11/10/2023 0 Comments Homestead strike gilded age![]() When it was over, 35 men lay dead and 60 others were seriously wounded.Įven before the violent clash, public opinion was running against the strikers through no fault of their own. The strikers were waiting for them and a battle lasted for eight hours. On July 5, the guards used river barges in an attempt to land near the factory under the cover of night. Frick proceeded to employ 300 company guards hired through Pinkerton's National Detective Agency to seize the millworks from the strikers. Carnegie, who left on vacation for Europe, transferred operational control to Frick, whose hatred of unions was well known. This started a general strike by the Amalgamated, which set up committees to run the strike and prepare the town. He instructed his general manager, Henry Clay Frick, to announce that the steel mill would now employ non-union workers and pay lower wages. In July 1892, as his contract with the AFL was about to expire, Carnegie decided to crush the steel workers union. In particular, they were upset that he refused to share the profits of more efficient production techniques. ![]() ![]() For their part, the Homestead workers, reflecting the attitudes of other steelworkers of the time, believed Carnegie was generally insensitive to their needs. Carnegie was also well aware that the threat of a strike, which was fully endorsed by the AFL, could cripple his steel empire if it was carried out effectively. He viewed the Amalgamated as a dangerous organization that not only weakened his ability to treat labor as a freely disposed commodity, but also resisted his attempts to introduce technological advances. With 24,000 members, the union was one of the most important members of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).Ĭarnegie himself, along with most other business leaders of the time, possessed a deep opposition to unions. Most of the steelworkers belonged to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Its work force was concentrated in Homestead, a town of 12,000. Homestead, Pennsylvania, was the center of Andrew Carnegie's enormous steel empire, the Carnegie Steel Corporation, which produced fully one-quarter of the world's steel by 1892. The Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, which pitted the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835 –1919) against the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, was one of the most dramatic expressions of the sharpening conflict between the corporation and the union -between capital and labor -on the terrain of industrializing America. So, too, were the emergence of the American corporation, which concentrated industrial wealth and power in the hands of a new economic elite, and the mass labor union, which sought to protect the burgeoning ranks of factory workers. The spread of factory towns, urban living, transportation networks, and new technologies were catalysts for the reorganization of American life. The industrialization of the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century involved a complex and unsettling social and economic transformation of U.S.
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