On July 6, 1892, amid the Homestead labor conflict, an advisory committee of the Knights of Labor and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Stealworkers argued that industrial centralization was concentrating control of major national industries in the hands of one or a few men, giving them despotic power over workers and the broader public. Speaking of the mill of Carnegie, Phipps and Co. at Homestead, Pennsylvania, it asserted that the employees had built a town with homes, schools, and churches, had long worked faithfully with the company, and had invested their savings in the mill expecting to spend their lives in Homestead and remain employed there while efficient. The committee maintained that both the public and the employees had equitable rights and interests in the mill that could not be altered without due process of law, that employees had a right to continuous employment during efficiency and good behavior regardless of religious, political, or economic opinions or associations, and that denying work or imposing social harm on an entire community of workers because of membership in a church, political party, or trade union violated public policy and fundamental American liberty. It called on American citizens to resist by every legal and ordinary means what it characterized as the unconstitutional, anarchic, and revolutionary policy of the Carnegie Company.
