Working Conditions: Homestead Strike Documents

Homestead Strike Timeline

Where: Homestead, Pennsylvania


Union: Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers

Company: Carnegie Steel Company

1876:

Amalgamated Association, union for iron and steel workers, forms.

1881:

Carnegie put Frick in charge of the Homestead factory.

1882 and 1889:

Amalgamated Association won two big strikes against the Carnegie Company. After 1889, the union became very powerful and organized. They had a very strong union contract.

February 1892:

Amalgamated Association asked for a wage increase. Frick responded with a wage decrease.

June 29, 1892:

The old contract expired without the two sides reaching an agreement. Frick locked the workers out of the plant, using a high fence topped with barbed wire.

June 30, 1892:

Workers decided to strike and they surrounded the plant to make sure that no strikebreakers would enter.

July 6,1892:

After the local sheriff was unable to control the strikers, Frick hired guards from the National Pinkerton Detective Agency to secure the factory so that strikebreakers could enter.

The Pinkertons arrived by boat in the middle of the night, hoping to surround the factory unnoticed.

The strikers knew they were coming. Shots were fired and people killed on both sides.

Document A: Emma Goldman (Modified)

It was May 1892. Trouble had broken out between the Carnegie Steel Company and its workers, organized in the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Amalgamated Association was one of the biggest and most efficient unions in the country, consisting mostly of strong Americans, men of decision and grit, who stood up for their rights. The Carnegie Company, on the other hand, was a powerful corporation. Andrew Carnegie, its president, had turned over management to Henry Clay Frick, a man known for his hatred of unions and workers.

The Carnegie Company enjoyed great wealth and prosperity. Wages were arranged between the company and the union, according to a sliding scale based on the current market price of steel products.

Andrew Carnegie decided to abolish the sliding scale. The company would make no more agreements with the Amalgamated Association. In fact, he would not recognize the union at all. Then, he closed the mills. It was an open declaration of war.

The steel-workers declared that they were ready to take up the challenge of Frick: they would insist on their right to organize and to deal collectively with their employers. Their tone was manly, ringing with the spirit of their rebellious forebears of the Revolutionary War.

Then the news flashed across the country of the slaughter of steel- workers by Pinkertons. In the dead of night, Frick sent a boat packed with strike-breakers and heavily armed Pinkerton thugs to the mill. The workers stationed themselves along the shore, determined to drive back Frick’s hirelings. When the boat got within range, the Pinkertons had opened fire, without warning, killing a number of Homestead men on the shore, among them a little boy, and wounding scores of others.

Source: Emma Goldman was political activist and radical who fiercely supported workers’ rights. The document above comes from her autobiography, written in 1931, where she remembers her reaction to the Homestead strike, thirty-nine years later.

Document B: Henry Frick

I can say as clearly as possible that under no circumstances will we have any further dealings with the Amalgamated Association as an organization. This is final.

The workmen in the Amalgamated Association work under what is known as a sliding scale. As the price of steel rises, the earnings of the men also rise; as the prices fall, their wages also fall. The wages are not allowed to fall below a certain amount, which is called the minimum. Until now, the minimum has been $25 per ton of steel produced. We have recently changed the minimum to $23 instead of $25. We believe this is reasonable because the Carnegie Company has spent a lot of money on new machinery that allows workers to increase their daily output, and therefore increase their earnings. The Amalgamated Association was unwilling to consider a minimum below $24, even though the improved machinery would enable workers to earn more. We found it impossible to arrive at any agreement with the Amalgamated Association, so we decided to close our works at Homestead.

The Amalgamated men surrounded our property and blocked all of the entrances and all roads leading to Homestead. We felt that for the safety of our property, it was necessary for us to hire our own guards to assist the sheriff.

We brought our guards here as quietly as possible; had them taken to Homestead at an hour of the night when we hoped to have them enter without any interference whatever and without meeting anybody. All our efforts were to prevent the possibilities of a confrontation between the Amalgamated Association and our guards.

We have investigated and learned that the Amalgamated men and their friends fired on our guards for twenty-five minutes before they reached our property, and then again after they had reached our property. Our guards did not return the fire until after the boats had touched the shore, and after three of our guards had been wounded, one fatally.

Source: In this newspaper interview in the Pittsburgh Post on July 8, 1892, Frick explains his opposition to the union’s demands.

Food Regulation: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

“The Jungle” (excerpts)

By Upton Sinclair

…of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose…there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them…

…after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade – there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes – they had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and "California hams," which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them – that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head cheese!"

…There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white – it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one – there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water – and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. 

Working Conditions: Aftermath of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

…Immediately after the fire, Triangle owners Blanck and Harris declared in interviews that their building was fireproof, and that it had just been approved by the Department of Buildings. Yet, the call for bringing those responsible to justice and reports that the doors of the factory were locked at the time of the fire prompted the District Attorney's office to seek an indictment [a formal criminal charge] against the owners. On April 11, a grand jury indicted Harris and Blanck on seven counts, charging them with manslaughter in the second degree under the Labor Code, which required that doors should not be locked during working hours.

