Sixty-six people, many of them women and children, died in the attacks. 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. Thanks to McParlan’s efforts, a number of Molly Maguires were executed by the state in 1877. 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. A few years later, a Pinkerton detective named James McParlan was hired to infiltrate and disrupt the union organizing activities of the Molly Maguires. 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. ( Teen Vogue has reached out to the Pinkertons for comment). 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. 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. Stay up-to-date with the Teen Vogue politics team. “All activities we undertake are fully in line with local laws and conducted with the full knowledge and support of local authorities.") (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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |