But after Pullman’s company joined forces with railroad managers, President Grover Cleveland’s Attorney General Richard Olney convinced a federal judge to issue an injunction against the strikers, and Cleveland himself sent 10,000 federal troops in to suppress the strike. The ARU managed to shut down rail travel in 27 states, an area stretching from Chicago to the West Coast, according to Indiana State University labor historian Richard Schneirov. The Pullman strike was the first instance in American labor history of a sympathy action, in which workers who aren’t directly involved in a dispute intervene to help fellow laborers. Debs, announced a nationwide boycott of all trains carrying Pullman cars, to support the ARU local whose workers were employed by Pullman. The following year, the American Railway Union, headed by Eugene V. In 1893, George Pullman laid off three-quarters of his employees, cut wages for many of the ones he brought back by nearly 30 percent, and refused to reduce rents or store prices in the company town he operated south of Chicago. Pullman Strike (1894)Īn engraving of strikers burning freight cars during the Pullman Strike in Illinois, circa 1894. The Homestead strikers’ resolve inspired other unionists but also showed them how hard it would be to overcome a big company that had government support. But Frick nearly paid for the victory with his own life, surviving being shot and stabbed in an assassination attempt by anarchist Alexander Berkman. The Pinkertons then became pinned down in a bloody gunfight with the strikers and were forced to surrender.Įventually, the Pennsylvania State Militia was sent in to suppress the strike, and the union was crushed. When word spread of the Pinkertons' approach, thousands of striking workers and their families rushed to the river to keep them from coming ashore. Frick sent Pinkerton detectives on barges up the river in order to protect strikebreaking replacement workers he planned to hire. Pinkerton detectives had become known for infiltrating unions and breaking strikes nationwide, including at another Carnegie plant a few years earlier. In June 1892, Frick announced pay cuts for Homestead steelworkers and refused to negotiate with the union, instead locking workers out of the plant. Located just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, Carnegie Steel’s sprawling Homestead steel plant was the scene of a brutal battle between the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and the company’s chief executive, Henry Clay Frick, who wanted to break the union’s power. has one of the most violent labor histories in the world,” says Judith Stepan-Norris, a research professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author of an upcoming book on the U.S.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, picketers often faced the risk of being beaten up by police or thugs recruited by management.
“It was the pressure they were putting on both employers and the government to do something."īut labor stoppages also have been a perilous move for workers. “They don’t happen without workers in large numbers going on strike,” explains Erik Loomis, an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the history department at the University of Rhode Island, and author of the 2018 book A History of America in Ten Strikes. Over the years, they played a part in many of the labor movement’s hard-fought gains-from better wages to the eight-hour workday and other improvements in working conditions. Strikes figured prominently in the rise of the organized labor movement that began in earnest in the mid-to-late 1800s. Since colonial times, when fishermen, bakers, refuse collectors and tailors tried to get more money or fairer treatment by refusing to perform their jobs, going on strike has been an important tactic of American labor.
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