Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism
Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism

Author: James Douglas Rose

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780252026607

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Not all workers' needs were served by the union. Focusing on the steel works at Duquesne, Pennsylvania, a linchpin of the old Carnegie Steel Company empire and then of U.S. Steel, James D. Rose demonstrates the pivotal role played by a nonunion form of employee representation usually dismissed as a flimsy front for management interests. The early New Deal set in motion two versions of workplace representation that battled for supremacy: company-sponsored employee representation plans (ERPs) and independent trade unionism. At Duquesne, the cause of the unskilled, hourly workers, mostly eastern and southern Europeans as well as blacks, was taken up by the union -- the Fort Dukane Lodge of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers. For skilled tonnage workers and skilled tradesmen, mainly U.S.-born and of northern and western European extraction, ERPs offered a better solution. Initially little more than a crude antiunion device, ERPs matured from tools of the company into semi-independent, worker-led organizations. Isolated from the union movement through the mid-1930s, ERP representatives and management nonetheless created a sophisticated bargaining structure that represented the shop-floor interests of the mill's skilled workforce. Meanwhile, the Amalgamated gave way to the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, a professionalized and tightly organized affiliate of John L. Lewis's CIO that expended huge resources trying to gain companywide unionization. Even when the SWOC secured a collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Steel in 1937, however, the Union was still unable to sign up a majority of the workforce at Duquesne. A sophisticated study of the forces that shaped and responded to workers' interests, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism confirms that what people did on the shop floor was as critical to the course of steel unionism as were corporate decision making and shifts in government policy.

Cradle of Steel Unionism, Monongahela Valley, Pa
Cradle of Steel Unionism, Monongahela Valley, Pa

Author: George Powers

Publisher:

Published: 1972

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13:

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USA. Historical account of the trade union activities of steel workers in the monongahela valley of pennsylvania from 1858 to 1971 - covers working conditions, wages, strike and unofficial strike activities, political aspects, employment problems, union leadership, etc. One-page bibliography, illustrations and statistical tables.

Divided We Stand
Divided We Stand

Author: Bruce Nelson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 069122742X

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Divided We Stand is a study of how class and race have intersected in American society--above all, in the "making" and remaking of the American working class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing mainly on longshoremen in the ports of New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, and on steelworkers in many of the nation's steel towns, it examines how European immigrants became American and "white" in the crucible of the industrial workplace and the ethnic and working-class neighborhood. As workers organized on the job, especially during the overlapping CIO and civil rights eras in the middle third of the twentieth century, trade unions became a vital arena in which "old" and "new" immigrants and black migrants forged new alliances and identities and tested the limits not only of class solidarity but of American democracy. The most volatile force in this regard was the civil rights movement. As it crested in the 1950s and '60s, "the Movement" confronted unions anew with the question, "Which side are you on?" This book demonstrates the complex ways in which labor organizations answered that question and the complex relationships between union leaders and diverse rank-and-file constituencies in addressing it. Divided We Stand includes vivid examples of white working-class "agency" in the construction of racially discriminatory employment structures. But Nelson is less concerned with racism as such than with the concrete historical circumstances in which racialized class identities emerged and developed. This leads him to a detailed and often fascinating consideration of white, working-class ethnicity but also to a careful analysis of black workers--their conditions of work, their aspirations and identities, their struggles for equality. Making its case with passion and clarity, Divided We Stand will be a compelling and controversial book.

City At The Point
City At The Point

Author: Samuel P. Hays

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 1991-03-15

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 0822971488

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An overview of scholarly research, both published and previously unpublished, on the history of a city that has often served as a case study for measuring social change. It synthesizes the literature and assesses how that knowledge relates to our broader understanding of the processes of urbanization and urbanism. This book is especially useful for undergraduate and graduate courses on environmental politics and policy making, or as a supplement for courses on public policy making generally.

Making Their Own Way
Making Their Own Way

Author: Peter Gottlieb

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780252066177

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"A model study, one of two or three genuinely indispensable books on that momentous movement historians know as the Great Migration. Peter Gottlieb shatters the received portrait of southern migrants as bewildered, premodern folk, 'utterly unprepared' for the complexities of urban life. African Americans in his account emerge as complex, creative agents, exploiting old solidarities and building new ones, transforming the urban landscape even as it transformed them." -- James Campbell, Northwestern University "Engagingly written and well organized. . . . A major addition to the fields of Afro-American, urban, and working-class history." -- Howard N. Rabinowitz, Georgia Historical Quarterly "Gottlieb uses oral histories, corporate records, and primary and secondary scholarship to present a useful picture of an important part of the Great Migration that followed World War I." -- George Lipsitz, Choice "Sensitive and yet also incisive. . . . clear and often compelling. An outstanding study." -- James R. Barrett, Journal of American Ethnic History Publication of this work was supported in part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Out of the Crucible
Out of the Crucible

