Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 October 1890 — LABOR NOTES. [ARTICLE]

LABOR NOTES.

New York gasfittera are abolishing 1 • ‘lumping.” Cleveland pavers struck against nonunion men. Brooklyn marble-cutters want $4 for eight hours. New York fresco painters are fined $4 for gilding. A travel!ng crane made at Aliance. 0., lifts 150 tons. The State of Ohio has established free labor bureaus. t- Tile-makers will demand -50, $3.50 and $3 a day. Minneapolis city laborers’ wages were increased to $1.75. Women worked in Chicago brickyards during the strike. Spain Socialists have fixed May 1 as a labor holiday each year. The Granite-cutters’ National Union secured nine hours all over. New York building workers won a strike against non-union hands. Some Buffalo bakers were expelled from the union for working Labor Day. Chicago tin-sheet and corniee-work-ers are winning eight hours and 40 cents an hour. Some New York gold-beater won from $4.50 to $6.20, for beating fifty pennyweight. Washington painters, including those on the White House, struck for eight hours and $3. Furniture workers in’a New York shop refuse to do without beer in working hours. It was complained of at the Cincinnati convention that Philadelphia manufacturers were retailing* The unions have induced San Francisco and Oakland breweries to not use Wellington coal during the strike. At Binghamton, N. Y,. sixty of the Cigar mill strikers, including women, have been arrested while on picket duty. The Grand Division of Railroad Conductors has paid off an indebtedness of SII,BOO in a year, and has a large balance in its treasury. John Chinaman has gimp enough to strike. A few of him asked, and got, higher wages for picking grapes in Southern California by this weapon. One of the men shipped from Philadelphia to take work molding, at San Francisco was a striker. He got the whole lot to desert before they got out. For SIO,OOO paid to the union the Rome Bricklayers’ Co-operative ety elected a man to Parliament, Then the Roman Trades Council expelled the bricklayers’ delegate. The Executive Committee of the Amalgamated Railway Servants has decided to send to America a hundred of the men who took partin the unsuccessful strike on the Dublifi, Wicklow & Wexford line. The strike of twenty-five hundred miners in the Irwin mining region, near Scottdale, Pa., continues. The company has evicted the miners from their cottages, and has tried to employ new men, but the work requires so much experience that the new ones have left The Knights of Labor and the Na. tional Progressive Union of the coke regions, Scottdale, Penn., have united and now form a federation twenty thousand strong. They fear opposition -from the operators when they shall present their annual demand next February, and are preparing for a strike. AU boys under sixteen years of age will |be discharged from the Edgar Thomson and the Homestead Steel Works at Pittsburg. This order is an idea of Andrew Carnegi. who has al. ways opposed youth labor. The order will affect many widows who depend on their sons for support. Some 250 boys at Braddock andover 100 at Homestead will be discharged. A number of the clerks and telegraph operators on the Mackey »ailroad lines recently banded themselves In a federation and struck for an advance in wages amounting to fifteen percent., and demanded the reinstatement of one of the office s of their federation who had just been discharged . The company took the matter under advisement, and in the meantime the men obeyed orders and returned to work until the company should make known their decision. Switchmen to the number pf one hundred and twenty-five, who are employed by the Union Pacific Railroad in the yards of that cornpay. at Denver, Col., went out on strike Wednesday because an assistant superintendent, whom they oposed, was not discharged. Theofiicials immediately employed thirty new men and threatened the strikers with permanent discharge if they did not return to their posts within twenty-four hours. Nearly all the freight for interior Colorado passes through Denver, and therefore through these yards, which makes prompt and decisive measures on the part of the company absolutely necessary. The strike of the Hindoo barbers recently announced wai scarcely understood abroad. .It seems that the special symbol of widowhood in India is the shaven bead, which must be kept perfectly bare, untill the poor woman dies. The Hindoo barbers struck against shaving lhe.se helpless, tortured, desp'sed child-widows, and hence the courageous men aimed a blow at once starting and effective against one of the most cruel and inlquitows systems this sin-enrsed world ever knew. By their refusal to follow out the custom they have sacrificed a large per cent of their income, and brought down on themselves the wrath of the wealthy high caste people, who if they ar > determined to have their widows shaven, must send them long

distance to find willing barbers. Five hundred barbers of Guzerati persist in their refusal to aid in perpetuating the disgrace of the unoffending women.