Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 March 1892 — LABOR NOTES. [ARTICLE]

LABOR NOTES.

The clerks are organizing at Elwood. There is a growing interest in unionism at that place. The clerks and salesmen of LafayettehavesucceededJel closing stores at 6p. m. and all day Sundays. The Loganspart City Council by unanimous vote decided to employ none but union labor on city work hereafter. The unions of Logansport take the credit of having carried the election in favor of free gravel roads at the late balloting. Kokomo is making greht headway in organization, The farmer organizations are amalgamating somewhat with the town labor there. The grand lodge of boilermakers will meet at Columbus the second Monday in May. The Brotherhood of Painters and Decorators gained ninety new local unions in 18U1. Denver’s industrial fair was opened last week by Governor Routt and staff. It promises to be a grand success and is the grandest trades display ever made in the West. The extensive locomotive shops of the New York, Lake Erie & Western railway at Susquehanna, I*a., have been placed on eight hours’ time, a reduction of one hour per day. A new order is being formed in the South called the Labor Educational Asspciation, its object being to educate the masses of the people by means of labor and economic literature and to qualify speakers an< lecturers to battle with the money power and its tools. The new constitution of the National Granite Cutters’ Union, which was recently submitted to a general vote of the local unions, provides, among other things, for the election of a national organizer whose salary is to be SIOO per month, besides traveling expenses, aiM the initiation fee is tg be raised to $25. The union also proposes to .build a monument costing $5,000 for the World’s Fair.

J. A. Riis, author of “How the Other Half Live,” recently lectured in Washington; D. C. In the 38,000 tenement houses of New York, he said, dwell 1,300,000 people. The tendency is still upward. Where the I)ulldings were four stories high they are now six; where two families once lived on a floor, there are now four. This accounts for the 40,000 annually sent to the islands, the 10,000 tramps who go to Blackwell’s, and the 500,000 beggars registered for eight; years past. A pine tree in Pennsylvania recently scaled 8,033 feet of lumber. It made seventeen saw logs 12 and 16 feet in length, and the top end of the butt log was fifty-eight inches in diameter.