COMMENTS: REGIONAL REPORTS-Johnstown, Pa.: Ordeal of a Union Town
Metzgar, Jack
Johnstown, Pa.: Ordeal of a Union Town They had a merry Christmas in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. For the first time in three years, the holiday passed without a steel mill being shut down. The...
...Retirees' health insurance is paid for by the company, as negotiated by the union...
...Few of the remaining jobs pay enough to sustain the working-class way of life that had been established through a century of struggle with "the company...
...employed only 200 people by the end of 1984, it hopes to build up to 800 over the next few years...
...As the Steelworkers gradually put limits on the giant steel companies' control at the workplace, the town's social and political life began to develop autonomously as well...
...In order to get its UDAG money, Johnstown Corp...
...But if they sell their home, they'll have to pay back everything they've received from welfare...
...Still, this new Main Street is not universally acclaimed...
...The area has sustained a net loss of 13,000 jobs since 1977...
...With a look at the new Main Street and at long-term employment increases in the banks, retail outlets, hospitals, and at the University of Pittsburgh's Johnstown branch, you could argue that this town, a backward place for most of the 20th century, probably arrived at the future a little earlier than most of the scores of factory towns that are dying throughout the Northeast and Midwest...
...The local business class freed itself from Bethlehem Steel's dominance and, with bipartisan political (and union) support, it initiated extensive urban redevelopment plans...
...He put in 18 years at U.S...
...having granted concessions in order to keep the facility open, these workers are no longer covered by the Basic Steel Contract...
...is the proudest symbol of "the Johnstown recovery...
...The fine was $77, which the justice of the peace is allowing them to pay in installments...
...Some workers claim that Johnstown Corp...
...Schooled through years of playing both ends against the middle, this class has exhibited a resourcefulness not typical of an urban area of scarcely 100,000 people...
...Ask somebody who lived through 1932 and 1933, when unemployment was nearly 25 percent here, what 1936 and 1937 were like, as unemployment dipped to a mere 15 percent...
...The new Main Street is their monument, 20 years in the making, a token of their independence from steel and of their hope for a service-based economy suitable for Yuppies...
...160 DURING THE DEPTHS OF JOHNSTOWN'S DEPRESSION in 1982 and 1983, a ferocious antiunion sentiment emerged in this formerly solid union town...
...Even into the 1970s, the essential reality of Johnstown has been a conflict between labor and capital—not in the abstract sense of Das Kapital, but in concrete daily struggles waged by you and your friends against "the company...
...Actual employment at Bethlehem has been around 2,000...
...Riverside workers who used to earn $11 an hour now make $6...
...Main Street used to be theirs, a place where men in steel-toed shoes and women in work jeans felt at home...
...And many of the permanently laid-off got union-negotiated severance payments estimated to average nearly $3,000 after taxes...
...The largest downtown department store pays the minimum wage ($3.35 an hour) or just above, even for women who have worked there for decades...
...The local media fueled antiunion sentiment, not by rabid attacks, but by a studied "neutrality" that "naturally" gravitated toward company information (often in the absence of effective union publicity...
...In working-class Johnstown the wage trend is clear...
...Many of the jobs that have been created in the last few years are in retail trade...
...The wages USWA Local 1288 extracted from U.S...
...It also organized dozens of machine shops, and everything from dairy workers to bank tellers...
...Steven Smedlak is the kind of man the Johnstown Chamber of Commerce likes to brag about— a hard-working, second-generation Slovak, a man slow to anger and quick to apologize...
...USWA and other union workers fought hard for wages, benefits, and workplace protections that until a few years ago were among the best in the world...
...The new Main Street is a shot in the arm for Johnstown, a sign that things are moving ahead...
...Though Johnstown Corp...
...Through it all, the local business leadership maintained a calm distance...
...Though there's going to be a Johnstown of some sort, working-class Johnstown is all but dead...
...When he was young in the 1930s and had risked his job by doing a little organizing for the Steelworkers' Organizing Committee, had he ever expected to live so well...
...I GREW UP IN JOHNSTOWN during a period when life was getting better...
...As retirees die off, that money will be lost to the local economy and fewer and fewer retirees will have the kind of pensions that sustain life, let alone savings accounts...
...worker who said, "It's better than nothing...
...The family lives on $310 a month from Public Assistance and another $203 in Food Stamps...
...is a national story in the business press—an example of what entrepreneurial initiative can do to salvage rust-bowl communi162 ties...
...All I wanted was a 'mouth,' some protection for saying what I thought...
...There are now fewer places for people to gather, fewer places for hanging out to see who you might bump into...
...Many of those who were 55 years old or older and with 20 or more years' service got special shutdown pensions, which pro161 vide a bridge until they're 62 and get Social Security...
