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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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in which the labor clauses, the labor conditions, were good. They were better than any union would have thought of asking for, just as they had been in the textile industry.

There as no real union in the steel industry. There was a strange little body that called itself the Amalgamated Steelworkers, dating back fifty years, but having grown weaker and weaker and having been completely broken up in the great steel strike in which the Homestead riots and Homestead massacre took place. It never recovered from that, growing weaker and weaker and weaker. The younger men never bothered to join it, if they ever even heard of it. So it was really reduced to a letterhead. It had a president, and other officers, but that was about all it had. It had almost no members. I suppose it must have a few members, but they were scattered and underground practically. They never admitted their membership in the mill where they worked. Most of them wouldn't have kept their jobs if their membership had been known.

William Green knew what condition the Amalgamated Steelworkers was in. He didn't attempt to press that the Amalgamated Steelworkers should be consulted about this code. I forget the name of the president of the union, but he was far gone. I don't know whether it was senile dementia, or whether he was always that way, but he was pretty far gone.





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