harsh working conditions such as long hours, low pay and health risks. Children and women worked in factories and generally received lower pay than men. The government did little to limit these conditions. Labor movements in the industrialized world developed and lobbied for better rights and safer conditions. Shaped by wars, depressions, government policies, judicial rulings, and global competition, the early years of the battleground between unions and management were adversarial and often identified with aggressive hostility. Contemporary opposition to trade unions known as union busting started in the 1940s, and continues to present challenges to the labor movement. Union busting is a term used by labor organizations and trade unions to describe the activities that may be undertaken by employers, their proxies, workers and in certain instances states and governments usually triggered by events such as picketing, card check, worker organizing, and strike actions. Labor legislation has changed the nature of union busting, as well as the organizing tactics that labor organizations commonly use.
The 1892 Coeur d'Alene labor strike erupted in violence when labor union miners discovered they had been infiltrated by a Pinkerton agent who had routinely provided union information to the mine owners. The response to the labor violence, disastrous for the local miners' union, became the primary motivation for the formation of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) the following year. The incident marked the first violent confrontation between the workers of the mines and their owners. Labor unrest continued after the 1892 strike, and surfaced again in the labor confrontation of 1899.
The Pressed Steel Car strike of 1909, also known as the 1909 McKees Rocks strike, was an American labor strike which lasted from July 13 through September 8. The walkout drew national attention when it climaxed on Sunday August 22 in a bloody battle between strikers, private security agents, and the Pennsylvania State Police. At least 12 people died, and perhaps as many as 26. The strike was the largest and most significant industrial labor dispute in the Pittsburgh area since the famous 1892 Homestead strike and was a precursor to the Great Steel Strike of 1919.
Anti-union violence is physical force intended to harm union officials, union organizers, union members, union sympathizers, or their families. It is most commonly used either during union organizing efforts, or during strikes. The aim most often is to prevent a union from forming, to destroy an existing union, or to reduce the effectiveness of a union or a particular strike action. If strikers prevent people or goods to enter or leave a workplace, violence may be used to allow people and goods to pass the picket line.
The San Francisco streetcar strike of 1907 was among the most violent of the streetcar strikes in the United States between 1895 and 1929. Before the end of the strike, thirty-one people had been killed and about 1100 injured.
The Battle of Virden, also known as the Virden Mine Riot and Virden Massacre, was a labor union conflict and a racial conflict in central Illinois that occurred on October 12, 1898. After a United Mine Workers of America local struck a mine in Virden, Illinois, the Chicago-Virden Coal Company hired armed detectives or security guards to accompany African-American strikebreakers to start production again. An armed conflict broke out when the train carrying these men arrived at Virden. Strikers were also armed: a total of five detective/security guards and eight striking mine workers were killed, with five guards and more than thirty miners wounded. In addition, at least one black strikebreaker on the train was wounded. The engineer was shot in the arm. This was one of several fatal conflicts in the area at the turn of the century that reflected both labor union tension and racial violence. Virden, at this point, became a sundown town, and most black miners were expelled from Macoupin County.
The Bayonne refinery strikes of 1915–1916 were labor actions of refinery workers in Bayonne, New Jersey, mostly Polish-Americans who struck Standard Oil of New Jersey and Tidewater Petroleum plants on Constable Hook beginning in mid-July 1915.
Anti-union violence in the United States is physical force intended to harm union officials, union organizers, union members, union sympathizers, or their families. It has most commonly been used either during union organizing efforts, or during strikes. The aim most often is to prevent a union from forming, to destroy an existing union, or to reduce the effectiveness of a union or a particular strike action. If strikers prevent people or goods to enter or leave a workplace, violence may be used to allow people and goods to pass the picket line.
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