The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Escaping injury was a matter of attentiveness and luck, but on a twelve-hour day in a loud and hot mill, attentiveness waned with the hours. Workers needed luck, and new workers needed it most of all. As wages sank, more and more of Carnegie’s workers were southern and eastern Europeans. Between 1907 and 1910, 25 percent of the recent immigrants employed in Carnegie’s South Works—3,723 in all—were killed or seriously injured. The company eliminated breaks in the workday that the unions had once secured; it apportioned work and set work rules as it saw fit. The death rate from accidents in Pittsburgh’s iron and steel mills nearly doubled between 1870 and 1900. The system was disastrous for workers, who became the equivalent of cannon fodder, but for Carnegie the profits were, in his words, “prodigious.”