In contrast to most other industrialised nations, the US has never accepted the concept of labor unions, which were always denigrated in the media as a kind of dangerous socialism that would exploit workers. But it was always true that it was capitalism that exploited workers and socialism that attempted to protect them. Thanks to the media, most Americans today still have this understanding backwards from reality. Neither the US government nor its corporations have ever held workers or employees in much regard. There was a brief period after the Second World War during which enlightened corporate self-interest driven by fear produced a rather benign labor landscape, but that illusion was dispelled by the 1980s when the numbers of industrial private-sector workers with any kind of union fell by about 70%, largely through the harsh capitalist and legislative climate. The majority of American workers still wanted labor unions, but the anti-union conspiracy was too powerful.
The FBI infiltrated labor unions and installed corrupt officials in attempts to destroy them from the inside. When those attempts failed and labor organisers showed signs of being successful, they were either simply murdered or framed and convicted of crimes, and often executed. The US government has for all of its history acted with absolute disregard for the law, whenever the law became inconvenient to the purpose at hand. One of these purposes was the crushing of labor, where the government frequently not only fabricated criminal charges against union organisers but convicted them under laws that had never existed. In one famous case, labor organisers trying to create a mine workers union in Pennsylvania were charged by the state with murder and conspiracy. When these charges failed to hold, the organisers and about a dozen union members were hanged for “obstinacy”.
