Steel: Changing Workplace

...Good neighbor Spear presides over a corporation that has more than two dozen sep arate steel-producing units and auxiliary plants in Western Pennsylvania...

...His successor, Hannan, is a past commander of the Clairton VFW post, and was listed on his own campaign cards as an Assistant Chief of Staff of the Pennsylvania VFW...

...Yet most of them are neither racists nor dullards, but people who still value strong family ties, and who practiced the work ethic long before Nixon's Labor Day address...

...It is recognized as the largest single employer (those who are not employed at Clairton Works have half a dozen of its large facilities within 20 minutes' driving time up and down the river), but is also known as the largest single polluter...

...He dumps in coal from larry cars that move on rails constructed along the oven roof...

...Unlike auto, rubber, and other sectors of the CIO, steel unionization went through half a century of craft exclusionism, company authoritarianism, aborted and bloody efforts at mass industrial organization, and bitter defeats for the workers when strikes were called...

...In most basic steel mills, through tradition and connivance, and sometimes both, the worst jobs have been held by black workers...

...46 JOSEPH HILL...

...If stereotypes are to be shattered in the process, then that of the "hard hat" should be one of them, for he emerges with a political education much better than is supposed, and is better equipped to participate in the reform of basic institutions than is usually supposed...

...Black complaints within the local seem to be primarily economic, coupled with the excessive concentration of Negro members in the coke-oven and labor-pool work force...

...Lloyd Ulman, in a 1962 Fund for the Republic study (The Government of the Steelworkers' Union), suggested that while economic discontent may fan issues of short duration, "most steelworkers STEEL: CHANGING WORKPLACE [do] not consider an opposition party essential more or less as an end in itself...

...His successor was his alter ego, David J. McDonald, who knew no ideology other than the perpetuation of incumbency...

...they prefer the difficult drive to the better suburban communities, and as one coke-oven grievanceman says, "They have no intention of subjecting their families to the stuff they shoot into the air every day...

...The degree of initial hostility with which their fathers viewed the arrival of the student revolution was shown in the 1967 resolution passed by Local 1557, which declared that any holder of its annual $2400 scholarship involved in any "antigovernment demonstration" would forfeit the grant...

...Brown wears a rubber mask (in addition to wooden pallets which he must wear over his thick steeltipped safety shoes, because his work calls for walking over the hot bricks of a battery of ovens...

...This group will emerge as a major political force in the USW during the 1970s, marking an end to the era of leadership by those who organized the Steelworkers with The Founder (Philip Murray...

...studies of new-hires in other basic steel plants over the past decade suggest an increasing number of young black workers, with a decline of traditional ethnic groups found in the mills...

...In addition to preparing testimony before legislative committees in Washington and Harrisburg, the leadership has a political involvement that generally follows the corridors of Democratic party activity but which at times has been in conflict with party and union positions on a local or state level...

...The frustration, disgust and plain weariness are poured down a labyrinth of machinery supposed to serve as a grievance system, which a good many workers see as a means to delay or avoid changes that would cost the company...

...The bag of cliches she used to describe the "dumpy wives of steelworkers" and the "dreary mill towns" along the river, expresses the elitist "liberal" stereotypes toward white working-class ethnics...

...Because most people in the industry would agree that the coke oven is the worst place to work in a steel mill, and that the lidman has the worst job in the coke works, Walter Brown was chosen for this interview...

...The cultural tone is working-class, and mid-American values predominate...

...Yet Local 1557 supported McDonald against Rarick, backed Abel in his 1965 challenge, and four years later gave most of its votes to a lawyer who ran against Abel in a year of discontent following the 1968 basic steel settlement...

...Dan Hannan concedes that the resolution, passed unanimously at a meeting conducted by his predecessor, violated the spirit if not the letter of both the union and the U.S...

...Constitution...

...Italian Sons & Daughters of America...

...And when English-speaking workers were promoted over the "Hunky" and foreign-born millhands, it was evidence that company divisiveness paid off...

