Carnegie chose to fight unions and collective bargaining because he earned more money by maintaining control over the wages of his workers… The Homestead steel mill, located a few miles from Pittsburgh along the Monongahela River, was one of the largest of Carnegie’s mills. This violent strike ended in a dozen deaths and helped Carnegie and other business tycoons maintain control over workers by denying them the right to unionize. These working conditions led to the Homestead Strike, during which many of the strikers expressed their opposition to the working conditions and low pay in Carnegie's steel mills. Carnegie Steel Co. … Over the course of the 1880s, several unions were broken at other mills and industrial plants around the country, but in 1892 the workers of the Homestead mill were still represented by the powerful Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Miserable working conditions including crowded and unclean factories, a lack of safety codes or ...read more Homestead's management, with millionaire Andrew Carnegie as owner, was determined to lower its costs of production by breaking the union. The skilled workers at the steel mills in Homestead, seven miles southeast of downtown Pittsburgh, were members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers who had bargained exceptionally good wages and work rules. A few scholars have probed the inner workings of the steel mills to determine the extent to which skilled workers exercised control over their working … The demanding conditions sapped the life from workers. "You don't notice any old men here," said a Homestead laborer in 1894. Steel Workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, 1889-1895 PART OF THE STORY OF HOMESTEAD in the 18 90s has received considerable attention from historians, particularly with regard to the dramatic events surrounding the Homestead lockout of 1892.