Category: Labor struggle

In August 1918, as U.S. troops fought in the trenches of France, the ladies of a North Side Red Cross auxiliary club came to shocking realization.

“One of the workers remarked that she now has to pay her laundress $3 a day,” the Pittsburgh Post recounted. “Another one exclaimed that so did she, and wasn’t it awful the way things are going. Then a regular chorus broke out . . . each had received a telephone call from her laundress which was an announcement of new terms,” including higher pay and streetcar fare.

How had low-paid washerwomen across the city simultaneously decided to charge the same rate — a 50-percent increase for many? The answer lay in the Negro Women’s Industrial Labor Union, a unique and seemingly short-lived organization that fought for Black domestic workers’ rights in Pittsburgh.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Communist-led coal miners waged a vicious fight against Western Pennsylvania’s coal operators. That fight turned deadly on June 22, 1931, in a hail of bullets and shotgun shells along a rural road in Hampton Township.

When the chaos ended, one miner lay dead and several were left badly wounded. The shooting — carried out near the entrance to a sprawling mine not far from North Park — would stir public outrage against the police and draw charges against dozens of miners and supporters.

As Pittsburghers prepared for a warm Memorial Day weekend in 1937, they faced a situation without precedent: simultaneous strikes at two city cemeteries.

The miniature strike wave continued, on and off, for weeks in spring and summer 1937. Gravediggers and groundskeepers at Homewood Cemetery and at St. Mary’s Cemetery along Penn Avenue picketed for higher wages and union recognition, joining a surge of militancy already roiling big industry.

A 1930 pay change for Pittsburgh’s taxi drivers sparked a four-month running battle that observers described as “guerrilla warfare.” Before the drivers and companies would come to a begrudging agreement, at least one man would be killed, countless drivers and passengers injured and many cabs torched and smashed.

Little discussed today, the strike dominated headlines in 1930 — alongside stories of bootleggers and racketeers — and posed a threat to business across the city. It represented a particularly striking example of the deadly labor violence that marked parts of the 1920s and early ’30s.

At 11 p.m. on May 12, 1937, workers finishing their shifts walked out of Jones & Laughlin’s steel plants. The next shift was conspicuously absent.

At least 25,000 workers at the company’s major steel works, scattered along the Monongahela and Ohio rivers, had launched Pittsburgh’s first major steel strike in 18 years. The last strike had been a crushing defeat; this one would end in victory for the new Steel Workers Organizing Committee.