23 ms·

Not surprised. Tech companies (Facebook and Google in this case, and probably others) have been known to retain Pinkerton agents to monitor employees. Yes, thos

Not surprised. Tech companies (Facebook and Google in this case, and probably others) have been known to retain Pinkerton agents to monitor employees. Yes, those Pinkertons. “Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company’s campus to eavesdrop on employees’ conversations.” https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-never-sleep https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-neve...

dylan604 6y ago
This is awesome in a very very sad way. Several years ago, I started working for a company that was in the build up to a Yea/Nay vote for joining the union. During that time, 2 "goons" showed up at my apartment to discuss the benefits of joining the union and why not joining would be bad. However, these very "intelligent" goons showed up during the day, you know, working hours where I had a very low chance of being home. I don't know if they were just that dumb, or if they were trying to influence what they thought were family members. Instead, it was my flatmate from England. She told me just laughed at the thought of me joining a union, and not so politely told them to bugger off and closed the door on them. Ultimately, the vote failed miserably. All of that to say, that I'm not surprised that anti-union shenanigans are at the same level as the pro-union shenanigans.
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  What makes you call them goons? Politicians, activists, all sorts of people go door knocking around the time of elections and referendums. What made this interaction so different that you call them goons sent there to intimidate you, not activists trying to attract your vote?
  - MrStonedOne 6y ago
    corpitized unions (anything union organisation bigger then 1 location of 1 employer) are goons.
    - AlexandrB 6y ago
      So what does that make corporations with more than 1 location?
      - MrStonedOne 6y ago
        Each location should have its own union, grouping them all up allows the needs of the few to get drowned out by the wants of the many, and elevates union leadership to a position of power over the workers as union reps have easier access to spread their messaging to employees across locations while normal employees can only organize within their location.
        scarmig 6y ago
        It also significantly decreases negotiating power. The point of unions is that someone small (an individual) has a hard time fairly negotiating with an organization (a company). Multiple small single-site unions would be just as ineffective negotiating with one large multi-site company.
        smnrchrds 6y ago
        Especially since large companies are known for closing down locations as soon as they unionize.
        rumanator 6y ago
        > (...) and elevates union leadership to a position of power over the workers as union reps I don't understand your point. Do you believe that this so called risk of an elected representative getting more power than the people that elected him is overall worse than the people having absolutely no power or representation? I mean, can you explain why in your view leaving an employee SOL is more desirable than ensuring he has some say?
        MrStonedOne 6y ago
        My view is that laws must keep unions from acting in bad faith before forced unions can be allowed to exist. The primary positive effect of a union is its appeals process that keep employers from firing you on a whim. Nothing about that positive effect requires the union be forced upon you, and if unions had to earn their dues they wouldn't act in bad faith as often.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    I used quotes because I was quoting my flatmate. She said their demeanor was not welcoming at all, and it felt very aggressive. I kind of wish I was there just so I could have told them what I thought, but spilled milk and what not.
    - RobertoG 6y ago
      Not saying this is the case, but it occurs to me... that would be a good way to sabotage the start of an union. Just send some aggressive people posing like members of the union.
      - _jal 6y ago
        It is, and there's evidence that has happened in the US. The Pinkertons have been busting unions for over a century - they have pretty much explored the full range of options for worker suppression available to capital. False flags can be a powerful tool (but becoming less so, as surveillance makes deniability harder).
      - refurb 6y ago
        Ahh... of course. Employers use dirty tactics and if unions do, it’s because it’s employers trying to sabotage them. No way a union could ever use dirty tricks too. But of course they might because they were forced to by their employers?
        kergonath 6y ago
        How many documented instances of unionised militants trying to bully workers into joining? History is full of private interests using the full might of the state and any trick they can think of to prevent unions. So yeah, one is more likely than the other.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Union activists in the UK have a reputation of being bullies, and in some cases in the past they've used physical violence to try to get people to do things their way. At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists dropped a concrete block on someone's head from a bridge because he was trying to get into work and they thought he should be striking (David Wilkie.) I would not appreciate union goons showing up at my door and I'd have a similar reaction.
