What were the major goals of the labor movement on the eve of the Homestead Lockout in 1892?
Labor unions in the U.S. began as craftsman’s guilds that were meant to uphold the standards and quality of both the products and the workplace. At first, most businesses were local and relatively small. In the mid-1800s, though, the American Industrial Revolution began. As industries grew, the interests of the workers began to conflict with those of the business owners.
The workers were faced with wage cuts, unsafe working conditions, and long hours. Additionally, some of the business owners were becoming more and more involved in politics. If company owners could start passing laws, the workers feared that their lives at work and at home would only get worse.
The Homestead Lockout occurred in 1892, when the Carnegie Steel Company announced that their workers would have to accept a huge pay cut. The Union declared a strike, which seems to have been exactly what the owners were trying to do—the company locked them out of the plant, and hired non-union “strikebreakers” to come in and perform the work instead. After so many years of bad feelings between workers and business owners, it’s not surprising that violence broke out.
https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-events/1892-homestead-strike
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