...Today hardly any of top management live in Clairton itself...

...The ecological revolution has changed much of that...

...The high incidence of job-related diseases in the coke operations has resulted in a long-term mortality study of steelworkers by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S...

...Steadily, the majority of basic steelworkers keeps shrinking in size...

...There are those in Local 1557 who contend that company hiring practices are guided by the theory that workers from rural backgrounds will not become union activists, and that a smaller USW constituency in Clairton will mean less heat when pollution becomes an issue...

...His office is a basement cubicle in a converted storefront meeting hall a block down from the Clairton Works entrance on State Street...

...It is difficult to determine just how important white ethnics are and how they fit into the contemporary workplace and neighborhoods of the steel industry...

...Except through the union at contract time, they held little muscle, and could measure their progress only through changes in work rules or such concessions as better face masks...

...The entrance sign to the Clairton Works bears the slogan "Safety First...

...Public Health Service, which found a tenfold risk of lung cancer for workers employed five years or more at coke ovens...

...Daniel Hannan, the two-term president of USW Local 1557, thus becomes a spokesman for the unease associated with those who recognize that their industry is changing just as are the corporate, political, and cultural worlds about them...

...some workers now suffer from lung cancer, silicosis, and the "black lung" disease that received attention during the mine workers' wildcat strikes in 1969-70...

...Most Clairton steelworkers are buying their homes...

...So far the Ad Hoc Concerned Steelworkers have waged only a rhetorical campaign, surfacing in Chicago with an occasional identification with the Black Economic Development group or the Trade Union Action and Democracy "rank and file" committee...

...The tradition of unity may have remained dominant within the Steelworkers because only a dozen aspirants who upset incumbents have been elected to the union's powerful International Executive Board through direct challenge in some 30 years of existence, and two of these are the current International Officers...

...Harrison Williams held a field hearing on pending federal occupational health and safety legislation, and he and Pennsylvania's junior Republican senator, Richard S. Schweiker, were given a tour of the plant...

...An analogy may be made to the USW, where blacks constitute a substantial minority but are distributed in such a way through the union's 24 districts that they have never achieved political clout proportionate to their numbers...

...Steel, where Donald Rarick mounted his campaign against the McDonald leadership...

...Local 1557, which has a member on the school board, last spring went on record supporting the board's position...

...Across the street, on a traffic island, is a replica of a Nike missile with a plaque honoring a Clairton Congressional Medal of Honor winner...

...Blue-collar industrial workers in the U.S...

...But big steel was destined to be the last thaw before the Nixonomics freeze of August 15, and the young militants crumbled when the money was placed on the table...

...Only now, however, has the life of the lidman down the river become a subject for congressional hearings and local pollution control boards...

...Yet unlike Gary, Indiana, where the black majority succeeded in achieving local political power, there has been no dramatic racial insurgency...

...Traditionally, the plant supervisors and foremen lived on the high ground that overlooked the grimy workers' dwellings and taverns of State Street, the winding road that followed the river and was the access to the Clairton Works...

...The high concentration of toxic elements in the mill has led to grave occupational health hazards...

...The Clairton Works local, because it is near the USW headquarters and is part of the generally turbulent District 15, has played an activist role in USW political affairs...

...but he adds that it accurately reflected the members' attitude...

...The worst thing about these jobs," says a cokeoven colleague of Brown's, "is that the company always knows they can get another man for your job if you go home...

...Today blacks make up about a third of Clairton, and are proportionately represented at Clairton Works...

...The hotbed of insurgency in the union in 1956-58 during the Dues Protest movement was just up the river from Clairton at the Irvin Works of U.S...

...If the Hannans are "upward mobile," their mobility is difficult to detect...

...There is evidence, however, that the once strong internal differentiation among white steelworkers has lessened, yet there is white defensiveness resulting from black organization and activity...

...The ecological due bills of half a century of unregulated steel-making are yet to be collected...

