Page:William Zebulon Foster - Strike Strategy (1926).pdf/67

 workers to betray and defeat them. These under-cover men constitute a real problem in all important organizing campaigns and strikes. Strike strategy must include ways and means to uncover these traitors and to defeat their treacherous activities.

In all sections of the labor movement the under-cover men are a deadly influence, but nowhere so much as in newly-formed organizations of the unskilled. In established unions the employers, to control the masses, depend largely upon the corrupt and conservative bureaucrats. But in new unions and movements of the unorganized, the employers, having no such body of reactionary officials to rely upon, flood them with their under-cover men and try to capture them entire.

In all great movements of the unorganized in American industries under-cover men work their way into the leading committees. Often the leadership is saturated with these betrayers. In some cases, as in the I. W. W. a dozen years ago, the rubber strike in Akron, under-cover men actually made up a majority of the leading union committees. The invasions of new mass unions by large numbers of detectives and spies is a settled employer policy.

Under-cover men are obstructionists, provocateurs, spies, and disrupters. When many of them are working together in a new union they may engage in all these activities, simultaneously, but generally they are to be found performing one particular, organized role, the character of which is determined by the state of the movement. The employers carefully fit their policies in the shops to harmonize with those of their under-cover men in the unions.

Under-cover men appear as obstructionists especially when an organizing campaign is just beginning, or is only weakly going ahead. Then the employers may find it