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.
First victories
Organizers formed SWOC amid the rush toward industrial unionism that marked the mid-to-late 1930s. Steel companies had resisted unions, mostly successfully: Strikes from the turn of the century to 1919 had been crushed with violent force. The moribund steel union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers (“the AA”), did little to organize the plants, where workers faced dangerous conditions and union supporters faced armed police.
SWOC swept onto the scene in 1936, effectively taking over for the AA. With backing from the new Committee for Industrial Organization and its leader, mine union head John L. Lewis, they signed up tens of thousands of workers (the organizers included radicals like Communist Ben Careathers).
The recently passed National Labor Relations Act pressured bosses to negotiate with unions, and U.S. Steel — the massive corporation that controlled some 40 percent of the industry — soon did so. In March 1937, U.S. Steel shocked the industry by accepting a collective bargaining agreement with SWOC, with raises and new overtime rules set. The fast-growing union stepped up pressure on smaller competitors, including Jones & Laughlin.
Ready to strike
SWOC members issued an ultimatum in May: If Jones & Laughlin didn’t agree to a contract similar to the U.S. Steel one by an appointed date, they would walk out. Members at two locals voted to strike. Meanwhile, hundreds of workers of uncertain loyalty met at an Aliquippa high school to form a new, “independent” union opposed to SWOC.
With no contract in place, some 25,000 workers launched a strike the night of May 12. Pickets fanned out in Hazelwood, the South Side and Aliquippa, totally shutting the plants — with the exception of a handful of maintenance workers allowed in under agreement with SWOC. The Post-Gazette reported from Pittsburgh:
(The) pickets just massed in tight little crowds, completely blocking entrances to the mills and waited for someone to appear and try to enter. No one did — or at least only one or two hardy souls and they didn’t have any clear idea why the wanted to get in.
Things were rougher in Aliquippa. The town — long dominated by Jones & Laughlin — set its police force against the pickets, with officers releasing tear gas amid fistfights. A salary worker in his 60s tried to get through the line; workers set upon him, exchanging blows. A woman in her 40s, the mother and wife of strikers, allegedly struck a police chief with her umbrella and suffered a club wound in response.
SWOC head Philip Murray accused steel producers of forming an “unholy alliance,” stocking “implements of industrial warfare” against the union. He was right: The so-called Little Steel companies had bought astonishing amounts of crowd-control gas and stockpiled guns in their facilities, as a congressional investigation would find (and as Ahmed White details in The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America).
Clashes with police and would-be strikebreakers made for shocking photographs. In Aliquippa, workers pushed a bus out through the plant gates. On the South Side, curious schoolchildren mingled with strikers as “showers of sandwiches and hardboiled eggs” fell from the lunchboxes torn from scabs’ hands. The Press reported: “Many of those in the crowd were women — middle-aged wives of union men who joined the picket lines and shouted encouragement to the strikers and booed the mill police on guard at the gate.”
A union secured
Even as state and federal mediators worked toward a solution, state officials moved in with force. The governor rushed in from Harrisburg, having already dispatched state police to Aliquippa. Liquor sales were suspended in the strike-hit neighborhoods. And members of the new, “independent” union — the United Iron and Steel Workers — threatened to reopen the plants by force. One member made his opinion clear: “Do you want a low class of ignorant foreigners running us? I am ready now to go down and give my life to clear the pass to that plant.”
They wouldn’t get the chance. The next day, Jones & Laughlin agreed to SWOC’s demand: If workers voted to join the union, it would represent all eligible members. All the strikers would return to their jobs “without discrimination.” Workers cheered in the streets as news spread that the strike was off. It had lasted about 36 hours.
The National Labor Relations Board posted announcements in English, Italian, Polish and Serbian, and within a week thousands of Jones & Laughlin workers were voting at dozens of sites at the company’s mill complexes. By May 21, the vote was in: Of more than 24,400 votes cast, over 17,000 were for the union — a greater than two-to-one majority. CIO leaders hailed the result; Murray said “universal collective throughout the steel industry” wasn’t far off.
The next phase of SWOC’s campaign would be far more violent. In late May, the union struck four Little Steel firms — mostly outside the Pittsburgh area — for the same recognition. They fought back brutally, and many would die before the union’s defeat. It would be years before the union secured victory among the most vicious holdouts.
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