Justice?  On December 27, twenty-three days after the trial had started, a jury acquitted [cleared] Blanck and Harris of any wrong doing. The task of the jurors had been to determine whether the owners knew that the doors were locked at the time of the fire.

Customarily, the only way out for workers at quitting time was through an opening on the Greene Street side, where all pocketbooks were inspected to prevent stealing. Worker after worker testified to their inability to open the doors to their only viable [possible] escape route, the stairs to the Washington Place exit, because the Greene Street side stairs were completely engulfed by fire. More testimony supported this fact. Yet attorney Max Steuer planted enough doubt in the jurors' minds to win a not-guilty verdict. Grieving families and much of the public felt that justice had not been done. "Justice!" they cried. "Where is justice?"

Twenty-three individual civil suits were brought against the owners of the Asch building. On March 11, 1914, three years after the fire, Harris and Blanck settled. They paid 75 dollars per life lost.

Harris and Blanck were to continue their defiant attitude toward the authorities. Just a few days after the fire, the new premises of their factory had been found not to be fireproof, without fire escapes, and without adequate exits.

In August of 1913, Max Blanck was charged with locking one of the doors of his factory during working hours. Brought to court, he was fined twenty dollars, and the judge apologized to him for the imposition.


In December of 1913, the interior of his factory was found to be littered with rubbish piled six feet high, with scraps kept in non-regulation, flammable wicker baskets. This time, instead of a court appearance and a fine, he was served a stern warning. The Triangle Waist Company was to cease operations in 1918, but the owners maintained throughout that their factory was a “model of cleanliness and sanitary conditions,” and that it was “second to none in the country.”

Regulating Trusts: Rockefeller's Tactics and Antitrust Acts

The Sherman Antitrust Act and The Clayton Antitrust Act

Sherman Antitrust Act Section 1: Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. Section 2: Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce…shall be deemed guilty of a felony…

John D. Rockefeller’s Violations

Clayton Antitrust Act Section 2. That it shall be unlawful for any person engaged in commerce…to discriminate in price between different purchasers… Section 7. That no corporation shall acquire…another corporation …to create a monopoly of any line of commerce.

John D. Rockefeller’s Violations

John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil’s Tactics

Standard Oil…began buying rival refineries and developing companies…In 1882, these various companies were combined into the Standard Oil Trust, which would control some 90 percent of the nation’s refineries and pipelines.

Mr. Rockefeller…temporarily undercut the prices of competitors until they either went out of business or sold out to Standard Oil.

Bought up the components needed to make oil barrels in order to prevent competitors from being able to.

Used his large and growing volume of oil shipments to negotiate an alliance with the railroads that gave it secret rebates and thereby reduced its…shipping costs to a level far below the rates charged to its competitors.

Secretly bought…competitors and then had officials from those companies spy on and give advance warning of deals being planned by other competitors.

Secretly bought or created new oil-related companies, such as pipeline and engineering firms, that appeared be independent…but which gave Standard Oil hidden rebates.

Dispatched thugs who used threats and physical violence to break up the operations of competitors who could not otherwise be persuaded.

Regulating Trusts: The History of Standard Oil by Ida Tarbell

“The History of the Standard Oil Company” (1902)

By Ida M. Tarbell

To know every detail of the oil trade…to control even its weakest factor—this was John D. Rockefeller’s ideal of doing business….for him to be able to direct the course of any particular gallon of oil from the moment it gushed from the earth until it went into the lamp of a housewife. There must be nothing—nothing in his great machine he did not know to be working right…he undertook, late in the seventies [1870s], to organize the oil markets of the world…Mr. Rockefeller was driven to this new task of organization…by that thing so abhorrent to his mind—competition. If, as he claimed, the oil business belonged to him, and if, as he had announced, he was prepared to refine all the oil that men would consume, it followed that the markets of the world belonged to him. . . .

“The coal-oil business belongs to us,” was Mr. Rockefeller’s motto, and from the beginning of his campaign in the markets his agents accepted and acted on that principle. If a dealer bought but a barrel of oil a year, it must be from Mr. Rockefeller.

…Mr. Rockefeller and his friends (other oil companies he controlled) were occupied with…a remarkable scheme…which was…to persuade all the railroads transporting oil to give to his company…special rebates…If they could get such rates it was evident that those outside of their combination (trust) could not compete with them long and that they would become eventually the only refiners. They could then…keep up prices. This done, they could easily persuade the railroads to transport no crude (unrefined oil straight from the ground) for exportation (selling to other countries), so that the foreigners would be forced to buy American refined (oil that Rockefeller’s company had refined)…In short, the scheme they worked out put the entire oil business in their hands.

…Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Watson and their associates began to seek converts. In order that their great scheme might not be injured…they asked of each person whom they approached a pledge of secrecy.