ABSTRACT
The history of trade unionism in the United States reveals the violent methodologies adopted by employers to prevent, contain, and destroy unions. The general social situation in which employers resorted to local power syndicates masquerading as private detective agencies for strikebreaking and labor mediation there was room for duplicity and the double-cross. The major events during this period in the women’s garment industry were the “uprising of the twenty thousand” and the “great revolt”. The garment industries and their corresponding trade union and radical movements are exceptionally well–documented. Most importantly, such an inquiry reveals a great deal concerning the inner dynamics of a power syndicate; how it was structured, how it operated. The power of power syndicates is, it seems, variable. That is important for it reveals how much anarchy, chaos and plain disorder prevail in organized crime and surely in those sectors of the urban economy with which it interacts.
