Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920 by Michael K. Rosenow

Author:Michael K. Rosenow [Rosenow, Michael K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Death & Dying, Labor & Industrial Relations, United States, Social Science, Political Science, History, General
ISBN: 9780252097119
Google: 0rJ_BwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 23359560
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2014-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Source: Crystal Eastman, Work-Accidents and the Law (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1910), 51.

Accidents did not afflict all ethnic groups equally. At one plant from 1906 to 1910, Polish workers and southeastern Europeans accounted for more than 60 percent of all accidents. Non-English-speaking workers over the same years sustained 3,273 injuries versus 1,213 for English-speaking foreign-born and 761 for American-born workers.64 A fatality list including surnames at the Homestead Works for 1911 echoed the findings: Chimko, Wynera, Dudash, Guesa, Winchuck, Fustin (Suhi), Seltz, Konkol, Susner, and Matsko. Alois Koukol remarked that he met men maimed by industrial accidents “everywhere in Pittsburgh”—they were “so common as to excite no comment.” Work segregated by ethnicity and skill proved most dangerous to Slavs. “In proportion to their numbers the Slavs are the greatest sufferers from accidents in the Pittsburgh region, for to their lot falls the heaviest and most dangerous work,” he reported. The Bureau of Labor concluded that the high frequency of accidents suggested that “the two groups of Polish and southeastern Europeans have a racial difference affecting their accident rates.”65 English-speaking workers and others in the community coined the pejorative racial epithet “hunky” to mark the so-called new immigrants as inferior.

As the epithet “hunky” demonstrates, ethnicity and experience combined to shape how foremen and skilled workers interpreted the deaths of laborers. “Oh, that is significant,” a superintendent remarked when told that four Slavs were killed by hot metal falling from a crane. “Americans would know enough to keep out from under those loads.” Foremen frequently ordered laborers into dangerous situations, sometimes eliciting protests from laborers worried for their safety. Such fear prompted one eighteen-year-old Slavic laborer to refuse orders to work in a certain section of the mill. “But the foreman insisted,” according to Crystal Eastman, “telling him with a rough laugh that it did not matter whether he was killed or not.” Afraid to lose his job, the young worker started work. Only a few minutes later, a bucket loaded with sixty-nine hundred pounds of material fell and crushed him.66 Language barriers compounded risks. Immigrants unfamiliar with English could misinterpret or simply not understand instructions.67

Skilled native-born workers sometimes shared with the foremen similar attitudes toward responsibility for accidents and the social worth of the deceased. American or native-born men usually performed the skilled work in the mill, such as operating cranes or driving the dinkey trains that transported materials across the plant. When a load fell from a crane or a train car crushed a worker, the casualty normally came from the Slavic or other eastern European ranks. These characteristics of production shaped how skilled native-born workers viewed the deaths of their immigrant coworkers and revealed tension between the two groups. Crane operators blamed the “stupidity and slowness” of the immigrant laborers, while friends of the injured laborer put fault on the operator for not waiting for the proper signal.68 One train engineer with twenty-five years’ experience in the mill confided to John Fitch that he had killed two men

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