Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 December 1891 — More W aife Reductions. [ARTICLE]

More W aife Reductions.

A dispatch to the New York Post from Pittsburg says: “It is reported to-day that the iron and steel manufacturers of the United States will make a general assault on the Ama gamated Association in the spring. Tne skilled workmen in all the union mills belong to this association, and the annual wage scale for the United States is made in this city Preliminary sklrm shes have already o cured, and in every instr nee the workmen were beaten. ” Under the protection of the McKinley tariff the manufacturers have formed trusts and combinations to control prices and appropriate all the tariff bonus to themselves. At the same time they use their organization to stop the workmen from uniting and to keep down their wages. The reductions in wages referred to in the above dispatch were those made by the Carnegies, the Pennsylvania Steel Company, the Bethlehem Iron Company, all members of the steel rail trust; by the firm of Jones & Laughlin, a member of the steel beam trust; and by the Oliver & Roberts Wire Company, which cut wages 20 per cent; and the Baker Wire Company, both members of the Columbia Patents Company, popularly known as the wire trust What could show more clearly that, the tariff is not for the workmen? “Hands off immigration,” said Carnegie recently. High duties on the product of trustsand free trade in labor is the keynote of high protectionism. Much stress is laid upon the fact that the McKinley tariff has almost completely prohibited the importation of woolen rags and shoddy from Europe to the United States. But no mention is made of the other fact that not a pound of woolen rags or shoddy is exported from this country. While England, Germany, Italy and poorer countries of Europe largely export these cheap materials, the

manufacturers of the Unitsd States have need of all the rags and shoddy they can •get as a substitute for pure wool to make into clothing for the richest people of the world. How often the domestic rags are worked over in the shoddy: mills is a question to which the statistics of manufactures afford no adequate answer.—Philadelphia Beeord.