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Book Review
Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class Struggle in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh. By John Hinshaw. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. xviii, 348 pp. Cloth, $75.50, ISBN 0-7914-5225-5. Paper, $25.95, ISBN 0-7914-5226-3.)
Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown. By Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. viii, 288 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-7006-1161-4.)
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John Hinshaw's Steel and Steelworkers and Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo's Steeltown U.S.A. offer a compelling "deindustrialization tale of two cities," tracing the history of two steel-producing centers—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio—and the process of economic restructuring and redefining civic identity in the postindustrial era. Both books chart the historical trajectory and denouement of the steel industry and the deleterious impact of corporate downsizing upon steelworkers and their communities. Taking different methodological approaches, these studies also address the legacy of racism within the steel industry and its historical implications for the respective communities. |
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Hinshaw has written a meticulously researched social history of Pittsburgh that focuses on the dynamics of class, race, and gender and on how intersecting forces—big business, the state, and organized labor—shaped the fate of steelworkers and greater Pittsburgh's development in the twentieth century. Drawing upon labor and corporate archives, census data, and state and municipal government primary source materials, he offers an original interpretative framework to understand the political economy of steel production and to contextualize industrial relation within a declining industry that once defined Pittsburgh's identity over the course of a century. |
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This study places more analytical stock in the long-term infrastructural weaknesses that sealed the American steel industry's fate than it does in global economic forces. Those weaknesses were: steel management's deferral of technological improvements and its calculated strategy of disinvestment; a dysfunctional collective bargaining system that failed to achieve compromise on important issues relating to work rules and productivity; institutional racism and occupational segregation; the conservative leadership of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA); and the absence of a viable political alternative for promoting the interests of Pittsburgh's working classes. Hinshaw ascribes a much larger role to the state as an active agent in promoting the economic and political interests of Big Steel and in perpetuating institutional discrimination within the steel industry. |
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This study is strongest in its use of oral histories to reconstruct the complex shop floor dimension of the struggles for union organization, economic and job security, and political action in Pittsburgh—and the combustible mix of racism and class conflict that shaped labor's battles with U.S. Steel and Pittsburgh's political elites. Hinshaw skillfully dissects the inequities of U.S. Steel's job seniority system and its damaging legacy of occupational segregation and denial of equal employment opportunity. Hiring was destiny within steel. Departmental seniority, rather than a more fluid and equitable plantwide seniority system, condemned a majority of black steelworkers to labor a lifetime in the most dangerous and arduous jobs without prospects for promotion. |
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In assessing steel labor's lack of success in transforming the politics of its rank-and-file membership, addressing civil rights issues, and stemming the tide of deindustrialization, Hinshaw provides a more balanced alternative to leftist orthodoxy that indicts the inherent limitations of the New Deal, CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), and liberalism in advancing political and civil rights reform. Clearly, the record of the steelworkers' leadership on seniority and civil rights is abysmal. But this study reminds us that the USWA won some significant strikes, economic gains, and political victories in the postwar era against concentrated economic and political power. |
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