T.W.U. Illegal Activity: “Kind master, tell us what you wish us to do”

“The contract is cheaper and better for the M.T.A. than at the time that the strike commenced.”

… “When they walked out, they walked out without once attempting to address the M.T.A.'s issues.”

… “The governor has said that the T.W.U. should not and cannot be rewarded for going on an illegal strike, and the M.T.A. concurs 100 percent. This collective-bargaining agreement does not reward them for engaging in illegal activity.”

Sewell Chan, Steven Greenhouse, “M.T.A. Offers Strong Defense of Union Deal,” New York Times, 1/02/06.

WHILE upon the subject of our manufacturing interests, I may record that on July 1, 1892, during my absence in the Highlands of Scotland, there occurred the one really serious quarrel with our workmen in our whole history.

… Some of the leaders of the men, knowing these conditions, insisted upon demanding the whole sixty per cent, thinking the firm would be compelled to give it. The firm could not agree, nor should it have agreed to such an attempt as this to take it by the throat and say, “Stand and deliver.” It very rightly declined. Had I been at home nothing would have induced me to yield to this unfair attempt to extort.

… The unjust demands of the few union men, and the opinion of the three thousand non-union men that they were unjust, very naturally led him into thinking there would be no trouble and that the workmen would do as they had promised.

… The best men as men, and the best workmen, are not walking the streets looking for work. Only the inferior class as a rule is idle.

… I was traveling in the Highlands of Scotland when the trouble arose, and did not hear of it until two days after. Nothing I have ever had to meet in all my life, before or since, wounded me so deeply. No pangs remain of any wound received in my business career save that of Homestead. It was so unnecessary. The men were outrageously wrong. The strikers, with the new machinery, would have made from four to nine dollars a day under the new scale—thirty per cent more than they were making with the old machinery. While in Scotland I received the following cable from the officers of the union of our workmen:

“Kind master, tell us what you wish us to do and we shall do it for you.”

This was most touching, but, alas, too late. The mischief was done, the works were in the hands of the Governor; it was too late.

… I knew myself to be warmly sympathetic with the working-man, and also that I had the regard of our own workmen; but throughout the country it was naturally the reverse, owing to the Homestead riot. The Carnegie Works meant to the public Mr. Carnegie's war upon labor's just earnings.

Andrew Carnegie. Authobiography (1920).