The United incident in Chicago last week was nothing new.
Government officials have often deployed force on behalf of their business and labor friends. That will change only when the consequences outweigh the gains.
J.D. Tuccille writes:
This is hardly the first time that a government agency has played the part of the meathead in the shotgun seat on behalf of a partner with bad judgment. Politicians, police chiefs, and military officers have frequently exercised violence at the urging of powerful people who found arm-twisting to be more convenient than negotiation for settling disputes.
Corporations have benefited on numerous high-profile occasions from the deployment of truncheons and bullets, even if their reputations ultimately took as much of a beating as labor union representatives as a consequence (something that continuously comes as a revelation to them, as United is currently demonstrating). While labor and business people might both have pushed their disagreements over the line to brutality during the heated strikes of the 19th and early 20th centuries, there are few private disputes that can’t be made worse by the addition of troops. That may have been most effectively demonstrated during the “Ludlow Massacre” of 1914, when Colorado National Guardsmen attacked a strikers’ tent colony at the bidding of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CFIC) and killed dozens of people, including women and children.
That calling in government force, however attractive it might have seemed at the time to CFIC management, had some public relations downsides is apparent from the fact that the Rockefeller family which was heavily involved in the firm is still trying to atone for the incident, with David Rockefeller Jr. visiting the site earlier this year.
And Flight 3411 was hardly the first time Chicago law enforcement were in the thick of the action—they played a very hands-on role by inflicting casualties, including 10 deaths, during the Republic Steel strike of 1937.
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