    - dcolkitt 6y ago
      Also at the time that the leader of the NUM, the striking union, was a self-avowed Stalinist.[1] It's hard to overstate the extreme militancy of trade union leadership in the UK during the late 1970s. While Thatcher gets the blame for the disintegration of the labor movement, just as big an issue was that the union leadership no longer represented the opinions of its rank-and-file members. The 1984 miners strike largely failed, because most of the local unions decided not to join. Scargill never put the strike to a membership wide ballot, because he knew it probably wouldn't have passed. Union leadership became more focused on pushing communist ideology than it was on representing its members. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill#Socialist_Labour_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill#Socialist_Labo...
      - kmlx 6y ago
        don't know why you're getting downvoted. this is part of history and one of the many reasons unions have failed in the UK. and they're still failing having lower number of members every single year.
        winphone1974 6y ago
        Probably because of the same sentiment towards rewriting history that's going around now. Rather then learn and move forward lots of people seem to prefer going back in time and judging history through today's lens.
        edent 6y ago
- minimuffins 6y ago
  What union did this?
  - dylan604 6y ago
    In my mind they are all the same. I honestly paid so little attention, I didn't even do the research. Everyone just kept referring to the local, but I don't remember what number. This was 2010 time frame. I've slept (a lot) since then. Edit: Turns out it was IATSE
- alecb 6y ago
  I'm impressed by how low-quality this anti-union astroturf bot is. If you have sentience, how much did someone pay for you on Fiverr?
  - dylan604 6y ago
    Are you suggesting I'm a bot? You are incorrect. Thanks for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you back stage.
  - dencodev 6y ago
    HN is not the best platform to from anti-capitalism sentiments. There's a lot of privilege here and it makes people pretty blind to how awful capitalism is (and the things it creates, like anti-union sentiment).
    - colinmhayes 6y ago
      Yes, capitalism is awful, but it's by far the best idea we've got.
      - beeboop 6y ago
        Please, go on and continue the propaganda about how socialism and communism doesn't work. Please point to failed nations/states that had communism and explain how they failed due to communism and that it definitely wasn't anything else.
        dforrestwilson 6y ago
        What are you suggesting?
        colinmhayes 6y ago
        Becoming a communist state is impossible. The leader of the socialist state won't let it happen. Power corrupts, why should we be putting more power in the hands of the state in hopes that one day it will relinquish it?
- toiletfuneral 6y ago
  wow you poor scab, I'm sure the grateful shareholders will reward your loyalties
- drspacemonkey 6y ago
  I wouldn't be so quick to jump to the conclusion that they were _actually_ union. They may very well have been. But companies have a long, proud history of playing VERY dirty tricks in response to unionization. A former boss of mine once bragged about how he killed a union effort at a previous job. He worked a corporate job for a chain of restaurants that was threatening to unionize. He was given the task of showing up pretending to be a union-affiliated, bafflingly incompetent asshole. He went to individual employees to discuss the "benefits" of joining the union, because in a group he was more likely to be called out by somebody actually union-affiliated.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    Pretty sure his actions were actually illegal. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/your-rights-during-union-organizing https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em... > Supervisors and managers cannot spy on you (or make it appear that they are doing so), coercively question you, threaten you or bribe you regarding your union activity or the union activities of your co-workers. You can't be fired, disciplined, demoted, or penalized in any way for engaging in these activities.
    - drspacemonkey 6y ago
      <sarcasm>Well, then that would be the first and only time that jackass did something skeezy and illegal</sarcasm> Seriously though, that man's sense of ethics were... well, when he first found out about the GDPR, his first and only question was "how do we circumvent this?" There's a bunch of reasons why he's a FORMER boss.
tehjoker 6y ago
Everyone that likes the New Deal should thank the union organizers and socialists that literally had to fight police in the streets to force the hand of the state. A large enough faction of the capitalists back then agreed to reforms because they feared things were going the way of revolution. In the 1930s, the 1917 revolution in Russia was a recent memory that scared the piss out of them. Bezos would like to continue accumulating wealth from the labor of his workers without having to face real negotiations. A really great idea for anyone out of work that has any free time not applying for jobs right now would be to join labor discussion groups about the state of the economy and read some Marx. A great deal of those writings feels like hearing from Hari Seldon from Asimov's Foundation series given that we can look back 150 years and see that so many predictions and ways of thinking about the world were broadly true. Socialism or Barbarism as they say.
