Jasper County Democrat, Volume 13, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 June 1910 — WORSE THAI SLAVERY [ARTICLE]

WORSE THAI SLAVERY

Blast Furnace Men Work Seven Days a Week MONTH IN, MONTH OUT Brutalized Condition of Men Employed In the Steel Industry—“ Protection to Labor” Means Getting Rid of American Labor and Employing Underpaid Foreigners. The condition of labor existing at Ihe Bethlehem Steel works. .Pennsylvania. are "shocking. but they are no worse than rhe conditions which prevail throughout the Whole steel industry* . ' ' This is the statement of Dr. Charles P. Neill. United States commissioner of labor. Impulsive journalists and organized labor advocates have used similar statements before concerning ihe treatment meted out to employees of the steel trust, but these statements were thought to be exaggerated. Mr Neill’s official utterances will perhaps receive more credence.

Bethlehem is the scene of a great strike. Nine thousand men quit work 1 here recently because of intolerable conditions. The labor employed there is not organized. Organized labor has been banished from the steel industry, since great Homestead strike many years ago. The immediate cause of the present strike is the fact that a committee of the workers who had gone to Mr. Schwab demanding to be paid the usual rate of time and a half for overtime were discharged by him; Such are rhe arbitrary methods which prevail under the steel trust. The Bethlehem Steel company is only a branch of that organization. But about tbe condition of the workers. White the better grades of workmen work only ten and a half ‘hours a day and get a half holiday every Saturday. "it is perfectly true,” says Com missioner Neill, "that in some departments work for the entire seven days of the week, month in and month out. has been the practice throughout the entire steel industry.” Speaking about the labor employed in the blast furnaces, he goes on to say that—- " The annual report of the bureau of labor on wages and hours shows that in the blast furnaces, for example, eighty-four hours a week has been regular working time in every section of the country. This means practically a twelve hour day every day in the week." A large percentage of the men receive only 12’X> cents an hour. How, can American labor put up with such treatment? the reader may ask. The answer is that few American workmen do put up with it. The steel and iron Industry Is overrun with foreigners of the more submissive varieties. Lithuanians, Syrians. Poles and Roumanians being, it is said, preferred as employees. Emigrants direct from Ellis island are taken to Pittsburg to work at low wages, driving out American labor and reducing the standard of living of the workers to a level of squalor and wretchedness. The homes of the workers in Pittsburg were the subject of a minute Investigation a year ago by the charities publication committee. The result of that investigation did not receive one-twentieth of the publicity it deserved. If it did it would stagger humanity. It tells of human beings disfigured by incessant toil into shriveled up, soulless skeletons, of pestilential cellar habitations and of loathsome vaults and exposed privy sheds which defy description, of rookeries swarming with mixed families, huddled together under circumstances where neither sanitation nor decency is possible. These are the conditions under which the imported laborers who make the fortunes of our Pittsburg millionaires are compelled to live their squalid, wretched lives. And to think that all this is the bounteous result of putting a tariff on iron and steel for the, benefit of American labor! In carrying ouUour hypocritical policy we have' raised- up a gigantic monouoply which has enslaved labor and condemned it to a hell upon earth, fio’southern sla very was ever worse than the terrible degradation to which these foreign workers are subjected. What a heartrending note of woe there is in the following words uttered by a poor old homesick Pittsburg immigrant: "We might not have been able to live so well there: but. O man. we could have brought up the children in the fear of God and in a land where men reverence the Sabbath!" THOMAS SCANLON.