Pearl Bergoff

Pearl Louis Bergoff (April 23, 1875 or 1878-August 11, 1947) was an American strikebreaker noted for violent tactics from the early 1900s through the 1930s.

Early life

Bergoff was born in Detroit, Michigan.

His father Julius, who was born in Germany,

Career Bergoff worked as a spotter on the Metropolitan Street Railway in Manhattan. His job was to watch conductors to verify that they recorded all the fares they accepted. He opened the Vigilant Detective Agency in 1905. which was established in 1907, with offices in the Schubert Building at 39th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. When longshoremen went on strike in 1907, the steamship companies hired Bergman, who brought in black and Italian immigrant strikebreakers. Bergoff relied on thugs from the Monk Eastman gang to "ride herd on the assembled scabs."

At the end of August a gun battle erupted, leaving six dead, six dying, and fifty wounded. Public sympathy began to swing away toward the strikers. There were violent confrontations between strikers and strikebreakers, but also between strikebreakers and guards when terrified workers demanded the right to leave. One Austro-Hungarian immigrant who managed to escape informed his government that workers were being held against their will, resulting in an international incident. In addition to kidnapping, strikebreakers complained of deception, broken promises about wages, and tainted food.

Early in September the company acknowledged defeat and negotiated with the strikers. Twenty-two had died in the strike. But Bergoff's business was not hurt by the defeat; he boasted of having as many as ten thousand strikebreakers on his payroll. He was getting paid as much as $2,000,000 per strikebreaking job by large industrial clients.

Even before the strike was over, and then in more detail in 1911, the strikebreakers appeared before federal panels to describe their own living and working conditions after they were brought to the conflict. Held inside the plant or in boxcars against their will, fleeced, stolen from, physically threatened, and given rotten food, one hearing witness collapsed and was diagnosed with ptomaine poisoning.

Subsequent career Bergoff settled in Bayonne, New Jersey, built the biggest office building in the city (which still stands), and sent strikebreakers to the Bayonne refinery strikes of 1915–1916. He was hired to break a strike at the Erie Railroad in 1920, for which he was paid $2 million. He also broke strikes of street cleaners and the Interborough Rapid Transit and Brooklyn Rapid Transit in New York City.

In December 1935 Bergoff was the subject of a book-length exposé by the labor editor of the New York Post, Edward Levinson. The book was called I Break Strikes!. Labor leader Walter Reuther credited this examination of Bergoff's practices as a major impetus to the creation of the La Follette Committee.

Bergoff's involvement in the violent Remington Rand strike of 1936–1937 resulted in his program of anti-union activities, the "Bergoff Technique", being republished and repackaged as the Mohawk Valley formula.