- badRNG 6y ago
  While I don't think getting bogged down in a political discussion here is a good idea (and I don't necessarily disagree,) I do think it is interesting how ignorant Americans often are of the many literal battles in the war for humane working conditions. It might be worth reading about how workers were bombed and gunned down during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Here is a good history of the different full battles waged in the late 19th and early 20th century by bosses and the police [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
  - supercollision 6y ago
    +1 to your post and links. I'm also surprised by how much anti-union sentiment exists in the US; things like the 40-hour workweek and concept of overtime were paid for in blood.
    - burfog 6y ago
      Now the work week is less than 30 hours. Yay! All it took was requiring health insurance for employees with 30 hours. By that strategy, we could have a 10-hour work week if we wanted it.
djsumdog 6y ago
Decades ago in University, I remember an Accounting professor talked about how Wal-Mart used their parking lot cameras to monitor where employees would congregate after work and would have special "employees" who would befriend these groups and make sure they weren't trying to organize unions, or discourage organization if they were.
rxhernandez 6y ago
In general, it's not a good idea to talk poorly about your employer in public if you want to keep your job; I've heard of at least a couple cases where someone was fired for "mouthing-off" to their spouse in a public place like a grocery store.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  Pre-COVID it was very interesting sitting in a bar in downtown SF and listening to all the drunk tech workers mouthing off. You could hear a lot of illegal activites, particularly racist or poor hiring practices, boasted of or complained about very regularly.
  - elipsey 6y ago
    Which bar was your favorite? I liked Mikkeller for this, but it got too loud. Irish Bank was also good, slower but quieter. I used to nag my friends about opsec... back when you could go places with friends :*(
- pklausler 6y ago
  It's not the smartest idea to talk poorly about your employer in private, either. Especially in "confidential" employee surveys.
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    I keep trying to get the message out. When your employer sends out these surveys, rate everything at the highest level possible. Nothing good can possibly come from giving bad ratings. If your boss/employer can't figure out how to improve things outside of those surveys, they won't figure it out from the survey. All you are doing is creating a bureaucratic headache for your boss which is going to trickle down to you.
dhosek 6y ago
For those who aren't aware of Pinkerton's history, from wikipedia: >One of the first union busting agencies was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which came to public attention as the result of a shooting war that broke out between strikers and three hundred Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike of 1892. When the Pinkerton agents were withdrawn, state militia forces were deployed. The militia repulsed attacks on the steel plant, and prevented violence against strikebreakers crossing picket lines, causing a decisive defeat of the strike, and ended the power of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers at the Homestead plant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  "My team and I routinely pried into workers' police records, personnel files, credit histories, medical records, and family lives in search of a weakness that we could use to discredit union activists... Once in a while, a worker is impeccable. So some consultants resort to lies. To fell the sturdiest union supporters in the 1970s, I frequently launched rumors that the targeted worker was gay or was cheating on his wife. It was a very effective technique." [1, 2] Read the Ebay stalking indictment. They were the B team with extremely limited operational capability. Now imagine they had any of the following, which are all for sale: * Real-time location from your cell provider * Real-time AirBnB booking * Real-time purchases from credit card companies * Real-time browsing records from your mobile ISP, home ISP, and behavioral advertising networks * Your complete prescription history from your pharmacy [1] https://aflcionc.org/confessions-of-a-union-buster/ https://aflcionc.org/confessions-of-a-union-buster/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_spies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_spies
dreamcompiler 6y ago
"Who are those guys?" "Pinkerton men" -Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969 https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2016/who-are-those-guys-s-paul-oharas-eminventing-the-pinkertons/em https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...

