Big Business, Workers and Newcomers
1After the Civil War, American businesses grew to a size the country had never seen. Railroads needed steel rails, and cities needed steel for bridges and buildings. Andrew Carnegie built steel mills near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that used the Bessemer process to make steel quickly and cheaply. He also bought iron mines, coal fields, ships and railroads, so his company controlled each step from raw ore to finished steel. In oil, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil combined many companies into one trust and by about 1880 refined roughly 90 percent of the nation's oil.
2The new mills and factories needed huge numbers of workers. In many steel mills, men worked twelve-hour shifts, often six or seven days a week, around furnaces and heavy machines. Injuries were common, and in most states there were no laws that made companies pay workers who were hurt. Wages for unskilled laborers were often less than two dollars a day.
3Workers formed labor unions so they could bargain as a group instead of one by one. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, welcomed both skilled and unskilled workers and grew to roughly 700,000 members by 1886. The American Federation of Labor, formed in 1886 and led by Samuel Gompers, organized skilled workers by craft and pushed for higher pay and an eight-hour day. When talks failed, unions sometimes went on strike. Owners often fought back by hiring replacement workers and private guards, and governors and courts often sided with the companies. Large strikes at Carnegie's Homestead steel works in 1892 and at the Pullman railroad car company in 1894 ended in defeat for the unions.
4Many of the new workers were immigrants. From the 1880s on, more and more of them came from southern and eastern Europe, from countries such as Italy, Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire. Some left villages where there was too little farmland to divide among children; Jewish families fled violent attacks in the Russian Empire. Steamships made the ocean crossing take about one or two weeks instead of a month or more. Immigrants were drawn by jobs that paid cash wages and by relatives and neighbors who had already settled in industrial cities. Many sent part of their pay home.