“Rats, Finks, and Stool Pigeons”

This chapter examines the industrial spy, who represented the negative case for the auto workers' notions of exemplary manhood, of real union manhood, and of the manhood of the fighter for unionism or the breadwinner of a family. These industrial mercenaries included many individualistic and anti-labor figures—union supporters called them rats, stool pigeons, finks, sluggers, thugs, goons, scabs, and strikebreakers. They were the union movement's negative examples that separated the honorable and respectable manhood of union men from the dishonorable and disreputable spies and thugs. Often violent men from the underside of urban America, these mercenaries of the class war spent several decades battling industrial unionism.