...Groups of long-haired youths may be seen on the streets of Clairton's newer business district "on the hill...

...Walls of flame from surrounding ovens shoot over the head of the lidman—under these conditions Dante would seem the only descriptive literature...

...His future shock will be no more nor less than that of most of us, but it will be conditioned by the realities of his long struggle...

...If, as Revel suggests, the central problem of our time is that there be a conciliation between revolution and democracy, then the industrial worker may fit in with his view that the new American revolution has begun and that profound changes can take place without the destruction of its worthwhile institutions...

...They live in a narrow compass, which is centered in the mill—and which has important focal points in the union hall, the church, fraternal or civic organizations, and their children...

...For years the people who worked in such places as Clairton's coke ovens were without much visibility in the community...

...Less than a month earlier, six employees at the Clairton Works of U.S...

...Hannan's home is a pleasant two-story brick house situated on an elevated part of the town where a generation ago few workers would have lived...

...The mayor of Clairton testified before a House labor subcommittee last year that his city "has absolutely the most polluted air of any area of the world," and that its citizens were living "in constant fear of another Donora...

...The large turnover of local union presidents in the last round of USW elections was considered significant because fully two-thirds of them were presidents in basic steel...

...Walter Brown, a 40-year-old steelworker, has the dubious distinction of being a lidman in the coke works...

...Milton Shapp's state income tax proposal in 1971 along with several other steel and auto unions in the Monongahela Valley, despite the support of the Governor's program by the district and the state AFL–CIO legislative committee...

...Steel as the source of many of the industrial poisons in the air and water of Allegheny County...

...Yet for much of the work force at Clairton it has been—and has had to be—a way of life...

...gone, however, is the old company line of "where there is smoke, there are jobs...

...Within the facility they are concentrated at the coke ovens...

...The absence of a black on the Executive Board still frustrates politically oriented black steelworkers...

...Every day Mr...

...Those at Clairton have a daily reminder of the effect of all the smoke and fumes and gases which, when carried downwind from the plant, make the hillside barren on the banks of the Monongahela River...

...Clairton reflects the transition of steelworkers from open class conflict to the present participation in a system where there 38 is little love for the companies but less for those who would upset the mechanics of the system...

...The "topdown" postulation of Ulman has some currency, while other critics, such as Len DeCaux (one-time publicity aide to Lewis and Murray), suggest that there was a deliberate effort to make the Steelworkers' Organizing Committee "a success story . . . without strikes" (see DeCaux's book, Labor Radical, Boston: Beacon, 1971...

...The absence of any real opposition within the USW may in part stem from the lack of ideological conflict at its birth...

...The Clairton situation appears to be unique and transitional...

...A pile of papers on his dining-room table, and a file cabinet, make a second office, where the telephone is constantly ringing on union business...

...A return of sorts to its origins in the 1930s occurred late in 1971 with the merger of the former District 50, which John L. Lewis had created for members not directly employed in the coal industry...

...Galvanized by the new technology, battered by a flood of imports of German and Japanese steel-makers, the industry faces a future of more steel produced by fewer and fewer workers...

...Whether the new leadership will be an incubator for social ideas may depend upon the events shaping the seventies: the cultural revolution bringing to virtually everyone the realities of "future shock" and the ultimate disposition of black power in the American experience...

...It has a profitable by-product called anhydrous ammonia, a liquid fertilizer that has been known to kill men exposed to it in quantities...

...For some three months at the coke oven of the U.S...

...Mr...

...It is difficult to believe that a black steelworker in Pittsburgh is any less "militant" than a black auto worker in Detroit, yet with the exception of the Ad Hoc group there are no counterparts of the black caucuses within the UAW...

...At a meeting of leaders from 15 of these locals held in the nearby Dravosburg UAW hall, there was open talk of a "third labor party" to secure tax reform legislation which Hannan and other spokesmen said was not forthcoming from the Democratic majority in the state legislature...

...Steel-tipped safety shoes are also sold by the company, though one of the concessions won by the union in 1970 was a better face mask...

