We are watching the Men who made America and it is interesting the method's Carnegie went to with his manager Fisk to kill over worked, really under paid for the dangerous jobs they did and in dangerous conditions. The stand off/strike resulted in 9 workers dead...Pinkerton's killed them willy nilly, the workers were armed at best with rocks. They shot them like sitting ducks in one of those shooting gallery things. Some of them barely 18.
I can see how unions got a foot hold, but they have FAR exceeded what they originally were about worker safety and a fair wage for the job performed.
My dad was a boiler maker in one of the largest steel mills in E. Chicago, IN, Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Union was useless when he accidentally fell and damaged his neck and spine and was injured to the point he could no longer do his job.
Two things - (1) they were on company property and preventing the company from hiring new people and conducting its business and (2) there's quite a bit of union myth-making involved on this incident, if the left-leaning Wikipedia is to be believed:
On July 6, 1892, during the Homestead Strike, 300 Pinkerton detectives from New York and Chicago were called in by Carnegie Steel's Henry Clay Frick to protect the Pittsburgh area mill and strikebreakers. This resulted in a fire fight and siege in which 16 men were killed (seven Pinkertons and nine strikers). To restore order two brigades of the Pennsylvania militia were called out by the Governor.Unions couldn't exist without an anti-trust exemption from the government. How is it fair that unions can band together to go after employers, whereas employers can't band together to go after unions? In a democracy, unions have the whip hand - they can get legislation passed that benefits unions, whereas employers are relentlessly fighting rearguard actions. In my view, unions ought to have their anti-trust exemption revoked.
I read once about a auto assembly plant in California, where a worker was mutilated and killed by a dangerous condition that the workers had been complaining about for years. At the next union meeting a bunch of dead guys friends showed up demanding to know what the UAW shop steward was doing about the death, and the unchanged dangerous condition.
"Nothing." Was the steward's reply. He explained that since the dead guy had not filed a grievance complaining that he had been killed, he wasn't required, under union rules, to take any action.
Yup, in the Volunteer State... being in a union is voluntary.