Friday's Homework, 10/21

1. The most powerful union in the country was the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, which was affiliated with the AFL. Their members were skilled workers, in great demand by employers and thus had significant power in the workplace. 
2. By the mid-1880's, the steel industry had introduced new production methods and new patterns of organization that were streamlining and steel making process and, at the same time, reducing the companies' dependence on skilled labor.
3. By 1890, Carnegie and his chief lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick, had decided that the Amalgamated "had to go," even at Homestead. Over the next two years, they repeatedly cut wages at Homestead.
4. In 1892, the Amalgamated call fir a strike because Frick announced another wage cut at Homestead. 
5. When this strike happened, Frick abruptly shut down the plant and called in 300 guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. 
6. When the Pinkertons show up, the strikers prepared for them by pouring oil on the water and setting it on fire, and they met guards at the docks with guns and dynamite.
7. The governor of Pennsylvania, at the company's request, sent the state's entire nation Guard contingent, some 8,000 troops to Homestead. 
8. The amalgamated was symbolic of the general erosion of union strength in the late nineteenth century, as factory labor became increasingly unskilled and workers thus became easier to replace.
9. The employees lived in houses that the company built. They did not like the regimentation and the high rates. 
10. Workers at the Pullman factory went on strike because they slashed wages by 25%, citing the declining revenues the depression was causing. 
11. Eugene Debs led the American Railway Union. Debs's union instructed its members who worked for the offending companies to walk off their jobs.
12. John Peter Altgeld, was the governor for Illinois. He refused to call out the militia to protect employers now, because he felt sympathy for the workers. 
13. Railroad operators asked the federal government to send regular army troops to Illinois, on the pretext that the strike was preventing the movement of mail on the trains. 
14. Labor weakness are obvious in this passage, because wages for workers rose hardly at all, state laws governing hours and labor and safety standards, and gradually some guaranteed compensation for workers injured on the job. This left workers with less political power and considerably less control of the workplace than they had had forty years before.