Homestead Strike of 1892
Homestead Strike of 1892 The Carnegie Steel Company, owned by Andrew Carnegie, was highly profitable. In 1892, the company’s profits reached four and a half million, a new record. Carnegie’s company was the world’s largest manufacturing firm at the time. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, founded in 1876, worked to gain better wages and work rules. Previously, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had been defeated at J. Edgar Thomson works in Braddock, in 1889. This company was also owned by Andrew Carnegie. Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie’s plant manager opposed unions and Carnegie, although out of the country at the time, felt the same. Knowing that the union’s three-year contract was coming to an end, Carnegie made preparations to break the union. In effort to put an end to the union, Carnegie lowered the wages of the steelworkers by twenty percent. Carnegie also told his plant manager to increase the production requirements. These changes riled the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and they refused to abide the new demands. Frick built a tall barrier around the mill and included searchlights on the corner towers. He began to lock the union workers out of the plant and on July 2nd, they were all fired. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was ready to strike. The union represented very little workers at the plant, but most workers not in the union overwhelmingly agreed to join the strike. Soon the town of the company joined in, causing a workers’ uprising. According to Pittsburgh labor historian, Charles McCollester, the strikers were "establishing pickets on eight-hour shifts, river patrols and a signaling system." The strikers surrounded the Carnegie Steel Company and did not allow the scabs to pass through. Frick called in three hundred Pinkerton guards, but when they arrived by boat on July 6th, they were met by ten thousand strikers (many of them armed). He who fired the first shot is