The Pinkertons Have a Long, Dark History of Targeting Workers 

No Class is an op-ed column by writer and radical organizer Kim Kelly that connects worker struggles and the current state of the American labor movement with its storied — and sometimes bloodied — past.
Robert A. Pinkerton inspects an office
ullstein bild Dtl.

Labor history is rife with colorful villains. Gilded Age robber barons, craven aristocrats, murderous bosses, and traitorous scabs have long populated workers’ nightmares, but few enemies of the working class have loomed larger than the Pinkertons. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was founded as a private police force in Chicago in 1850, and quickly expanded its reach; its detectives initially focused on catching thieves and burglars, but soon became the bane of the labor movement for their work as enthusiastic, vicious strikebreakers. Throughout the Civil War era and in the decades after, Pinkerton operatives left their bloody mark on strikes, protests, and massacres, and gained a ruthless reputation for protecting the interests of capital by any means necessary. As one newspaper columnist put it, “No man of refined sensibilities would enter the ranks as a hired Hessian of plutocracy, expecting to shoot down his brothers at the command of capital.”

The list of Pinkerton injustices against the working class spans centuries, and as a new report from Motherboard appears to show, the agency is keeping up with the times. The Pinkertons, who are now a subsidiary of Swedish security company Securitas AB, are reportedly cozying up to 2020’s version of the Gilded Age robber baron: Silicon Valley tech bosses like billionaire vampire Jeff Bezos, who has hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to reportedly surveil workers in at least one of Amazon’s European warehouses and infiltrate its worksite, according to documents obtained by the publication. There is a dreadful sort of irony to the idea that today’s innovation-obsessed captains of industry really are taking a page from their Gilded Age forebears by hiring the Pinkertons, and that a plutocrat is still a plutocrat whether he’s wearing a top hat or garish swim trunks. As for the Pinkertons themselves, these former union-busting mercenaries of old are not only alive and well, they appear to have been repurposed into a nightmarish data-driven geek squad. (An Amazon spokesperson acknowledged that the company hired the Pinkertons, but told Motherboard that those workers were used “to secure high-value shipments in transit.” “We do not use our partners to gather intelligence on warehouse workers,” the spokesperson said. “All activities we undertake are fully in line with local laws and conducted with the full knowledge and support of local authorities.")

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In Inventing the Pinkertons; Or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs Being a Story of the Nation’s Most Famous (and Infamous) Detective Agency, S. Paul O’Hara wrote, “the agency was simultaneously a tool for capital, a myth in American folklore, and a manifestation of state power.” Anarchist writer and labor organizer Lucy Parsons put it more bluntly, writing in 1886, “There is a set of men nay, beasts for you! Pinkerton detectives! They would do anything.” That same year, a bomb was thrown into a crowd of workers gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square (and the policemen and Pinkertons surrounding them), and seven anarchists were arrested despite zero evidence linking them to the specific crime. A Pinkerton detective testified at the sham trial that sent Parson’s husband, Albert, and three other anarchists to the gallows, alleging a vast conspiracy.

Seven years later, the Illinois governor pardoned the three living Haymarket anarchists after identifying the police and Pinkertons as unreliable narrators. Shortly before that pardon, the Pinkertons had also taken part in one of the 19th century’s bloodiest labor conflicts, the 1892 Homestead Strike. Steelworkers at robber baron Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, refused to ratify a new union contract that cut their wages, so Carnegie’s agent, the rabidly anti-union Henry Frick, fired all 3,800 of them, and brought in 300 Pinkertons to occupy the property. The workers and Pinkerton detectives fought in a 12-hour gun battle. After three of their own and at least seven workers were killed, the Pinkertons surrendered, but the strike ultimately collapsed.

In recent times, the Pinkertons have tried to leave behind their thuggish image and pivoted toward more white-collar efforts, like “corporate investigations” and “comprehensive risk management,” though their operatives were called in to handle security during a strike in West Virginia in 2018. On its website, the company touts a “proprietary and analytical approach” to corporate surveillance by using “big data and machine learning technology to identify, manage, and mitigate business risk for clients.” In 1936, the U.S. Senate’s La Follette Civil Liberties Committee launched a yearslong investigation into widespread anti-labor practices like industrial espionage and strikebreaking by detective agencies, including the Pinkertons. The following year, Robert Pinkerton II, a great-grandson of the founder, purportedly ended the agency’s anti-union work.

The agency is clearly proud of its history, and to be sure, it has notched a few legitimately impressive wins over the centuries, like spying for the Union during the Civil War, providing support to militant abolitionist John Brown, and foiling an assassination plot against President Abraham Lincoln; but these outstanding events pale in comparison to the great harm the Pinkertons have wrought. Their motto, which floats menacingly beneath an all-seeing eye logo, is “We never sleep.” And the sanitized timeline available on their website is an exercise in deception by omission: For example, the 1855 entry mentions how they specialize in “protecting railroad shipments for several Midwestern railways,” but conveniently skips past the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when Pinkertons worked as infiltrators in a monthslong open conflict that left over 100 people dead. (Teen Vogue has reached out to the Pinkertons for comment).

They proudly note their role in going after Old West outlaws Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, but don’t mention that their operatives were suspected of brutally maiming James’s mother and killing his nine-year-old half-brother in an 1870 raid on James’s house. A few years later, a Pinkerton detective named James McParlan was hired to infiltrate and disrupt the union organizing activities of the Molly Maguires. The Molly Maguires were a secret society of Irish immigrant coal miners who advocated for workers rights, terrorized and even killed foremen and supervisors, and — because they were loath to fight “a rich man’s war” — rebelled against the Civil War draft. Thanks to McParlan’s efforts, a number of Molly Maguires were executed by the state in 1877. According to The New Republic, the Pinkertons were also brought in alongside the Colorado National Guard during the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, in which the guardsmen attacked and set fire to the camp where miners and their families slept. Sixty-six people, many of them women and children, died in the attacks. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say, Pinkerton history is not typical of a “risk management” firm.

And it’s no surprise that the Pinkertons are now working with an Amazon facility in Europe.

Just like their 19th century counterparts, massive tech monopolies have been accused of anti-union and anti-worker activities. Sometimes tech companies go further and just propose and fund their own legislation, as Uber and Lyft did with California’s toxic Proposition 22.

So hiring the literal Pinkertons to reportedly surveil workers reads as just one more volley in the war on the working class. But if there is another lesson we can draw from labor’s past, it’s that the people will only put up with so much before they take action. In the 19th century, they reached for pistols and dynamite; these days, many union battles are waged in court and on the picket lines. On November 20, the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board to represent 1,500 workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. If they win, it will be a historic victory for workers in a state that remains key to the grand project of organizing the South. On Black Friday, Amazon workers in 15 different countries staged a coordinated day of protest. The battle has only begun.

The Pinkertons may never sleep, but the workers have awakened.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: What Socialism Has to Do With the U.S. Labor Movement