- Industry: Government; Labor
- Number of terms: 77176
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
Agents of the Allan Pinkerton Detective Agency of Chicago who were hired by employers to break strikes or act as company spies within unions. Some believe the expression "Fink," a pejorative term for a worker not loyal to the union, originated by combining a common expletive with the word "Pinkerton. "
Industry:Labor
The incentive wage system by which workers are paid by the individual piece worked on or completed.
Industry:Labor
The stationing of persons outside a place of employment to publically protest the employer and to discourage entry of nonstriking workers or customers. Most picketing takes place during strikes although there is also informational picketing conducted against nonunion business establishments.
Industry:Labor
In addition to payment of wages, the company provided employees with room, board, and medical care.
Industry:Labor
The company considered itself the father of its employees and as such had the responsibility of regulating their lives through company houses, stores, hospitals, theaters, sports programs, churches, publications, and codes of behavior on and off the job. Paternalism was also prevalent in public employment. Teachers in 1915 were not permitted to marry, keep company with men, travel beyond the city limits, smoke, dress in bright colors, or wear skirts shorter than two inches above the ankles.
Industry:Labor
In 1919 20, U. S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer conducted raids on the headquarters of alleged radicals. Unionists, liberals, radicals, and aliens were indiscriminately arrested and around four thousand were tried for their dissent from the status quo with little regard for their civil rights.
Industry:Labor
A method of speeding up work. The pace setter is a person who sets the work pace, usually at an ever higher rate, by leading the work gang and necessitating its catching up with him.
Industry:Labor
A business that employs workers without regard to union membership. In the 1920s the "open shop" employed an ill disguised attempt to get ride of bona fide unions. States with "Right to Work" laws have decreed the open shop.
Industry:Labor
The slogan of the IWW which stressed the inclusion of everyone, regardless of trade, into an all encompassing union. This was also the rationale for the general strike where workers in all types of employment would strike at the same time.
Industry:Labor
A group of Irish miners who in the 1860s and '70s vandalized the mines and terrorized the bosses. Ten were hanged as the leaders of the conspiracy after Pinkerton agent, James McParland, exposed them in 1877.
Industry:Labor