Author: Dennis C. Dickerson

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1986-01-01

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780887063053

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This book examines in depth the century-long struggle of Black laborers in the iron and steel industry of western Pennsylvania. In the process it shows how the fate of these Black workers mirrors the contemporary predicament of the Black working class and the development of a chronically unemployed underclass in America's declining industrial centers. Dickerson argues that persistent racial discrimination within heavy industry and the decline of major industries during the 1970s are key to understanding the social and economic situation of twentieth-century urban Blacks. Through a blend of historical research and contemporary interviews, this study chronicles the struggle of Black steelworkers to gain equality in the industry and the setbacks suffered as American steelmaking succumbed to foreign competition and antiquated modes of production. The plight of western Pennsylvania's Black steelworkers reflects that of Black laborers in Chicago, Gary, Detroit, Cleveland, Youngstown, Birmingham, and other major American cities where heavy industry once flourished.

Crucible of Freedom
Crucible of Freedom

Author: Eric Leif Davin

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2012-07-10

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 073914572X

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This book explores the relation between democracy and industrialization in United States history. Over the course of the 1930s, the political center almost disappeared as the Democratic New Deal became the litmus test of class, with blue collar workers providing its bedrock of support while white collar workers and those in the upper-income levels opposed it. By 1948 the class cleavage in American politics was as pronounced as in many of the Western European countries-such as France, Italy, Germany, or Britain-with which we usually associate class politics. Working people created a new America in the 1930s and 1940s which was a fundamental departure from the feudalistic and hierarchical America that existed before. They won the political rights of American citizenship which had been previously denied them. They democratized labor-capital relations and gained more economic security than they had ever known. They obtained more economic opportunity for them and their children than they had ever known and they created a respect for ethnic workers, which had not previously existed. In the process, class politics re-defined the political agenda of America as-for the first time in American history-the political universe polarized along class lines. Eric Leif Davin explores the meaning of the New Deal political mobilization by ordinary people by examining the changes it brought to the local, county, and state levels in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and Pennsylvania as a whole.

Racial Competition and Class Solidarity
Racial Competition and Class Solidarity

Author: Terry Boswell

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2006-03-09

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0791482081

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It sometimes seems that racial conflict is an intractable impediment to class solidarity in the United States. Yet in a time of economic depression and overt racism, the unions of the CIO did, on a number of occasions, forge interracial solidarity among industrial workers of the 1930s and 1940s. This book explores the role of racism and racial solidarity in union organizing efforts or strikes during the period between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, covering both those conditions and actions that enabled unions to realize interracial solidarity and those more common circumstances in which union organizing was defeated by racial competition. The authors combine theories of racial competition, specifically split labor market theory, with game theory models of collective action to compare the patterns of race relations that accompanied nine American labor organizing drives and strikes. They conclude that racial competition thwarted solidarity when minorities were recent immigrants or where employers used racist paternalism. Where conditions were more favorable, unions overcame racial divisions by institutionalizing their rhetoric about racial equality in the form of black organizers and black union officials, in what came to be known as the "miners' formula." This formula worked, and the CIO unions today remain among the country's most integrated institutions and most powerful advocates of working class interests.

Steel and Steelworkers
Steel and Steelworkers

Author: John Hinshaw

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2002-04-04

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780791452264

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Breaks new ground in the study of an industry and region crucial to the history of American industrial capitalism.

Remapping the Humanities
Remapping the Humanities

Author: Mary Garrett

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780814333693

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An innovative collection demonstrating the rich potential for interdisciplinary learning found within the network of university-based humanities centers. Remapping the Humanities celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Wayne State University Humanities Center by bringing together essays that illustrate the richness of public conversations developed in interdisciplinary humanities centers. The contributors to this collection represent more than a dozen disciplines--including philosophy, English, political science, history, law, comparative literature, and Spanish--and, taken together, their essays illustrate an ongoing remapping of the intellectual landscape as scholars from across university departments engage one another in unpredictable ways. This volume is divided into four thematic sections: Identity and Community, Remembering and Forgetting, Nationalism and Globalism, and Toward (Post)Modernity. Yet the essays deliberately represent a range of theoretical perspectives that interact synergistically, such as feminism and postcolonial studies, or literary criticism and art history. They also tackle topics as varied as the formation of the modern family in France and the inculcation of civic virtue in American cities, and they draw freely from different sources of evidence like newspaper accounts, popular literature, paintings, and diaries. Remapping the Humanities includes unique touches such as a portfolio of full-color images and an audio CD of Celtic-inspired jazz. In addition, a preface by Walter Edwards, academic director of the Humanities Center at Wayne State University, gives some background on this institution and the work being done there. The importance of Remapping the Humanities ultimately lies in its refusal to say that learning has ended and the example it provides of the value of calculated ferment and intellectual instability. Educators involved with or wanting to learn more about interdisciplinary research will appreciate this unique collection.