The Art of the Industrial Squeeze
How the Steel Trust uses deliberate idleness and wage competition to break unions and keep workers in poverty.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There is a strike in progress against the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company, a subsidiary of the United States Steel Corporation. That company has declared its intention to operate all its mills non-union, and at the same time has posted a new schedule of wages at a material reduction. The trust has more mills than it needs, and it does not believe in competition in its own business—it prefers a monopoly. But the trust is a firm believer in competition between its employees. It has decided to have them compete for such work as it has to be done. The competition will be sharp and the lowest bidders will get the work. The trust believes that starvation is a great incentive to the kind of competition it likes. It will see to it, therefore, that a number of its plants are idle for long enough periods to sharpen competition for work.
“The trust believes that starvation is a great incentive to the kind of competition it likes.”
This 1909 analysis of 'cut-throat' labor practices mirrors modern debates about the gig economy, where algorithms and on-demand scheduling force workers to compete against each other for hours, effectively shifting the risk of market volatility onto the labor force.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.