Espionage Exposed

Published last autumn by Bobbs-Merrill Co. was a $2.50 volume called Labor Spy, purporting to be the autobiography of a crack operative who spent 20 years at his trade. Apparently he found it healthy to retire to a Canadian farm to write under his old detective agency designation GT-99. The book was a hair-raising success story of how a good machinist broke into the spy business writing daily reports on his fellow workmen, advanced to union-busting, then settled down in a midwest industrial centre to bore into the local labor movement in behalf of the manufacturers. In time he got to be a cynical official of the city's Central Labor Union, an evil power in State A. F. of L. affairs, and served as a delegate to the historic 1935 A. F. of L. convention in Atlantic City where John L. Lewis bolted. . . .

Last week the background, if not the detail, of this horrendous story was confirmed by a report of Senator Robert M. La Follette's Civil Liberties Committee. From nine volumes of testimony on labor espionage elicited in the Committee's hearings last year, Senator La Follette concluded that it was a "common, almost universal practice in American industry. . . . Large corporations rely on spies. No firm is too small to employ them. The habit has even infected the labor relations of non-commercial philanthropic organizations [like hospitals]."

Intended as it was to be a primer on the profession, Senator La Follette appended to the report a glossary of such technical terms as "fink" (strikebreaker), "noble" (commander of a strikebreaking squad), "missionary" (spreader of anti-union propaganda, especially among workers' wives), "hooker" (spies who tempt workers to become spies). But the report's dynamite was a list of some 2,500 U. S. companies found as clients of detective agencies. "The list, as a whole," the report observed, "reads like a bluebook of American industry."

Promptly the protests started to pour in to Senator La Follette's office. In some cases at least the dapper little heir to the Wisconsin Progressive machine had apparently stuck his neck way out. The list had been compiled in large measure from questionnaires sent out to detective agencies. And some of their clients had used detectives, not for labor espionage, but for such humdrum matters as the discovery of petty pilferers.

In general, however, Senator La Follette appeared to be safe in the assumption that the hiring of industrial detectives was for labor work unless proved otherwise. He reported that no less than 304 Pinkerton operatives were admitted union members, about one-third union officials. One had bored his way to the vice-presidency of a national union, 14 were presidents of locals, eight were local vice presidents, 20 local secretaries, and the rest in positions varying from organizers to central labor union delegates. And the Pinkertons were active in 93 national and international unions. Reported by the Committee was the remark of a labor leader: "There is no gathering of union members large enough to be called a meeting that is small enough to exclude a spy." And Herman Weckler, up-from-the-ranks vice president & general manager of Chrysler & De Soto Corp., testified that labor espionage had been existing for years. "It is a practice we have grown up with."

The Pinkertons shared honors in the report with General Motors Corp., which sorrowfully reiterated last week that it had abandoned labor espionage last year. Said the report: "The example of General Motors Corp. is amazing and terrifying in the picture it presents of management caught in a hopeless mass of corruption and distrust." In two-and-a-half years General Motors paid nearly $1,000,000 for spy service. The plant managers began by hiring spies for their own use. Over this was a superstructure of espionage built by personnel managers of Fisher Body and Chevrolet. Then the top general management contracted secretly for still another spy service. By this time even the Pinkerton officials were "bewildered." But the payoff came when General Motors realized that the horde of spies had opened the corporation to leaks in trade and design secrets. Whereupon spy was set to spy on spy.

Not the least startling fact was that some of the General Motors Pinkertons had been used to shadow Edward F. McGrady, then Assistant Secretary of Labor, who was attempting to mediate the Toledo Chevrolet strike in 1935. Among their duties was to eavesdrop on Mr. McGrady's confidential conferences with the strikers. In Flint, Mich., where spies on the executive board had smashed a federal Union of Automobile Workers, reducing membership from 20,000 to 120 in two years, United Automobile Workers organizers found the community in such fear of espionage that an organizing meeting for Polish workers had to advertise as a lecture on Poland.

Said the La Follette report: "Not only is the worker's freedom of association nullified by employer's spies but his freedom of action, of speech and assembly is completely destroyed. Fear harries his every footstep, caution muffles his words. He is in no sense any longer a free American. In a constitutional sense his very position reflects the mockery and contempt which those who demand constitutional rights for themselves deny to others. . . ."

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