...Even before the closing took place, local business leaders went into action...
...But the worst is not yet over...
...So few plants that shut down are ever reopened that Johnstown Corp...
...The 11,000 steel and 4,000 coal-mining jobs that have been lost were some of the best-paying in the world...
...Indeed, a good part of the union-negotiated way of life goes on even after the company is gone...
...Similar drops in employment (from 10,000 to 6,000) have occurred at the dozens of coal mines surrounding Johnstown...
...Steel (USS) absorbed the costs of the shutdown before selling the plant...
...Steelworkers wondered how teaching could be compared to "real" work in the mills...
...They can hire whom they want and pay a lot less...
...Because of his former union activism, he doesn't expect to be hired back at Johnstown Corp...
...In a quiet moment Steven told me, "I've never been so scared...
...Steel as a machinist and was a minor officer in USWA 1288...
...Steven Smedlak (a pseudonym) is 46 years old...
...The unemployment rate was about 14 percent, nearly double the national average but well below the 25 percent Johnstown suffered into the spring of 1983...
...When the dust settled, the local business class was there to pick up the pieces...
...Then United Steelworkers Local 1288 was disbanded...
...is one of the few examples of a shuttered mill being reopened by new ownership...
...In January 1985, Bethlehem asked its Johnstown workers for more wage concessions...
...But it's not the Main Street of a steel town anymore, or of a union town...
...This contract calls for several of the fancy new sorts of provisions recommended by labor-relations experts—stock purchases, profit-sharing, and two seats on the company's board of directors...
...And the street suggests that a narrower range of behavior and dress than before is now acceptable...
...Many people think the worst is over, and some are optimistic about the town's economic prospects...
...Though the steel companies started it, the antiunion campaign had a popular base among unorganized workers (in retail outlets, banks, insurance companies) and above all in the professional middle class, which had long resented Steelworkers' wages and power...
...Johnstown has attracted a lot of media attention since 1982, when it led the nation in unemployment...
...He and his wife have four kids still living at home...
...Since 1977 steel jobs in Johnstown—and USWA membership in steel— have dropped from 13,200 to about 2,500...
...15,000 remain unemployed...
...was that U.S...
...if they hadn't, the unemployment rate would be over 20 percent...
...I've seen Homestead and Youngstown and formerly thriving commercial strips in Chicago and Detroit, where vacant buildings and boarded-up storefronts, broken windows, and trash give everyone a feeling that things are out of control, that the living will soon be broken or dead...
...People who once made $13 an hour now make about $7...
...Steel announced the closing of its Johnstown Works, permanently eliminating 1,200 jobs...
...But there is no pension...
...5,000 more people were working in Cambria and Somerset counties in late 1984 than had worked in 1983...
...We're coming back," a lot of people told me...
...They found a buyer who, with the help of a $4 million Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) from the federal government, reopened the place as "Johnstown Corporation...
...The fear is back in Johnstown...
...A half-dozen greasy-spoon restaurants have been eliminated...
...In a labor force of scarcely 100,000, that's nothing to sneeze at...
...And that's not what had been important to him at first...
...Teachers complained that Steelworker wages were too high for jobs requiring little education or skill...
...But last year another supermarket chain, Riverside Markets, shut down its stores, met its obligations to union workers, then sold buildings and inventory to a new owner, who hired back many of the same workers without a union contract...
...The big thing was the fear, you can't imagine the fear," he said, "they had your job and they owned you, you couldn't look at them cross-eyed...
...No longer...
...Without hesitation, he said "no," he had never dreamed such a thing...
...There's no national job market for the kinds of machines Steven knows how to operate and, anyway, it's impossible to imagine leaving their network of family and friends and moving away...
...Of those, about 1,500 would be in the car shop, manufacturing railroad cars...
...Whether it truly works is a more complicated question...
...A lot of people are being left behind, and still more will be...
...Though it's hard to say for sure, if Bethlehem were working at full capacity (which it hasn't for quite a while) as many as 3,600 might be employed...
...All of me agrees with another who replied, "That's about all it's better than...
...Much of the apparent prosperity—the well-kept homes, the healthy savings accounts, the consumer spending—is based on union pensions...
...It doesn't look like postwar Dresden or the South Bronx...
...Shortly before Christmas the Smedlaks' youngest daughter was arrested for shoplifting...
...Their old frame house, purchased years ago for $6,000, might sell for $12,000 now in Johnstown's depressed market...
...I've observed too many plant-closing situations not to appreciate the activism of the Johnstown business class...
...Most reporters, while noting the sufferings of the unemployed, have been more impressed with Johnstown's positive qualities...
...BESIDES MAIN STREET, the newly formed Johnstown Corp...
