Private security and the “labour spy”

Submitted by Matthew on 20 February, 2013 - 7:55

The private security industry is expanding at an impressive pace. Estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, the industry includes vast corporations such as G4S, now the world’s third largest private sector employer, and with a global staff of 657,000.

Companies like this may be familiar to British people from large-scale public events like the Olympic Games, but private security is also a profitable industry in war-torn regions like Iraq and Afghanistan, where governments and investors have found it convenient to browse the market to source their heavily armed men. Espionage, too, has been an enormously lucrative industry in modern history, and the recent exposure of blacklisting services operating on a staggering scale demonstrates that the profits have by no means dried up. The boom in private security presents a number of problems, but a glance at history suggests the threat it poses to the labour movement is particularly dangerous.

The use of hired thugs to harass organised workers was particularly notorious in the USA from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Companies such as Pinkerton, Thiel, and Burns provided industrialists with goon squads to rough up striking workers or union agitators with a shocking brutality.

Before state bodies such as the FBI began to seriously centralise and expand, whole militias of “Pinkerton men” would be hired in by bosses to attack strikers. In the Homestead Strike of 1892, Pinkerton men staged a lengthy gun battle with steel workers, resulting in 16 deaths. Far from being some isolated phenomenon, the use of such services was so widespread that a federal law was eventually passed to specifically stop the employees of Pinkerton from being hired by the state.

By the 1930s, the role of these companies had changed, but had by no means disappeared. Indeed, companies specialising in spying on trade unionists had grown to an enormous size.

In The Labor Spy Racket, Leo Huberman records how in 1937 there were 230 agencies engaged in industrial espionage in the USA, and that an estimated 135,000 labour spies were employed by the top three agencies alone (Pinkerton, ever the entrepreneurial success story, being among them.)

The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee unearthed evidence that such agencies had contracts with some of the most famous corporations of the day, including Chrysler, General Motors, Kellogg, and Quaker Oats.

The La Follette committee also revealed training manuals given to aspiring industrial snitches which gave them meticulous instructions to “make up and mail in a detailed report for each day” cataloguing “how each man feels about the foreman and superintendent or anyone else in authority.”

The main goal is to “report whether any men where you work are members of the union” and “whether any agitation is going on in town anywhere.” Of course, none of this is to say that the turn towards espionage meant abandoning the more traditional use of brute violence. The LaFollette committee also heard witnesses from the Ford car works at Dearborn who spoke of being beaten unconscious by gangs of more than 25 men.

The scale and extent of hired strike breakers from this period seems so extreme that it is easy to forget that private surveillance on organised labour is still going strong today. The recent blacklisting scandal in the British construction industry is a case in point. After a campaign from the UCATT construction union and investigative journalism from the Guardian, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) was finally forced into raiding the offices of the Consulting Association in 2009.

The company had a blacklist of 3,213 construction workers alleged to be left-wing, radical, or just vocal about health and safety issues. The ICO has disclosed that the Association’s blacklisting service was used by 40 construction companies in the industry, including Balfour Beatty and Sir Robert McAlpine.

The situation is no better abroad. British security companies profited from the proliferation of contracts the followed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, when the US government began outsourcing protection of convoys to private operators.

Diplomats and investors continue to use British firms such as G4S and Control Risks to provide armed guards. In areas where any scrutiny and accountability of armed authority has largely collapsed into chaos, private armies can be even more dangerous than state ones. The story of private security in the occupation of Iraq is perhaps still best epitomised by Blackwater, the company whose staff opened fire in a public Baghdad square, killing 14 civilians.

As concerning as all this may be, it would be a mistake to counterpose the unaccountability and violence of private security forces with the supposed benevolence of state security.

After all, in every one of the cases above, private agents proceeded with varying degrees of collaboration from the state. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the Pinkerton militias received a large proportion of their contracts from the government itself.

Similarly, Blackwater mercenaries were not brought into Iraq by some shady criminal network, but hired by the US military. In the evidence given to the La Follette Civil Liberties committee, time and time again witnesses and victims described the collaboration of the police, the way in which “the Dearborn police who were present made no effort to forestall” the savage beating of striking Ford workers.

In March of last year, the ICO revealed that details on the Consulting Association’s construction blacklist included information that “could only have been supplied by the police or the security services.” And where private companies aren’t up to the job, anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of the 1984 miners’ strike knows that the British police force is perfectly capable of violently assaulting strikers without needing outside help.

Nevertheless, while socialists recognise the state’s repressive machinery for what it is, there are certain pressures we can apply to try and hold the police to at least some degree of constraint and account. All of these are infinitely harder to bring to bear on a private force that doesn’t even have the pretence of a democratic function.

The growth of the private security industry continues — it is the job of socialists to fight and warn against it.

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.