Little Steel Strike

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As Little Steel Strike , a strike is called, the May 26, 1937 in the US states Pennsylvania , Ohio , Indiana and Illinois began and captured 20 iron, steel and rolling mills with about 92,000 workers. The strike, which was carried out with particular bitterness, gradually collapsed - after courts and authorities of the individual states intervened in favor of the entrepreneurs - and ended after 64 days with a serious defeat of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee responsible for it . During the strike there were several bloody clashes between workers on the one hand and the company's own security forces or the police and the national guard on the other. The so-called Memorial Day massacre in front of the Republic Steel plant in Chicago (May 30, 1937) is remembered to this day .

Background, course and meaning

Now an emblematic image document of the Great Depression era: workers flee from police officers who attacked them with batons, tear gas and firearms in Chicago on May 30, 1937 ( Memorial Day massacre )

In 1936 activists from the environment of the Committee for Industrial Organization (see Congress of Industrial Organizations ) began to set up an industrial union to organize all workers employed in the steel industry in the United States . To this end, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) was formed in June 1936 , which after a short time acted de facto as a union and initially concentrated its resources on the large US Steel plants in the Pittsburgh and Chicago areas. In early March 1937, to everyone's surprise, US Steel was ready to accept the SWOC as a negotiating partner and representative of the workforce without any major argument. A number of smaller steel producers followed suit. In contrast, some of the smaller companies called Little Steel , in contrast to the two companies that dominate the sector, US Steel and Bethlehem Steel - Big Steel - agreed in the spring of 1937 to seek a confrontation with the SWOC and inflict a defeat on it before it entered the own works had found appreciable support. This group essentially included Republic Steel (49,000 employees), Inland Steel (11,000 employees) and Youngstown Sheet & Tube (23,000 employees). In particular, Thomas Girdler, the senior manager of Republic Steel , came out publicly as an advocate of an, if necessary, violent confrontation with the SWOC; the same thing - according to Girdler - must find its “ Verdun ” in Little Steel . The looming conflict between the SWOC and the Little Steel protagonists also had a certain political significance, as the latter were among the most aggressive opponents of the National Labor Relations Act , signed by the president in 1935 (which expressly forbade entrepreneurs from joining a union as usual to acknowledge with the dismissal and thus the American trade unions for the first time "legalized") and firmly assumed that the Supreme Court would sooner or later declare this law unconstitutional and repeal it (see Four Horsemen of Reaction ).

After the agreement with US Steel , the SWOC approached the named companies several times up to May 1937 and asked them to enter into similar agreements, but received only negative responses, and sometimes no replies at all. Thereupon it decided to enforce the right of association of the affected workers by strike. This procedure was risky, as the SWOC had mostly only recorded a minority of the respective workforce at the 20 plants selected for the strike. However, it was expected that the hitherto unorganized workers would also join the strike that had begun.

The strike began on May 26th. At first, the SWOC's calculation seemed to be paying off. Without exception, all the factories that were on strike were idle, as the workforce almost completely stopped working. The police and the few scabs were - with the exception of Chicago, where the police drove the pickets away from the start - initially powerless, since the factories had usually been cordoned off by thousands of pickets; sometimes barricades were erected in front of the main gates. However, the companies also chose these "access controls" to be the legal focal point of their countermeasures. In local courts, her lawyers successfully enforced the view that these barriers were illegal. In Washington , they made the Senate Post Office Committee aware of “criminal interference” in the postal service: in individual cases, the pickets at the factory gates had also turned away the postman - without knowing that this would be used against them in court. A judge at a time judged the actions of picketing as breach of the peace ( disturbing the peace ) and / or disorderly conduct ( disorderly conduct ). The Ohio State Court approached by Republic Steel even explicitly stipulated that a maximum of twelve (and at less central entrances, a maximum of two) pickets at the main gate of a plant were to be regarded as "legal". In this way the strike was effectively illegalised in a roundabout way and was practically impracticable, as the police forces gradually lifted the blockades more or less violently; in Ohio, the governor used the National Guard for this purpose. Most of the disorganized workers then went back to work; In addition, the companies recruited strikebreakers en masse. In Ohio, police also closed all SWOC offices and arrested hundreds of activists after a number of bitter workers were caught trying to blow up a steel mill. In several cities, Citizens Committees made up of straw men from the companies launched campaigns via the press and radio against the “foreign agitators” who allegedly led the strike; the Committee for Industrial Organization is a "Russian organization", innocent citizens suffered from its "reign of terror". The unexpected passivity of the federal authorities also paralyzed the strikers: John L. Lewis , the head of the CIO and one of Roosevelt's most important supporters in the presidential elections last year , had asked the president after the violence in Chicago and elsewhere to give government contracts to the companies on strike to cancel and publicly reprimand managers like Girdler for violating the National Labor Relations Act , but had been dismissed (leading to the rift between Lewis and Roosevelt). On June 17, Roosevelt only appointed a three-member Federal Steel Mediation Board , which was largely ignored by all involved. At the end of July, the SWOC declared the already ineffective strike at Inland Steel and Youngstown Sheet & Tube to be over; at Republic Steel he continued pro forma with a handful of activists whose reinstatement the company refused to accept for some time.