...The new Main Street is a substantial accomplishment...
...now there are three, the best comfortably clean, the other two better than that...
...The new company reported a profit in the final quarter of '84, and just before Christmas paid out a small profit-sharing bonus to its workers...
...What's left of the steel mills exhibits the same trend...
...The Smedlaks' home is paid for—"In that respect, we're lucky...
...In large measure, the United Steelworkers of America won their fight with Bethlehem and U.S...
...He doesn't frighten easily and never panics, the type of guy who digs in, holds his ground, and gets the job done...
...This is called the "Johnstown spirit...
...USS assumed the obligations of its union contract—pensions and health benefits for retirees and severance pay for those who were eligible...
...One of the local banks is USWA-organized, so the banks pay somewhat better—about $5 an hour for a starting teller...
...THE MOOD IN JOHNSTOWN is good right now...
...During the last week of 1983, U.S...
...Since then it has permanently closed facilities where more than 8,000 people worked...
...Before too long an enterprising reporter is also going to notice that the "retraining" program set up in Johnstown by Mainstream Access is now being touted as a "national model" and that the new "Johnstown Corp...
...The United Food & Commercial Workers' Union has fought valiantly against contract concessions, in one instance allowing A & P to close a dozen stores rather than accept a drastically substandard contract...
...In 1977 the Johnstown plant of Bethlehem Steel employed 12,000 people...
...And even many other union workers joined in...
...Men who made $15 an hour now get $9, those who made $12 get $6, and those who made $10 get $4.50—which qualifies some for Food Stamps...
...The new local, with an office inside the plant, negotiated a five-year contract when it had only 33 members...
...Gone, too, are the three old Main Street pool halls, each with its distinct level, or lack, of respectability...
...Because it was a classic company town for nearly 100 years, Johnstown has always been a place with class relations particularly visible...
...Steel financed a good part of my college education...
...This left the new owners free of union requirements...
...Teacher, fire fighter, police, and municipal unions were taken to the wall for job cuts and contract concessions...
...In most instances, it makes sense to hire those who had worked for U.S...
...The plant is a combination foundry and machine shop, so it had a large number of skilled workers...
...Thank God, their 14year-old son Bryan got his buck last hunting season and the freezer is full of deer meat—none of which, so far as they know, has to be deducted from the welfare check...
...Nor has Johnstown heard its last shutdown announcement from Bethlehem Steel— though, it's true, there's not a helluva lot left to shut down...
...Steve has had six weeks of work since Thanksgiving 1981...
...In many instances management is hiring pensioners who worked there before the shutdown and whose health insurance is covered by their pension...
...had to form a new USWA local...
...A lot of working-class people resent it...
...Union activists and other "trouble-makers" are being by-passed, even where they're acknowledged as the best on their machine...
...Even one of Johnstown's growth industries, health care, is based on the continuing health insurance extracted from the companies decades ago by union struggle...
...Anchored by an expanded hospital, a bank, a new Holiday Inn, and City Hall, Main Street also includes two high-rise office buildings and a series of spilled-up exteriors of small shops and stores...
...Steel, but the new owners are free to choose...
...There used to be 17 bars in that five-block area—everything from the seedy to the merely tawdry to the comfortably clean...
...Given the climate in Johnstown, it will most likely get them...
...This mill town 60 miles southeast of Pittsburgh has become a regular stop on the rust-bowl circuit...
...By 1977, when the steel shutdowns began, Johnstown was a strong union town...
...Steel in the 1950s and 1960s...
...The best-paying job is retirement...
...It has one of the lowest crime rates in the country and a high savings rate...
...some of it still is...
...6,500 people have left the labor force since 1980...
...When you've been face-down in the mud, to rise to your knees can feel better than standing up used to...
...Many old-timers will tell you that those were very good years...
...With the decline of steel employment, the power of both the steel companies and the Steelworkers plummeted, and the local business class acquired undisputed leadership...
...Part of me agrees with the Johnstown Corp...
...My father, a machinist there and a shop steward for 1288, retired at 57 and lived 12 of the best years of his life off his Steelworkers' pension...
...A good part of Johnstown's downtown was like that for most of the past five years...
...THE KEY to the deal facilitating Johnstown Corp...
...is getting federal money to "train" former USS workers for work they've been doing for 20 and 30 years...
...Meanwhile supermarkets shut down dozens of stores, extracted concessions from the United Food & Commercial Workers, and in one instance busted the union entirely...
...Even in its depression, delinquency rates for bank loans remained substantially below the national average...
...Steelworkers had top-of-the-line pensions and health coverage...
...Others said, more modestly, "There's going to be a Johnstown...
Vol. 32 • April 1985 • No. 2