...Abel wrung a 30 percent wage package out of the companies in an eleventh-hour agreement last August in the brief thaw before the Nixon freeze...

...Walter Brown, who is in job class 7, 40 earns $3.83 an hour, but with incentives he makes about $8,600 a year...

...Charles Stokes, who was the first black elected as a trustee of Local 1557 and who served as a grievance committeeman for three elected terms, said that U.S...

...the labor priest sometimes gave counsel rather than the intellectual who had been to Brookwood Labor College...

...It was the Abel leadership which reached the accord, and despite internal pressures from young workers, blacks, and an opposition still in search of issues for the 1973 USW elections, it was done without a strike...

...During a leave of absence he had consulted with union safety technicians and had helped to initiate Allegheny County's new anti-pollution ordinance, which for the first time established meaningful corporate penalties...

...Pittsburgh is a classic case of the urban ills which plague most of the nation's big cities, and what happens to Pittsburgh affects every mill town up and down the three rivers that converge at the Point of the "Renaissance City...

...Despite the mask, he is subjected throughout his shift in the ovens to inhalaSTEEL: CHANGING WORKPLACE tion of tar, methane, benzene, hydrogen sulphide, carbon monoxide, coal dust, coke dust, and powdery particles of pure carbon...

...Walter Brown does not estimate how many years his job has taken from his life expectancy, but he is familiar with the report of the Williams subcommittee and knows that industrial physicians have testified that every five years under such conditions could result in shortening normal expectancy by a year...

...Too many white ethnic workers see their neighborhoods as mere buffer zones between poor blacks and middle-class whites...

...Mod attire and long hair was no longer an eyebrowraiser at the 1970 USW convention, and for the first time delegates in their early 20s were a minority of some consequence...

...He would also have been an effective person to give testimony to the Williams subcommittee...

...There are no black carpenters or millwrights, or blacks in the paint shop, motor inspection, heating, or engineering departments...

...Its maverick mayor, Peter Flaherty, has been described as an "Ohio River de Gaulle" to the dismay of labor leaders and Democratic powers who were part of the Lawrence and Barr machines, which once ran the county...

...While as many as 15,000 black steelworkers work in the greater Pittsburgh area, militant activity among black workers has been confined to the traditional craft unions in this industrial union center...

...In any case, SWOC in 1936-37 was a tight organization, dominated by Philip Murray, and with an independent treasury...

...Steel was still the visible enemy, but present in the honest antagonisms of those who worked for "the company" were the decades of paternalism which had shaped the social alignments of all the steel towns in the Monongahela Valley...

...McDonald survived an abortive rank-and-file "Dues Protest" movement in the mid-'50s, but was deposed in 1965 by a slate led by then Secretary-Treasurer I. W. Abel...

...Residents of the Monongahela Valley identify U.S...

...Newspaper accounts referred to them as "new-breed" activists who would hammerandtong it with the company during the 1971 negotiations and possibly throw the industry into its first strike since 1959...

...The only thing similar about Gary, Indiana, and JOSEPH HILL Lackawanna, New York, and Fontana, California, and Clairton is the skyline of smokestacks—and the resultant pollution that has affected the minds and bodies of their inhabitants...

...Stokes describes himself as a moderate, yet attributes his defeat as grievance chairman in the last local elections to this changing character of the work force...

...The black/white conflict in the work sector is generally cited as one of the reasons for the breakup of the Old Politics JOSEPH HILL which ran Pittsburgh and Allegheny County for so many years under the late David Lawrence and his protege, Mayor Joe Barr...

...If there was any ideology, it was Catholic and inevitably anti-Communist...

...Recently a member of Local 1557 was interviewed by a Pittsburgh newspaper for a series on jobs "that are physically draining or mentally dulling...

...simply do not play the role Marx assigned to them in the 19th century...

...At the comer tavern football finds more of an audience than politics...

