![]() ![]() The Homestead StrikeĪn illustration from Harper's Weekly depicting the Homestead Strike of 1892 showing Pinkertons, escorted by armed union men, leaving the barges after surrendering.Īfter Carnegie purchased the massive Homestead steel works in 1883, he spent millions transforming it to become the heart of his steel empire. Workers walked off the job in protest until they were forced to give in to Carnegie’s demands after five months without a paycheck. Just months after his declarations in Forum magazine, Carnegie demanded that laborers at his original steel mill-the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock, Pennsylvania-return to 12-hour shifts and be paid on a sliding scale that tied their wages directly to the price of steel. He followed a simple business philosophy: “Watch the costs, and the profits will take care of themselves.” Few costs were greater than the wages of his workforce, and he drove his employees to work longer hours without corresponding pay increases. Carnegie claimed in his autobiography that he never employed strikebreakers, yet he did so repeatedly. ![]() In spite of his public pronouncements, Carnegie did not want unions in his steel mills. Carnegie Pushes to Get Rid of Unions at His Mills In appreciation for his pro-labor pronouncements, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers named a division in Carnegie’s honor and anointed him as an honorary member. “To expect that one dependent upon his daily wage for the necessaries of life will stand peaceably and see a new man employed in his stead is to expect much,” he wrote in Forum. Weeks later, after the Haymarket Riot, Carnegie expressed empathy for striking workers. “My experience has been that trades-unions upon the whole are beneficial both to labor and capital.” “The right of the working man to combine and to form trades-unions is no less sacred than the right of the manufacturer to enter into associations and conferences with his fellows, and it must be sooner or later conceded,” he wrote in Forum magazine in 1886. In his writings, Carnegie expressed his approval of trade unions. ![]() American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, circa 1862.Ĭarnegie opened his first steel mill in 1875, and his steel empire helped to build Gilded Age America as the country transformed from an agricultural society into an industrial one. ![]()
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