dylan604 6y ago

This is awesome in a very very sad way. Several years ago, I started working for a company that was in the build up to a Yea/Nay vote for joining the union. During that time, 2 "goons" showed up at my apartment to discuss the benefits of joining the union and why not joining would be bad. However, these very "intelligent" goons showed up during the day, you know, working hours where I had a very low chance of being home. I don't know if they were just that dumb, or if they were trying to influence what they thought were family members. Instead, it was my flatmate from England. She told me just laughed at the thought of me joining a union, and not so politely told them to bugger off and closed the door on them. Ultimately, the vote failed miserably. All of that to say, that I'm not surprised that anti-union shenanigans are at the same level as the pro-union shenanigans.

smnrchrds 6y ago
What makes you call them goons? Politicians, activists, all sorts of people go door knocking around the time of elections and referendums. What made this interaction so different that you call them goons sent there to intimidate you, not activists trying to attract your vote?
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  corpitized unions (anything union organisation bigger then 1 location of 1 employer) are goons.
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    So what does that make corporations with more than 1 location?
    - MrStonedOne 6y ago
      Each location should have its own union, grouping them all up allows the needs of the few to get drowned out by the wants of the many, and elevates union leadership to a position of power over the workers as union reps have easier access to spread their messaging to employees across locations while normal employees can only organize within their location.
      - scarmig 6y ago
        It also significantly decreases negotiating power. The point of unions is that someone small (an individual) has a hard time fairly negotiating with an organization (a company). Multiple small single-site unions would be just as ineffective negotiating with one large multi-site company.
        smnrchrds 6y ago
        Especially since large companies are known for closing down locations as soon as they unionize.
      - rumanator 6y ago
        > (...) and elevates union leadership to a position of power over the workers as union reps I don't understand your point. Do you believe that this so called risk of an elected representative getting more power than the people that elected him is overall worse than the people having absolutely no power or representation? I mean, can you explain why in your view leaving an employee SOL is more desirable than ensuring he has some say?
        MrStonedOne 6y ago
        My view is that laws must keep unions from acting in bad faith before forced unions can be allowed to exist. The primary positive effect of a union is its appeals process that keep employers from firing you on a whim. Nothing about that positive effect requires the union be forced upon you, and if unions had to earn their dues they wouldn't act in bad faith as often.
- dylan604 6y ago
  I used quotes because I was quoting my flatmate. She said their demeanor was not welcoming at all, and it felt very aggressive. I kind of wish I was there just so I could have told them what I thought, but spilled milk and what not.
  - RobertoG 6y ago
    Not saying this is the case, but it occurs to me... that would be a good way to sabotage the start of an union. Just send some aggressive people posing like members of the union.
    - _jal 6y ago
      It is, and there's evidence that has happened in the US. The Pinkertons have been busting unions for over a century - they have pretty much explored the full range of options for worker suppression available to capital. False flags can be a powerful tool (but becoming less so, as surveillance makes deniability harder).
    - refurb 6y ago
      Ahh... of course. Employers use dirty tactics and if unions do, it’s because it’s employers trying to sabotage them. No way a union could ever use dirty tricks too. But of course they might because they were forced to by their employers?
      - kergonath 6y ago
        How many documented instances of unionised militants trying to bully workers into joining? History is full of private interests using the full might of the state and any trick they can think of to prevent unions. So yeah, one is more likely than the other.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Union activists in the UK have a reputation of being bullies, and in some cases in the past they've used physical violence to try to get people to do things their way. At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists dropped a concrete block on someone's head from a bridge because he was trying to get into work and they thought he should be striking (David Wilkie.) I would not appreciate union goons showing up at my door and I'd have a similar reaction.
