Eugene V. Debs, arguably the foremost union activist in
American history, described the 1909 McKees
Rock, Pa., strike
this way: "The greatest labor fight in all my history in the labor
movement." Yet today, few remember this struggle when immigrant workers
rose up and changed the course of American unionism.
The strike took place at the huge Pressed Steel Car Co.
plant in McKees Rock, a few miles down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, where
between 5,000 and 8,000 mostly immigrant workers from some 16 nationalities
created railway cars. Hailing mainly from southern and eastern Europe, they
included "Russians who had served in the 1905 Duma [parliament], Italians
who had led resistance strikes, Germans who were active in the metal workers'
union," according to historian Sidney Lens. "But because of the
language barrier they were easily divided, and thoroughly exploited."
At McKees Rock, "exploited" literally meant daily
injuries and deaths. Labor historian Charles McCollester quotes from an article
in the Pittsburgh Leader, one of the city's daily newspapers, which reported
that when a worker is maimed and mangled in his work, "some foreman or
other petty 'boss' pushes the bleeding body aside with his foot to make room
for another living man, that no time be lost in the turning out of pressed steel
cars. The new man often works for some minutes over the dead body until a labor
gang takes it away." A former county coroner testified that the death toll
averaged one person a day.
The workers also were subjected to a corrupt "pool
system" in which their pay was determined not by any established wage rate
but by the whim of the foremen. On July 10, 1909—a payday—workers received less
pay than normal and 40 riveters told the company they wouldn't work unless they
were told the pay rates. When they returned to work three days later, they were
fired. That was the breaking point. Within 48 hours, 5,000 workers went on
strike.
When management brought strikebreakers to the plant on a
steamer along the Ohio River, strikers fired
their rifles at the steamer and it fled to the opposite shore. Soon, there were
more skirmishes when the company brought in hundreds of deputy sheriffs and
state constables. One striker was killed at the plant entrance, and 5,000
mourners marched in his funeral procession.
The Pressed Steel Car workers received welcome support from
other workers. Railway trainmen on lines leading into the city and the motormen
on the local streetcar lines all refused to haul scabs. This solidarity was
critical. In the end, the workers won what Lens called "a victory of
towering proportions." As he recounted, management "agreed to end the
pool system, raise wages by an immediate 5 percent and 10 percent more in 60
days, fire the remaining scabs and rehire all strikers."
The victory at McKees Rock extended well beyond the plant.
This was the moment when immigrant workers who had no power—"persecuted,
robbed, and slaughtered," as one local priest described them—found their
voice. The turning point may have come at a giant rally on Indian Mound, a hill
near the Ohio River, when 8,000 workers joined
together and heard fiery speeches in nine languages. After that, they and the
union movement itself were never the same.
Eugene Debs correctly interpreted the workers' victory. He
predicted the McKees Rock success would be "a harbinger of a new spirit
among the unorganized, foreign-born workers in the mass production industries
who can see here in McKees Rock the road on which they must travel—the road of
industrial unionism."
Sources
McCollester, Charles, The
Point of Pittsburgh.Battle
of Homestead
Foundation, 2008. Brody, David, Steelworkers
in America:
The Nonunion Era. Harper & Row, 1969. Lens, Sidney, The
Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit-Downs.Haymarket Books,
2008.
