When the Union's Inspiration ... Solidarity Remembered

...We had to sell the frame house we were buying and move to a government housing project (very nice then...

...He joined the union at his first opportunity in 1936, having been signed up by Runt Espey and in turn signing up others among the younger men, including my Uncle Stan...

...Though it didn't happen all at once, that's exactly what the union contract eventually achieved...

...This was not gravy...

...in the long run, this may undermine worker militancy and the very capacity for concerted action...

...This story got told and retold because it was so extreme...

...I knew the company hated the union, so I joined...

...The foreman needed Runt's craft skills, and now his leadership, to get production...

...But it's our contract...

...the contract itself, not anything that was in it...

...For workers, according to Metzgar, the issue was freedom from "arbitrary authority and all the indignities, the humiliation, and the fear that come with being directly subject to the unlimited authority of another human being...

...All rights reserved...

...EDS...

...This immediately eliminated the worst excesses of foremen, which (as in the story above) violated existing company policy...

...If you had the seniority and could do the job, it was yours by right...

...Runt, therefore, could openly advocate for the union without fear of losing his job...

...He was referring to Bethlehem's meager ($30 a month) disability payment and general indifference more than This article is excerpted and reprinted from the chapter entitled "Getting to 1959" from Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered, by Jack Metzgar, by permission of Temple University Press...

...In 1949, the Steelworkers struck the companies for forty-two days in order to get them to fund a pension plan and to partially fund health insurance...

...But the life, health, and disability insurance, and the pension the Steelworkers won in 1949 were for more than just themselves...

...This process was further aided by the union's winning of Supplemental Unemployment Benefits (SUB) in the fifty-eight-day strike of 1956...

...you didn't need to bring anyone kielbasa, not even the union...

...The rest was gravy...

...Johnny Metzgar's values, politics, life on the factory floor, and relationship to his family are evoked in a lyrical, yet unflinchingly honest way...

...2000 by Temple University Press...

...But those long weeks didn't last...

...In 1932, for example, my father had to report for work every morning six days a week, even though the company needed him only fifty-two of the more than 300 days on which he reported...

...Jack Metzgar's book, about one family's life in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is a vivid tale about class and the labor movement in America...

...Striking Steel is also a history of the 1959 steel strike, the largest strike in U.S...

...head Myron Taylor in a hotel in New York City...

...The money for both "came out of the same pot," he would say, and we should not expect him to degrade his working conditions (or fail to improve them) so that he could bring a little more home to us...

...Though the "winter shack" he rented with his second wife in Florida was a decidedly modest dwelling, it allowed him to avoid more than a decade of northern winters when he "should have been in the mill aching and freezing"—and yet to return to the glorious spring, summer, and autumn of the western Pennsylvania hills...

...I didn't really think it would do any good...

...THE PERCEPTION and remembrance of the 1950s as a time of repressive conformism and spiritless materialism might relate to the middle-class organization man, the white-collar professional and managerial worker of the time...

...The union itself, not anything that it did or didn't do...

...Which is not to say he was indifferent to the details, just that he knew that neither God nor the Devil were in them...

...And as my father would find out, my mother, my sister and I—like nearly everybody else in American society— were learning to tolerate less and less repression from anybody or anything, including him...

...If what we lived through in the 1950s was not liberation, then liberation never happens in real human lives...

...The idea of retiring at the age of fifty-six and being able to live comfortably, if frugally, was unimaginable in 1946...

...Most foremen were people you could reason with...

...It [not caring] protected me...

...and then go have a talk with the foreman...

...I once asked my father if he had thought, when he first joined, that the union would accomplish all that it had...

...Steel was a relatively small plant, employing only about 2,000 in good years...

...But they all had this power over your life and the life of your family, and most of them used it in both big and little ways, sometimes with a purpose, DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 83 SOLIDARITY REMEMBERED sometimes just out of meanness, but always with the same humiliating result...

...Otherwise, we'd still be slaves...

...mills and mines...

...Besides the peace of mind they provided, by taking away the need to save up for hard times they released savings for other things and made buying on installment (and credit in general) rational and feasible behavior...

