The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-06-14
WORSE THAN SLAVERY
Blast Furnace Men Work Seven
 Days a Week
MONTH IN, MONTH OUT

"'SH'' hs5 "SNb OO Bruta,ized Condition of Men Employed
 In tho Steel Industry-"Protection to
 Labor" Means Getting Rid of Aneri-
 can Labor and Employing Underpaid
 Foreigners.
 The condition of labor existing at the Bethlehem Steel works. Pennsyl- vania. are shocking. but they are no worse than the conditions which pre- vail throughout the whole steel indus try"
 This is the statement of Dr. Charles F. Neill, United States commissioner of labor. Impulsive journalists and or ganized labor advocates have used similar statements before concerning the treatment meted out to employees of the steel trust. but these statements were thought to be exaggerated. MT. NeilPs official utterances will perhaps receive more credence.
 Bethlehem Is the scene of a great strike. Nine thousand men quit work there recently because of intolerable conditions. The labor employed there is not organized Organized labor has been banished from the steel industry since the great Homestead strike many years ago. The immediate cause of the present strike Is the fact that a committee of the workers who had gone to MT. Schwab demanding to be paid the usual rate of time and a half for overtime were discharged by him. Such are the arbitrary methods which prevail under the steel trust. The Bethlehem Steel company is only a branch of that organization
 But about thetcondition of the work CTS. While the better grades of work men work only ten and a half hours day and get half holiday every Sat urday. it is perfectly true" says Com missioner Nefn, that in some depart ments work for the entire seven days of the week, month in and month out, has been the practice throughout the entire steel industry"
 Speaking about the labor employed in the blast furnaces, he goes on to say that
 } '"The annual report of the bureau of labor on wages and hours shows that in the blast furnaces, for example, eighty-fow hours a week has been regular working time in every section of the country. This means practical ly a twelve hour day every day in the week." A large percentage of the men receive only 1235 cents an hour.
 How can American labor put up with such treatment? the reader may ask. The answer is that few Ameri- can workmen do put up with it. The foreigner of the more submissive va rieties, Lithuanians. Syrians, Poles and Roumanians being, it is said, pre- ferred as employees. Emigrants di- rect from Ellis island are taken to Pittsburg to work at low, wages, driv- Ing out American labor and reducing the standard of living of the workers to a level of squalor and wretchedness.
 The homes of the workers in Pitts burg were the subject of a minute investigation a year ago by the charities publication committee. The result of that investigation did not receive one-twentieth of the publicity it deserved If 1t did it would stagger humanity. It tells of human beings disfgured by tncessant toll into shriv- eled up. soulless skeletons, of pestf- lential cellar habitations and of loath- some vanits and exposed privy sheds which defy description, of rookeries swarmtng with mixed families. hud- dled together under circumstances where neither sanitation nor decency is possible. These are the conditions un- der which the imported laborers who make the fortunes of our Pittsburg millionaires are compelled to live their sQualfd, wretched lives.
 And to think that all this Is the boun- teous result of putting a tariff on iron and steel for the benefit of American labor! In carrying out our hypocritical policy we have raised up a gigantic mononoply which has enslaved labor and condemned it to hell upon earth. than the terrible degradation to which these foreign workers are subjected. What a heartrending note of woe there is in the following words utter ed by poor old nomesick Pittsburg immigrant:
 we might not have been able to live so we'll there; but, O man. we could have brought up the children in the fear of God and in a land where men reverence the Sabbathp'
 THOMAS SCANLON.