It took the SWOC - from which the United Steelworkers union emerged in 1942 - several years to recover from this defeat. It was only in the slipstream of the war boom that began in 1940/41 that it found appreciable support in the factories that were on strike in 1937. Little Steel was finally forced by the government in 1942, as part of the comprehensive regulation of the relations between capital and labor (see National War Labor Board ) established after the United States entered the war , to recognize the United Steelworkers as a workforce representative.

The Little Steel Strike received - which was anything but self-evident - relatively large coverage in the press. The Civil Liberties Committee of the Senate, chaired by Robert M. La Follette , played an important role in this ; it was responsible for the scandalization and clarification of the acts of violence against workers, some of which were tacitly tolerated by the local and state authorities, and some of which were tacitly tolerated and union activists tried. Upton Sinclair ( Little Steel , 1938), Meyer Levin ( Citizens , 1940) and Marc Blitzstein ( The Cradle Will Rock , 1937) processed the strike in literary terms.

In June 1937, the leftist journalist and illustrator William Gropper visited the city of Youngstown on behalf of The Nation magazine . At the beginning of July, the sheet printed out the drawings made on this occasion along with an accompanying text by Gropper. These and other reports helped a wider public to be interested in the conditions in the mill towns of the Midwest , where New Deal legislation had remained largely theoretical. Among other things, Gropper had noted:

"Youngstown, Ohio is bounded on the north by mill owners, on the south by the steel mills, on the east by a dingy section where workers live, and on the west by more workers' houses." Police and deputies in armed motorcars ride through the city looking for action. Near the entrances to the mills the striking pickets walk or sit day and night. Not far off stand deputized police armed with guns, clubs, and cartridge belts (...). Open meetings are held every night; women and children as well as the strikers attend these meetings. Speeches are delivered through loud speakers from the CIO trucks by union leaders and other strike sympathizers. (...) On East Federal Street, in a poor colored section of Youngstown, is the headquarters of the truck drivers' union, which has been actively supporting the strike. (...) The truck drivers also have their own sound truck in which they ride around the city giving the latest news and announcing the time and place of union meetings. Radio broadcasting privileges are denied to the strikers. (...) Across the street strikers were holding a meeting. Screams were drowned out by shell fire. (...) More blasts from the police rifles - and then cars full of special police drove by, firing low at the mass of people. (...) According to the next morning's paper, two were killed and twenty-eight hurt. "

literature

  • Bernstein, Irving, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 , Boston 1969.
  • Galenson, Walter, The CIO Challenge to the AFL. A History of the American Labor Movement 1935-1941 , Cambridge (Mass.) 1960.
  • Sofchalk, Donald Gene, The Little Steel Strike of 1937 , (Diss., Ohio State University) Columbus 1961.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Woytinsky, Wladimir S. (et al.), Employment and Wages in the United States, New York 1953, p. 657.
  2. ↑ See Bernstein, Irving, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941, Boston 1969, pp. 466ff.
  3. ↑ See Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 479.
  4. ↑ See Woytinsky, Employment, p. 550 and Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 479f.
  5. ↑ See Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 480.
  6. ^ See Woytinsky, Employment, p. 550.
  7. ↑ See Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 486ff.
  8. ↑ See Woytinsky, Employment, p. 551.
  9. ↑ See Woytinsky, Employment, p. 552.
  10. ↑ Quoted from Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 493.
  11. ↑ See Bernstein, Irving, A Caring Society. The New Deal, the Worker, and the Great Depression, Boston 1985, p. 107.
  12. ↑ See Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 494f.
  13. ↑ See Woytinsky, Employment, p. 552.
  14. ^ See Woytinsky, Employment, pp. 553f.
  15. ↑ See Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 826.
  16. ^ Gropper, William, Gropper Visits Youngstown, in: The Nation, July 3, 1937.