THE STRIKE AT CARNEGIE'S WORKS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2390, 2 August 1892, Page 4

THE STRIKE AT CARNEGIE'S WORKS.

In the course of an interview with a representative of the Auckland Herald, Major Calhoun, a World's Fair Commissioner on his way to Sydney, said with reference to the strike at Mr Caanegie's works :—" lam not at all surprised at what has occurred at Pittsburg. Mr Carnegie came there poor, and although not sixty yet, has piled up forty millions out of labour. But Mr Carnegie still wants ' protection' and cheap labour. There are others associated with him, and about a dozen trusts practically control the whole mineral region. He and those associated made a great deal of their riches by importing Poles and Hungariane, until the Americana rose in arms, and the Legislature passed a law that contracts for importing foreign labour were illegal and declared null and void. The Carnegie halls and Canegie libraries were very good advertisements. But the workmen would not patronise them ; in fact they were not free public libraries in the sense and under the conditions in which hundreds of American citizens had endowed the cities in which they had made their fortunes. The trusts with which he was associated would give no freehold on their estates to the workman on which he could build a home, and he would have to go so far away that he could not keep his work. He had to buy everything at the trust stores and pay accordingly. It was simply industrial slavery. The men had pleaded to get free homes, and to establish co-operative stores, but in vain. Still he was utterly opposed to the violence and outrages committed, and which the state authorities would severly punish. Mob tyranny gave a thousand tyrants to the one of capital. He preferred organised labour to disorganised labour. The men were taught to discuss matters, to think and reflect, though after a feeble fashion. The outragos were the wild despairing efforts of a blind giant, who one day would see. Capital had left but one lesson on the mind of labor—that it would never improve its conditions or increase its pay save from having these advantages wrested from it by force. If the great capitalists would say to the laborer at the end of life's journey : 'We will see you to the end, not for what you do, but what you have done in the past, and what we have made out of you in the days of your prime,' they would hear no more of strikes. It might be done by life insurance or by annuity, a deduction being made from the wages and supplemented,"