...With that merger came the acquisition of almost 100,000 chemical workers into the USW...

...Donora, Pa., is a mill town down the river, whose U.S...

...The last local union election at the Clairton Works saw this identification in the competition for local offices: "member I.S.D.A...

...many commute from as far down the river as Uniontown, 30 miles to the east...

...He averages one day a week of "lost time," paid by the union, working on the grievances and everyday problems of his members...

...The Clairton Works does not require any in-depth social anthropology to establish this, yet it is a plant where subtle violence is done to the physiology of perhaps one-third of the workers who daily pass through its gates...

...Brown, are black...

...Its successor group, the Organization for Membership Rights (1958-61), failed because of an absence of issues...

...In internal union politics it reflected a cautious independence...

...His wife operates a beauty shop in the basement of the home, this kind of supplementary income being a fixture among many steelworker families...

...Its Clairton Works is the largest coke and chemical producing plant in the world, offering virtually every conceivable vapor, gas, dust, oxide, tar, and contaminated water in the glossary of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts...

...Among Local 1557's black members there is only one who identifies with the Ad Hoc group...

...Sam Evett, assistant director of the USW's largest district in Chicago—Calumet, estimates that fully half the union's 1.2 million membership has been in the union less than 12 years, and is in the 20-32 age bracket...

...At the Clairton Works, the largest by-product coke plant in the world, some 4,000 workers encounter each day noxious fumes, heat, and exposure to lung and respiratory diseases...

...The March 1971 issue of the Journal of Occupational Medicine reported that the odds someone in his job will die of lung cancer are ten times as high as those of "the average steelworker...

...for a subtle factor of life in the mills has been the realization by both younger and older workers that their industry will never be the same again...

...The first contest for a top office, that of International vice-president, occurred only as late as 1955...

...The strong support in the community of traditional values is also reflected in the decision STEEL: CHANGING WORKPLACE of the Clairton board of education in restoring prayers to the classroom, despite the Supreme Court ruling against them...

...Meanwhile, seven years of such hiring practices have reduced the number of younger black workers at Clairton...

...One trend acknowledged by the union is that the majority of workers at Clairton are not from the immediate community...

...Both senators came away visibly shaken: Williams told an aide that he could not conceive of a man spending eight hours under these conditions...

...Depending upon one's vantage point, Local 1557 has thus earned a reputation as being either independent or maverick...

...The preoccupation with health and safety by the local leadership at Clairton becomes understandable when one visits the coke ovens, where almost 1,000 of the plant's workers are employed...

...Such discontent has usually been channeled into primaries, and unhappiness over the state's new 3 percent income tax has already initiated a rebellion within the Clairton Works toward the incumbent district legislator, a USW member from nearby Glassport...

...The single-issue Dues Protest committee experienced some measure of success, but as with their counterparts in the national political life, elected rebels soon become incumbent members of "the club...

...Vegetation has even disappeared on the hills across the river...

...The result is a dispersion of potential strength...

...Local 1557 passed a resolution of solidarity with the Monessen workers...

...In the spring of 1970, a Senate subcommittee on labor headed by Sen...

...The air pollution issue has made political activists of the Local 1557 membership...

...Even with high seniority a black worker can remain at essentially the same job class for years...

...The mayor of Clairton, for 16 years, through the early 1960s, was a Local 1557 activist...

...Perhaps more significant, as one looks at Clairton and its environs, is the changing sociology and politics of the workers in the steel industry, in their union and their communities...

...Steel had been hospitalized when concentrations of gas and fumes felled them on the top of the coke ovens at the plant, which is just 12 miles up the Monongahela River...

...Steel has a mixed image in Clairton...

...And all of this has made his local JOSEPH HILL union a factor politically, although in the USW it is moderate in size (the largest USW local in basic steel has 18,000 members...

...And the one Dues Protest candidate elected to the International Executive Board was from District 15...

...When New York's Mayor Lindsay came to town on a political outing last September, a literary paratrooper from the Village Voice was with the entourage...

