This Day in Labor History: June 15, 1959. The @steelworkers go on strike to protect their victories of the last 20 years against employers' hatred that they ever had to accept unions. Let's talk about this absolutely critical strike for understanding postwar America 
Perhaps the most underrated event in American labor history, the steel strike of 1959 touches on many of the key labor issues of the postwar period.
Combining the total number workers and length of the strike, companies lost more employee hours than any other strike in American history. It showed the height of worker power in American labor history on the shop floor and through the contract.
It also demonstrated how government would still bust strikes when it could, a blast from the past and a foretaste of the future. Yet it also suggested just how far unions had come in American society, given how the USWA overcame these challenges and won.
Finally, the 59 steel strike was really the end of the peak of American labor militancy.
During the 1950s, the nation’s major unions made enormous gains in wages and benefits for their members. That was particularly true of the United Auto Workers and, to a slightly lesser extent, the USWA.
After Philip Murray died in 1952, David McDonald became union president. McDonald is no one’s idea of the ideal union president, particularly given his total lack of charisma. There’s a reason no one talks about him today.
But McDonald was good at forcing the companies to open up their pocketbooks in contract negotiations and forcing their hand on shop floor issues. He was irritated that the UAW generally won better contracts than his union and worked hard to make up that gap.
During the 1950s, the USWA won significant wage gains, health insurance, pensions, vacation time, and other hallmarks of the working class becoming middle class through union contracts.
This often took place through strikes, including in 1946, 1949, 1952, and 1955. A 1956 strike was a major victory for the USWA (and for McDonald’s leadership), leading to big wage and benefit gains.
By 1959, the American steel industry was incredibly profitable, with very little foreign competition having developed by this time. But the companies wanted to push back.
The companies' specific line of attack was to take control of the shop floor through eliminating a section in the union contract that had given workers significant shop floor power through the grievance process.
Effectively, the USWA was using the grievance procedure to take away management prerogative to rule at the workplace. This included making it very difficult for companies to lay off workers whose jobs were replaced by automation.
While the high wages and benefits rankled the companies, it was the sheer gall of employees to tell them how to run their factories that really infuriated the steel industry. That gets to the crux of unionism--it's not about money. It's about power. People don't understand that.
And so the companies decided their target would be the shop floor clauses, with the hope that this was a first step to regaining control over their workers.
Less than a month before the expiration of contract, and in the middle of ongoing negotiations, the companies offered a slight wage increase in exchange for union givebacks on scheduling, seniority, staffing, and work standards.
The hope was to force the union to strike and then the companies would be willing to give up everything but shop floor control givebacks.
This strategy certainly worked at first. The USWA completely rejected the corporations’ offer. More than 500,000 workers went on strike at factories around the nation on July 15. Steel production declined 90 percent.
AFL-CIO president George Meany wasn’t happy with McDonald or the USWA. Being a Cold Warrior first and class warrior second, Meany worried the strike would undermine national security.
He really wasn’t in a position to distance himself too far from one of the federation’s most powerful unions, so he gave it a very mild endorsement while pressuring McDonald to settle.
The strike convinced President Dwight Eisenhower to invoke the back to work clauses of the Taft-Hartley Act, forcing an 80-day cooling off period. This then led to the union filing suit in federal court that Taft-Hartley was unconstitutional.
Unfortunately, the Court upheld the law by an 8-1 majority. Because the Supreme Court is always terrible. The strikers had to return to work after 116 days on the pickets. Yet the union was able to survive this frontal assault.
Kaiser Steel, which had long had been more willing to work with labor than many of the other companies, caved and took out the offending provision while offering a small wage increase. But the rest of the companies held out.
Finally, Eisenhower realized the workers would strike again if the companies insisted on the workplace rule provision. He had Richard Nixon tell US Steel chairman David Blough to give up.
With the government clearly stepping in on the side of continued steel production, the companies did surrender. The contract created a committee for the union and management to study the issue of shopfloor rights.
One lesson of this strike for us is that the idea that the companies ever really accepted unionization, even at the peak of labor’s power, is a lie. There was never a period where the companies saw unions as partners.
Rather, they wanted to return to the 1920s without union shops. The reason they couldn’t is worker power. Corporations had to make public statements that they accepted organized labor as a partner. These were lies but they also reflected the need to appease that worker power.
The corporations may have lost the 1959 strike, but the union was not is a good position to win in the long run.
Ultimately, the rise of steel imports, which some have claimed were a result of consumers looking to foreign competition in order to avoid production problems because of these frequent labor conflicts, would undermine both the industry and the USWA.
The 1959 strike was the last nationwide steel strike of the era. In the 1962 contract, McDonald did give back quite a bit of shopfloor control and made it easier for companies to let workers go because of automation.
He became convinced about that the steel industry was increasingly less competitive and hoped these compromises of worker power would help. They did not.
But they did create a rank and file rebellion against McDonald and in 1965, he was replaced by I.W. Abel, a very rare defeat for a major union leader to that point in labor history. But the American steel industry did not reverse its long, slow decline.
In short, if you want to know why the steel industry declined, the biggest reason was that steel companies were so intransigent toward unions that other industries begged politicians to open the nation to more steel imports. Their own anti-unionism destroyed them.
That's not to say that with less reactionary leadership, we would have a great steel industry today. Globalization is a powerful force. But given that the companies also wouldn't invest in modern steel mills and steel executives shoulder a lot of the blame.
Somehow, to my knowledge, there is not a scholarly book that looks specifically at this incredibly important moment. But there is Jack Metzgar's wonderful Striking Steel, which is possibly the best labor book of the last several decades.
amazon.com/dp/1566397391/…
amazon.com/dp/1566397391/…
I will be back tomorrow with a discussion of black sharecropper organizing in Alabama and the white supremacist violence they faced.
