Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 by Joseph A. McCartin

Author:Joseph A. McCartin [McCartin, Joseph A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Labor & Industrial Relations, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, History
ISBN: 9780807846797
Google: rSE6DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 1090468
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1998-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

The Sluggish Start of the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers

A more ambiguous story was told in northern steel mills. Surely the most important mass union effort of the early twentieth century began among northern steelworkers during 1918. Few could have predicted it even a year earlier. When members of a federal labor union of furnace hands at Pittsburgh’s Jones and Laughlin plant staged the first wartime steel strike in September 1917, idling as many as seven thousand Slovak, Serb, and Polish immigrants for more than three weeks, their walkout was easily broken. This failure again illustrated the factors that ensured that steelworkers would be among the last to demonstrate militancy during the war: their employers possessed vast power, and they themselves suffered from interunion squabbles. Unions of skilled workers, such as the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers (AAISTW), ignored unskilled furnace hands and others, leaving the job of unionizing them to the few AFL agents in the field who tried to organize catchall federal labor unions. Their ethnic heterogeneity, moreover, made it difficult to weld steelworkers into a single movement.21

By the summer of 1918, however, these inhibiting factors were counterbalanced by other developments, especially in those steel mills most closely tied to the war effort. Tightening labor markets, federal protection of the right to organize, and the war’s own tendency to draw a multicultural workforce together around a common language of democratic citizenship laid the groundwork for the emergence of successful organizing efforts in steel mills. Among the first places where this became clear was in the plants of the Bethlehem Steel Company. No contractor was more important to the war effort than Bethlehem Steel. With mills spread across seven Pennsylvania cities, the company produced armor plate, naval guns, and shells for the Liberty fleet. Its massive South Bethlehem works was one of the most essential war production plants in the nation. And it was right there that wartime steel unionism first took root.

As the war began, unionism in South Bethlehem faced large obstacles. Wide gulfs between skilled and unskilled workers were accentuated by ethnic divisions. Bethlehem’s skilled workers were disproportionately Pennsylvania Dutch and stood aloof from the largely eastern European immigrant workforce occupying unskilled positions. One-third of South Bethlehem’s thirty thousand workers were foreign-born, among them large numbers of Hungarians, Slovaks, and Czechs. The arrival of African American workers as a result of the Great Migration, first to work in the company’s Lehigh Coal and Coke subsidiary in Northampton, Pennsylvania, and later in South Bethlehem, added a new element of racial tension. And the employment of hundreds of women in South Bethlehem’s light machine shops, where they assembled artillery cartridges, further stratified the workforce by gender.22

Adding to these problems was Bethlehem Steel’s political power. Arch Johnson, the company’s vice president, was mayor of Bethlehem during the war, and the city’s police chief was a former member of the State Constabulary—the infamous “Cossacks” who helped break union efforts. The company’s support of churches, community

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