...There are no illusions among them as to who is polluting both their workplace and their homes, for unlike the professor whose hyacinths are dying, they must live with the fouled ecology...

...The potential for real political power by those in the industrial unions should be an alliance with the poor, for they have much in common on economic issues, and a strong coalition could be set up once the mythology of the "middle-class worker" as beneficiary of the affluent society is laid to rest...

...His leisure time seems to be concentrated upon a pollJOSEPH HILL tics of revelation, of using whatever medium he can to tell what its like to work in a steel plant, and especially the coke ovens at the Clairton Works...

...But the experience of paternalism followed by industrial unionism, and then the absorption of steelworkers into the consumer society within two generations —all this has produced a diversity of lifestyles...

...Since it was constituted almost 30 years ago, the USW has experienced only three challenges for its presidency...

...The new alignments of the community in the past generation have placed the steelworker and his union as a social equal with the Rotarian and the Chamber of Commerce...

...U.S...

...Last year a Clairton councilman who had been president of a salaried workers' local of the USW was reassigned to a job at the Clairton Works that he had held 25 years earlier...

...In the end some concessions were made toward solving the problem, but most steelworkers felt the company won the bout...

...Activity in the political and legislative sector has long been accepted as a consequence of the shift of power in that sector from the corporation to the union...

...The black population in Pittsburgh is fragmented in separate ghettos and distributed in working-class slum areas along the rivers...

...And if the response of its workers has not been "militant," it has been informed, intelligent, and with the ingredients of effecting change and reforms...

...Hannan has found no radicalization among his children, one married and through a teachers' college, another an undergraduate at college, and a third in a Catholic high school, but there is some evidence of it in his community...

...Perhaps even more blatant than the predominance of blacks in the lower-paying job classes is the racism the corporation encourages in other ways: the shower and locker-room facilities, constructed when the coke ovens were rebuilt 25 years ago, were designed for "separate" facilities...

...All this influenced the direction the larger locals in steel were to take in those formative years...

...In this respect they may reflect the realities of their workplace, for fellow USW members in the container industry have lobbied against "ban-the-can" legislation which many middle-class ecologists have advocated...

...They have claimed for years that the ovens are shoddily maintained, that this causes them to smoke more than they should, and that the slogans are forgotten when production schedules have to be met...

...Yet the militancy will likely remain with the same untested leadership in the locals, and the antagonisms are likely to increase rather than diminish because of the prospects of long-term reduction in the steel work force...

...And because of unemployment and the difficulty blacks experience in changing jobs, this percentage is not likely to change...

...Many held elective office for the first time, and several had less than five or six years in the mill...

...Not as easily defined is the relationship of the newer, young worker to the union...

...All steel towns are not the same...

...Under the new union contract, his hourly earnings will increase by 88 cents...

...Yet basic steel is still dominant within the union...

...Steel Monessen Works last year, workers showed up at the plant each day, looked at the coke works and determined that the company was doing nothing to correct unsafe working conditions, and then went home...

...Steel has turned down suggestions that it initiate a high school equivalency program for "hard-core" unskilled workers, which in other steel communities has been funded by the federal government, the company and USW, and which primarily benefits black workers...

...Steel at Clairton did not hire its first black foreman or apprentice to a skilled trade until after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed...

...This view doesn't seem to take into account the Memorial Day Massacre and the Little Steel strike...

...And at a time when public consciousness has forced corporate advertising to a defensive rhetoric, this contradiction lies heavily upon the worker whose home and neighborhood is literally being poisoned by his employer...

...Brown fits into the process by walking over the hot bricks and removing thick steel lids with a six-foot iron bar...

...The local lobbied against Democratic Gov...

...White coke-oven workers also rationalize the fact that they would be earning less money elsewhere, and that meanwhile there is always the prospect of moving up the ladder of job classes...

...At the Clairton Works some 30,000 tons of soft coal are consumed daily, producing enough coke and coke-oven gas for all the steel-making facilities of the corporation in Western Pennsylvania...