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    Also at the time that the leader of the NUM, the striking union, was a self-avowed Stalinist.[1] It's hard to overstate the extreme militancy of trade union leadership in the UK during the late 1970s. While Thatcher gets the blame for the disintegration of the labor movement, just as big an issue was that the union leadership no longer represented the opinions of its rank-and-file members. The 1984 miners strike largely failed, because most of the local unions decided not to join. Scargill never put the strike to a membership wide ballot, because he knew it probably wouldn't have passed. Union leadership became more focused on pushing communist ideology than it was on representing its members. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill#Socialist_Labour_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill#Socialist_Labo...
    - kmlx 6y ago
      don't know why you're getting downvoted. this is part of history and one of the many reasons unions have failed in the UK. and they're still failing having lower number of members every single year.
      - winphone1974 6y ago
        Probably because of the same sentiment towards rewriting history that's going around now. Rather then learn and move forward lots of people seem to prefer going back in time and judging history through today's lens.
      - edent 6y ago
minimuffins 6y ago
What union did this?
- dylan604 6y ago
  In my mind they are all the same. I honestly paid so little attention, I didn't even do the research. Everyone just kept referring to the local, but I don't remember what number. This was 2010 time frame. I've slept (a lot) since then. Edit: Turns out it was IATSE
alecb 6y ago
I'm impressed by how low-quality this anti-union astroturf bot is. If you have sentience, how much did someone pay for you on Fiverr?
- dylan604 6y ago
  Are you suggesting I'm a bot? You are incorrect. Thanks for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you back stage.
- dencodev 6y ago
  HN is not the best platform to from anti-capitalism sentiments. There's a lot of privilege here and it makes people pretty blind to how awful capitalism is (and the things it creates, like anti-union sentiment).
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    Yes, capitalism is awful, but it's by far the best idea we've got.
    - beeboop 6y ago
      Please, go on and continue the propaganda about how socialism and communism doesn't work. Please point to failed nations/states that had communism and explain how they failed due to communism and that it definitely wasn't anything else.
      - dforrestwilson 6y ago
        What are you suggesting?
      - colinmhayes 6y ago
        Becoming a communist state is impossible. The leader of the socialist state won't let it happen. Power corrupts, why should we be putting more power in the hands of the state in hopes that one day it will relinquish it?
toiletfuneral 6y ago
wow you poor scab, I'm sure the grateful shareholders will reward your loyalties
drspacemonkey 6y ago
I wouldn't be so quick to jump to the conclusion that they were _actually_ union. They may very well have been. But companies have a long, proud history of playing VERY dirty tricks in response to unionization. A former boss of mine once bragged about how he killed a union effort at a previous job. He worked a corporate job for a chain of restaurants that was threatening to unionize. He was given the task of showing up pretending to be a union-affiliated, bafflingly incompetent asshole. He went to individual employees to discuss the "benefits" of joining the union, because in a group he was more likely to be called out by somebody actually union-affiliated.
- sitkack 6y ago
  Pretty sure his actions were actually illegal. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/your-rights-during-union-organizing https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em... > Supervisors and managers cannot spy on you (or make it appear that they are doing so), coercively question you, threaten you or bribe you regarding your union activity or the union activities of your co-workers. You can't be fired, disciplined, demoted, or penalized in any way for engaging in these activities.
  - drspacemonkey 6y ago
    <sarcasm>Well, then that would be the first and only time that jackass did something skeezy and illegal</sarcasm> Seriously though, that man's sense of ethics were... well, when he first found out about the GDPR, his first and only question was "how do we circumvent this?" There's a bunch of reasons why he's a FORMER boss.

tehjoker 6y ago

Everyone that likes the New Deal should thank the union organizers and socialists that literally had to fight police in the streets to force the hand of the state. A large enough faction of the capitalists back then agreed to reforms because they feared things were going the way of revolution. In the 1930s, the 1917 revolution in Russia was a recent memory that scared the piss out of them. Bezos would like to continue accumulating wealth from the labor of his workers without having to face real negotiations. A really great idea for anyone out of work that has any free time not applying for jobs right now would be to join labor discussion groups about the state of the economy and read some Marx. A great deal of those writings feels like hearing from Hari Seldon from Asimov's Foundation series given that we can look back 150 years and see that so many predictions and ways of thinking about the world were broadly true. Socialism or Barbarism as they say.

