| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

James D. Rose, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2001)

JAMES D. ROSE has given us a book of considerable depth and originality. In re-telling the story of the early days of steel unionism, Rose overturns much of what we thought we knew about the era. Company unions, working-class unity, rank-and-file militancy, labour law, the New Deal, and ultimately the rise of steel unionism itself are revisited. This fascinating account represents labour history at its very best. Part of the University of Illinois' "Working Class in American History Series," edited by David Montgomery, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism is a must read for anyone interested in the history of North American trade unionism.

The book is organized into six chronological chapters arranged around the great steel strike of 1919; the shop floor issues of the 1920s and 1930s; the rise of a "rank-and-file" movement in the immediate aftermath of the New Deal; the formation of an Employee Representation Plan (ERP), or company union, at US Steel; the triumph of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in 1937; and, its subsequent consolidation. This basic story-line has been repeated so often that it is a wonder that Rose has anything new to add. The fact that he succeeds brilliantly owes much to his innovative approach and to his use of new sources.

Rose tracks the rise of steel unionism in a place that remarkably few labour historians have looked: on the shop floor. Unlike earlier studies that paid close attention to the institutional rise of industrial unionism, or the more recent literature dedicated to local working-class communities, Rose focuses on the shop-floor relations of a single workplace: the Duquesne Works of US Steel, located South of Pittsburgh in the Monongahela River Valley. A study of this kind allows Rose to recreate the interplay between the company, its employees, and their unions. We therefore learn much about day-to-day conflict over wages, poor working conditions, promotion, and job security. We also learn that the workforce was divided along racial and ethnic lines, pitting skilled workers against the unskilled, and hourly paid workers against those paid by tonnage. There were no "steelworkers" at Duquesne, only bricklayers, machinists, chippers, open hearth labourers, tonnage men, foremen, immigrants, and the native born. Given this fragmentation, it was truly remarkable that industrial unionism eventually took hold.

But the originality of Rose's book goes well beyond his decision to study a single steel mill. The closure of US Steel's Duquesne Works in the early 1980s proved disastrous for steelworkers, their families, and for the mill town as a whole. It did, however, result in the salvage of personnel records from an abandoned mill building and their being made available to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's excellent United Electrical Workers/Labor Archives. To be blunt, these corporate records made Rose's workplace approach possible, enabling him to reconstruct the shop floor experience of Duquesne steelworkers and provide us with an inside look into a company union. Rose's findings on a number of counts are crucial to understanding the rise of steel unionism in the US. For the purposes of this review, however, I will limit my comments to two aspects: the positive role that the company union played in the triumph of industrial unionism at Duquesne, and the exaggerated image of rank-and-file militancy propagated by some historians.

Two models of labour representation vied for the loyalty of Duquesne steelworkers in the 1930s: industrial unionism and company unionism. Up to the present time, labour historians have generally praised the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers as the forerunner of the SWOC: a militant and multiracial movement of unskilled workers. By contrast, the local ERPs set up by US Steel have been condemned as creatures of the company. But Rose finds otherwise. He argues that both organizations laid the foundation for steel unionism at Duquesne (and one would presume at other mills). I was surprised to learn, for example, that the Duquesne ERP quickly developed a mind of its own, representing the shop floor concerns of skilled and semi-skilled workers with great resolve. Grievance records reveal that 91 "requests" (for there was no binding arbitration) were made in the first year, dealing with a variety of issues, big and small. Decisions were also regularly appealed to corporate headquarters. As a result, ERP representatives, elected annually, won important improvements in health and safety, hours of work, wage and tonnage rates, and a host of other issues. Naturally, these shop floor representatives enjoyed considerable rank-and-file support among the privileged and largely native born, white workers. When several of these same ERP representatives defected to SWOC in 1936–37, they gave the industrial union instant shop floor credibility, local leaders experienced with grievance procedures, and a following among skilled and semi-skilled workers.

Rose also raises important questions about the "rank-and-file" school of history most closely identified with Staughton Lynd. How militant were steelworkers during the 1930s? Could local rank-and-file organizations take on US Steel? In their formulation of the "radical and localized activity of workers early in the depression," (5) Lynd and others have argued that a spontaneous upsurge of working-class militancy (or "community unionism") was suppressed by the nationally organized CIO. This historiographic line has its counterpart in the extensive "post-war compromise" literature in Canada. In Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism, Rose finds the claims of working-class militancy exaggerated. Corporate paternalism, the threat of reprisals, and a fragmented workforce all worked against working-class unity. Thus, industrial unions, whether locally or nationally organized, failed to sign up a majority of Duquesne workers until after the national agreement had been signed with US Steel without a strike. Rose demonstrates, very effectively in my opinion, that it took a combination of the New Deal, the Wagner Act, and a nationally organized industrial union with support from unskilled and skilled workers to force a giant like US Steel to the bargaining table.

One final point. There is, as Rose points out, a tendency to let the recent failures of industrial unionism and labour law shape our view of the rise of industrial unionism during the 1930s. The Cold War purges of left-wing trade unionists, union support for the war in Vietnam, and the failure of the United Steelworkers to resist plant closings during the 1970s and 1980s, however, should not diminish the early accomplishments of steel labour.


Steven High Nipissing University

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