...The interior political life of the Steelworkers has been comparatively sedate, at least by contrast to other CIO and even many AFL craft unions...

...He then replaces the lids, which have a temperature up to 2,400 degrees, and returns along the bricks, which range from 150 to 180 degrees...

...Unofficial estimates are that as much as onehalf of the USW membership is below 35...

...Coke-oven workers, like underground miners and those employed in much of the chemical industry, do not have to be instructed about the dangers of occupational pollution...

...The gradual disappearance of the machine and the emergence of independent politics has caused confusion in unions that have practiced old-style coalition politics for three decades, and locals as those at the Clairton Works find themselves in a period of reassessment...

...44 With wartime, full employment, and labor shortages, the situation for black workers improved, and the first postwar contracts began to remove some of the worst on-job discriminations...

...Dan Hannan has transported his members in buses to downtown Pittsburgh where they have ringed the entrance to the corporate temple, with signs greeting U.S...

...There can be no simplistic judgment about the grievance machinery within such a complex work sector as basic steel manufacturing...

...The USW has responded with literature, a new-hire program, and even a 20-minute color film that includes a rock group...

...There is evidence to suggest that their children, in fact, might be the greatest element toward experiencing firsthand some of the unsettling subcultures which have thrown other established institutions into self-appraisal and reevaluation...

...Approximately two-thirds of the Clairton Works' lidmen, like Mr...

...Twenty deaths were attributed to the inversion, which eventually caused the economic demise of the community...

...They have filled hearing rooms and booed company officials who have spoken against local ordinances, and have effected an alliance with county commissioners who have used the pollution issue in local elections...

...Its involvement in the political life of the community has reflected the larger coalition of the Democratic party in Allegheny County...

...By contrast, the current black opposition group, the Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Steelworkers, has issues but few influential leaders and so far little visible constituency outside the Chicago—Gary area...

...By the time of the 1946 modernization and the rebuilding of the coke ovens, approximately one-quarter of the work force was black...

...Then followed two decades of relative political stability within the union—first under Philip Murray, the personification of the CIO Steelworkers' Organizing Committee and then of the USW until his death in 1952...

...Against this background, United Steelworkers' Local 1557 articulates the economic aspirations of some 4,000 workers at the Clairton Works, and because of the genesis of industrial unionism, the local has become the political voice of the majority of its members...

...Steel facility was phased out several years ago...

...If this does not come as a great revelation, neither should there be surprise at the spectacle of a "clean air" group honoring the head of the corporation that has done the most to foul the air...

...On occasion, however, U.S...

...as with most blue-collar wage earners, the economic struggle is getting through pay periods in solvency...

...Brown, a lidman for the past seven years, came to work at Clairton in 1953...

...There are 27 job classes at the Clairton Works, and they range from a member of the labor pool who gets $3.38 an hour to a skilled worker who may earn as much as $5.63...

...The Local 1557 leadership that emerged after the USW was formed in 1942 was typical of other large locals in the industry: 42 in the economics of negotiations and the realities of the workplace it was aggressive, even "militant...

...In October 1969, Edward Spear, president of the United States Steel Corporation, was given a "Good Neighbor" award by a now defunct organization called the Cleaner Air Week of Pittsburgh...

...Hannan, on returning from Washington where he testified before the House subcommittee hearing, was transferred from his coke plant job as an instrument repairman to the Clairton Works blast furnace about a mile away...

...Invariably, the grievance committeemen are among the most "militant" of the local membership...

...Few nights are spent at home, for there are always committee meetings, hearings, political conferences...

...During the past year he spent almost two months in Washington with the USW negotiating committee, testified at Harrisburg and Washington hearings on safety and pollution, and was in public conflict with his employer on half a dozen occasions...

...Where the old steel town reflected the dominance of city halls and school boards by management and supervisory personnel, now USW activists also occupied the centers of local power, became part of the public school establishments, and soon were a bulwark of such community activity as the United Fund...

