Authoritarian Reflexes: The Perspectives of British Employers on Labor Repression in the United States, 1890–1914

From the late Nineteenth century to the 1930s, the United States of America was the only advanced industrial nation in which a vast market for private security provided armed protection and investigative services to corporations and commercial entities. Pinkerton and other agencies like Jim Farley, Pearl Berghoff and Baldwin-Felts acted as unregulated private militias conducting military-like operations in the defense of persons (ex. strikebreakers and non-union labor) and assets (ex. plants and equipment) during or in anticipation of labor disputes. The privatization or delegation of policing functions to private bodies, often resulting in serious disorders, riots and bloodshed, considerably enhanced the control capacities of employers and gravely undermined trade-union activities. This paper examines how the “American model” of labor repression was assessed and debated by employer associations, industry groups and individual firms of Great Britain before 1914. On the basis of archival sources, the paper outlines the plans laid forth by the most intransigent anti-labor sectors of the British industry for the importation of American forms of industrial police and strikebreaking to meet the rising threat of organized labor. In particular, it details the attention devoted by the association of shipowners, railway management and engineering industries towards U.S hybridized forms of private and public policing in strikes, company-police systems and the subcontracting of security to espionage and commercial strikebreaking agencies. Although the State in Britain did not retreat from public order and law enforcement provisions and firmly dissuaded employers from any move towards the privatization of security, the paper shows how instances of industrial vigilantism emerged in response to the labor and welfare policies of the Liberal government (1906-1914). The goal of the paper is to highlight the transfer of knowledge and techniques of labor repression across the Atlantic and the authoritarian temptations of British employers for industrial self-defense.