No expenditure returned such
dividends as the friendship of our workmen.
We soon had a body of workmen, I truly believe, wholly unequaled--the
best workmen and the best men ever drawn together. Quarrels and
strikes became things of the past. Had the Homestead men been our own
old men, instead of men we had to pick up, it is scarcely possible
that the trouble there in 1892 could have arisen. The scale at the
steel-rail mills, introduced in 1889, has been running up to the
present time (1914), and I think there never has been a labor
grievance at the works since. The men, as I have already stated,
dissolved their old union because there was no use paying dues to a
union when the men themselves had a three years' contract. Although
their labor union is dissolved another and a better one has taken its
place--a cordial union between the employers and their men, the best
union of all for both parties.
It is for the interest of the employer that his men shall make good
earnings and have steady work. The sliding scale enables the company
to meet the market; and sometimes to take orders and keep the works
running, which is the main thing for the working-men. High wages are
well enough, but they are not to be compared with steady employment.
The Edgar Thomson Mills are, in my opinion, the ideal works in respect
to the relations of capital and labor.
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