...At Clairton, the corporation has systematically followed the procedure common to most of its large steel facilities: it has hired black workers for the dirtiest jobs and by-passed them for promotion, designating them for the labor pools where there is virtually no opportunity to "get out" through bidding for higher job classes...

...Brown and most of his co-workers at the ovens smile at that...

...In 1946 it gained worldwide attention because of an inversion caused from the pollutants at the plant...

...The issue of grievance procedure is potentially one of the most volatile within the union...

...Hannan shows a visitor a copy of Business Week, which called him an "outspoken local president...

...Steel has responded with the finesse of GM's John Roche putting the gumshoes on Ralph Nader...

...As the foremen assign lockers to new-hires, de facto segregation continues...

...Walter Brown must buy his own fireproof jacket from the company for $4...

...several in the Pittsburgh area are double the size of Local 1557...

...The money people and the political people have decided they had better do something before the soot drives away both attractive newcomers and their own brain trust...

...Jean Francois Revel declares them to be the two things which most frighten white working people, yet he also notes that "white workers in America are very fond of combat...

...Symbolic of the uneasiness and change in the union and its membership is the minor spate of mergers the USW has effected since 1967, including one with the once leftish Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers, and another with the Stoneworkers...

...Rising discontent in the steel industry has characterized the politics of the union since...

...No roof is above the hot ovens, so when it rains or snows, the lidman must suffer that too, although for much of the year he may welcome that contrast to the inferno below...

...Pittsburgh's Black Coalition has, in fact, made significant inroads in breaking into the whitedominated construction industry and the crafts that determine so much of its job market (see Stanley Plastrik, "Confrontation in Pittsburgh," Dissent, January—February 1970...

...The period between the two world wars saw the growth of the Clairton Works, but its black population apparently became a sizable minority only in the mid-'40s...

...Steel vicepresidents as they crossed their lines...

...Government in the Steelworkers evolved as a democratic process, but the values of ethnic working-class families weighed more than the militant posture of the CIO in articulating that democracy...

...Although as chairman of the local's Civil Rights Committee, Charles Stokes has pointed out that no child of a black member has ever STEEL: CHANGING WORKPLACE received the annual Local 1557 scholarshir (initiated over 20 years ago, it is awarded in competitive academic examination), he concentrates his fire on what appears to be subtle corporate racism in hiring practices: since 1964 the Clairton Works has required a high school diploma for new-hires...

...The emergence of black consciousness has led toward some realignment along Slavic or Italian lines, and cultural identity among second- and third-generation workers again appears to be a factor...

...And success at this difficult task in which there is constant interplay between industry resistance and, often, worker conservatism, tends to produce the future leadership in the local union...

...Where Pittsburgh always had the image of a city where lights burned at noon and salesmen took enough shirts for a change at 5, things are now different...

...They feel fear and apprehension in many of the changing neighborhoods of Pittsburgh and the steel towns of Western Pennsylvania simply because once stable communities are starting to fall apart...

...The "melting pot" stereotype which is usually associated with Pittsburgh has some relevance, but a cauldron of unhappiness may be more appropriate...

...It was not until the time of men still working in the plants that effective unionization occurred, and that was less than 30 years ago, before the first convention was called to form the United Steelworkers of America...

...Hannan sums up the conditions under which the majority of his membership works: "Hot, filthy, monotonous, and dangerous...

...Constant headaches and coughing have become usual both on and off the job...

...The chairman of the USW state legislative committee last year refused to introduce the mayor at a gathering of Steelworkers in Pittsburgh because of Flaherty's alleged strikebreaking role during a ten-day strike of municipal employees, which left 600 tons of garbage uncollected (most of the strikers were black Teamsters...

...The local had a president at that time whose top credentials seemed to be his service with Merrill's Maurauders in the China– Burma theater during World War II...

...before World War II those blacks who worked there were confined to the coke ovens, the labor pool, or stockpiling steel...