The Camera as a Weapon on the Picket Line
Local machinists are using photography to document and shame strikebreakers in their ongoing eight-hour day strike.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The machinists are putting up a stubborn fight against the Metal Trades Association and are making a winning fight. After many weeks of strike for the eight-hour day, the boys are able to say that they have not had a single desertion and in many places shops have been signed up. This is particularly true in California where shop after shop has given up the fight and signed the agreement. The boys on strike against the local plants are as firm as ever. Picketing has become an exact science; the taking of pictures of strike-breakers is kept up. But few have escaped the eagle eye of the camera. Groups are being made; the past history of the strike-breakers is being secured, and it will not be long until the pictures, with a history of those appearing, will be given that all men may know those who betray their brothers in time of trouble. More than one of the scabs have quit their places and left the city when promised their pictures would be withheld.
“Those who remain in the shops will be published from one end of the country to the other... that they may be shunned by all honest men as unclean.”
The use of photography and public shaming as a tactic in labor disputes was a high-tech strategy in 1910; today, that same surveillance has moved to social media, where gig workers and labor organizers use similar documentation to hold companies and crossing workers accountable.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.