badRNG 6y ago
While I don't think getting bogged down in a political discussion here is a good idea (and I don't necessarily disagree,) I do think it is interesting how ignorant Americans often are of the many literal battles in the war for humane working conditions. It might be worth reading about how workers were bombed and gunned down during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Here is a good history of the different full battles waged in the late 19th and early 20th century by bosses and the police [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
- supercollision 6y ago
  +1 to your post and links. I'm also surprised by how much anti-union sentiment exists in the US; things like the 40-hour workweek and concept of overtime were paid for in blood.
  - burfog 6y ago
    Now the work week is less than 30 hours. Yay! All it took was requiring health insurance for employees with 30 hours. By that strategy, we could have a 10-hour work week if we wanted it.

djsumdog 6y ago

Decades ago in University, I remember an Accounting professor talked about how Wal-Mart used their parking lot cameras to monitor where employees would congregate after work and would have special "employees" who would befriend these groups and make sure they weren't trying to organize unions, or discourage organization if they were.

rxhernandez 6y ago

In general, it's not a good idea to talk poorly about your employer in public if you want to keep your job; I've heard of at least a couple cases where someone was fired for "mouthing-off" to their spouse in a public place like a grocery store.

tmpz22 6y ago
Pre-COVID it was very interesting sitting in a bar in downtown SF and listening to all the drunk tech workers mouthing off. You could hear a lot of illegal activites, particularly racist or poor hiring practices, boasted of or complained about very regularly.
- elipsey 6y ago
  Which bar was your favorite? I liked Mikkeller for this, but it got too loud. Irish Bank was also good, slower but quieter. I used to nag my friends about opsec... back when you could go places with friends :*(
pklausler 6y ago
It's not the smartest idea to talk poorly about your employer in private, either. Especially in "confidential" employee surveys.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  I keep trying to get the message out. When your employer sends out these surveys, rate everything at the highest level possible. Nothing good can possibly come from giving bad ratings. If your boss/employer can't figure out how to improve things outside of those surveys, they won't figure it out from the survey. All you are doing is creating a bureaucratic headache for your boss which is going to trickle down to you.

dhosek 6y ago

For those who aren't aware of Pinkerton's history, from wikipedia: >One of the first union busting agencies was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which came to public attention as the result of a shooting war that broke out between strikers and three hundred Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike of 1892. When the Pinkerton agents were withdrawn, state militia forces were deployed. The militia repulsed attacks on the steel plant, and prevented violence against strikebreakers crossing picket lines, causing a decisive defeat of the strike, and ended the power of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers at the Homestead plant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...

rmrfstar 6y ago
"My team and I routinely pried into workers' police records, personnel files, credit histories, medical records, and family lives in search of a weakness that we could use to discredit union activists... Once in a while, a worker is impeccable. So some consultants resort to lies. To fell the sturdiest union supporters in the 1970s, I frequently launched rumors that the targeted worker was gay or was cheating on his wife. It was a very effective technique." [1, 2] Read the Ebay stalking indictment. They were the B team with extremely limited operational capability. Now imagine they had any of the following, which are all for sale: * Real-time location from your cell provider * Real-time AirBnB booking * Real-time purchases from credit card companies * Real-time browsing records from your mobile ISP, home ISP, and behavioral advertising networks * Your complete prescription history from your pharmacy [1] https://aflcionc.org/confessions-of-a-union-buster/ https://aflcionc.org/confessions-of-a-union-buster/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_spies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_spies

dreamcompiler 6y ago

"Who are those guys?" "Pinkerton men" -Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969 https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2016/who-are-those-guys-s-paul-oharas-eminventing-the-pinkertons/em https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...