Homestead Strike 1892
The Homestead Strike began as a company lockout and strike on June 30, 1892. Located in the area of Pittsburgh, PA known as Homestead was the Homestead Steel Works, a Carnegie Steel company. Technological advances in steel production in the 1880s allowed for lighter and stronger steel, which garnered higher prices. The production process for the lighter and stronger steel allowed for quicker production, which in turn meant more steel plants and more workers.
As the steel industry expanded, skilled laborers, as in other industries, saw their wages cut and their jobs replaced by unskilled workers. In 1876, craft laborers formed the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA), which concentrated its efforts west of the Alleghany Mountains. The union achieved success in negotiating a uniform wage scale, regulating working hours, workloads, and work speeds, and improving working conditions for steel and iron workers.
When AA members went on strike on July 1, 1889, while attempting to negotiate a new three-year collective bargaining agreement, they seized the town. Townspeople of various ethnicities and strikers violently drove off a trainload of strikebreakers on July 10th. The AA conceded to the wage cuts but was able to control the steel plant. For the next few years, the AA successfully defined work rules and limited the Homestead plant’s management from maximizing output. This, of course, caused cleavage in the relationship between management and workers.
Henry Clay Frick was put in charge of the Carnegie Steel Company operations in 1881 and resolved to break the union. Frick, with the permission of Andrew Carnegie, began building walls around the Homestead Plant that were topped with barbed wire. When negotiations began for a new AA contract, Frick announced that he would only negotiate with workers individually, not with the union. Before the AA members could strike, Frick locked out the workers and hired 300 armed guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to protect the nonunion, or scab, workers.
The confrontation between the Pinkertons, AA members, and other union workers around the Homestead plant was bloody. On July 12, the Pennsylvania state militia arrived near the Homestead mill and surrounded it. Strikers and Pinkertons fired shots at each other from their various vantage points. The violence persisted for four months, and eventually support for the striking workers evaporated. By October, the state militia withdrew and nine strikers and seven Pinkertons were dead.
The union had capitulated and the skilled steelworkers had lost their power on the shop floor. At other steel plants, managers refused to negotiate with AA members. After the Homestead strike, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers lost all of its negotiation power and collapsed. The skilled workers in the AA were eventually replaced by mechanization.