Homestead Strike Of 1892

Adrian Dillulio and Sara Salitan
Mr. Jacobs (E Band), History 11th Grade
March 13, 2015

An Inevitable Conflict: The Homestead Strike of 1892
The Homestead Strike of 1892 was a defining event for the future unions of the United States of America. The conflict between the Carnegie Steel Company, and the nation’s strongest trade union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, was bound to emerge from Carnegies’ unjust labor conditions. Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant who built a steel empire in Pittsburgh through hard work and ruthless business tactics, despised organized labor. Carnegie Steel Co. was making massive profits, and Carnegie knew that with unions would come reform of existing conditions, and wage changes. A worker commented

A brief period of about a month at Homestead [soon after the strike] entailed sixty-five accidents, seven of which were fatal.” The steelworkers earned a favorable three-year contract in result of the 1889 strike, but by 1892 Andrew Carnegie was determined to break the union. Carnegie and his chairman, Henry Frick, were furious that workers had a voice within the union. “Frick, the president of the company, is a determined man, and when he stated that he would not give in to the strikers, everyone who knew anything of him believed he would keep his word. But the strikers, too, were equally determined, and there was an inclination among them to rule Homestead by mob law.” The company would frequently issue a "lockout" procedure, in which they locked doors on workers and forced them to starve, in order to suppress disobedient employees and bully them into submission. Management would also coerce these workers to sign contracts, known as “ironclad oaths” or “yellow-dog contracts,” that prevented them from joining labor unions. And, should the

Carnegie did this despite the fact that the workers had already suffered from large pay cuts three years prior. Management refused to make proposals to negotiate, throughout contract settlements. It issued ultimatums to the union. Carnegie and Frick made little effort to conceal their interests, which were to keep wages low, hours long, all in order to keep profits high. Their company advertised widely for strikebreakers, “In late spring [1892] the workmen at Homestead were startled to see a stout stockade of planks, pierced with holes suitable for rifle barrels and topped with barbed wire, erected around the entire plant and running down to the river bank on each side of the piers where barges came for deliveries.” On July 6, 1892, at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel plant near Pittsburgh, company officials ordered in three hundred armed Pinkerton detectives to break up an aggressive strike by steelworkers, who were angry over pay cuts and armed with rifles and dynamite. After a violent battle which led to the death of ten and injuries of some sixty workers, the strikers forced assailants to give up. Eventually, troops were called in, and both the strike and