...These were nothing to brag about at first...

...He got paid for sixty hours a week, but on any given day he could leave after eight hours if his work for that day was completed...

...Without hesitating, he answered, "No...

...If the company had found out he had joined the union, my father would not only have lost his job at U.S...

...It binds us as well as them [management or the company...

...SUB supplemented government-funded unSOLIDARITY REMEMBERED employment compensation to pay about 80 percent of a steelworker's wages when he was laid off (by the 1970s it was paying as much as 95 percent...

...His father knew somebody in management who passed on a good word to a man in the plant's personnel office, and then Johnny badgered that man every day for three months until he got a job...

...Indeed, it was in the wages and benefits that the rest of us could see the revolution "since the union...

...And because they came slowly, year by year, contract by contract, strike by bitter strike, they gave a lilting, liberating feeling to life—a sense that no matter what was wrong today, it could be changed, it could get better—in fact, by the late 1950s, that it was quite likely that it would get better...

...This was the very basis of life for a wage worker in a capitalist society...

...And unlike so many other Americans, who just saw "prosperity" improving their lives, we saw the union doing it...

...But I didn't care...

...He told numerous stories to illustrate how this worked, none of which involved him directly...

...In 1932 he had only fifty-two days of work...

...I don't know what I'd have done if I'd had a family then...

...Besides the companyand-the-union stories, Runt figured in most of the stories my father used to instruct me in how to be a "little guy" (which referred to both height and strength) in a world of big men...

...They owned your job, and that meant they owned you...

...As my father used to say, "If the union didn't do anything else, it put an end to that...

...I was young, single, and I hated my job, and . . . I just couldn't live with the fear...

...Not that it seemed we ever had to make that choice...

...and Runt almost uniformly would say, "Hell no...

...Most foremen would not dream of doing anything like this...

...We needed a guy like that at the time...

...These moral injunctions to daily fortitude made so much more sense then when there were so many visible payoffs for doing so...

...Into the 1960s, the Steelworkers' wage-and-benefit package was always bargained and reported in cents, not in percentage-increase terms...

...Work picked up after that," he said...

...One fellow who had a reputation as a particularly good worker had been employed steadily during one period...

...What is it worth for a man to have thirteen years of contentment like this—when everything he hates in life is avoided...

...Jack Metzgar's Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered, an excerpt from which appears below, is a combination of memoir, labor history, and meditation on the importance of unions in transforming the lives of industrial workers in the 1950s...

...Specific work rules and working conditions were crucial to him, and he had a way of dividing them from wages and benefits, a way that coincided with the split between work and family that was so much a part of 1950s culture...

...The worst of these stories, which he and others told me several times over the years, went like this...

...One day the foreman ran into this worker while the worker was with his sixteen-year-old daughter, a particularly beautiful young woman, as the story goes...

...rolling mills...

...And, with a little imagination, a crafty bugger like Runt, who was the molders' first grievance man, could use the formal power of the union contract to extend his informal power in the labor process...

...In this context, Runt was able to give the union a power and a presence on the molding floor all out of proportion to what had been agreed upon in March 1937 by John L. Lewis and U.S.S...

...Still, Mom's heart attack set us back...

...To get work, workers would vie with each other to curry favor with foremen and superintendents...

...This strike was not over wages or benefits, but rather, "work rules...

...Runt, who was short and cocky, like my father, had some job security and not a little shop-floor power through his craft skills...

...he particularly liked making a fool out of big guys who were soft, which could hurt a lot more and a lot longer than a punch in the face...

...And, though they were often in the forefront, it wasn't just the steelworkers who experienced these benefits: the average real wage of all manufacturing workers increased 89 percent during the same period...

...The government recommended eighteen and a half cents, and that's what we got...

...My father both gloried in and was ashamed of Runt's negative qualities, with which he clearly identified, but in his scheme of things these qualities were necessary and justified if, in general and for the most part, they served a larger purpose...

...At this point he was summarily fired and was subsequently without work for the better part of a year—at a time when there was no unemployment compensation and "relief' was a breadline...

...The idea was to eliminate arbitrary power itself, not just shift it from one person to another...

...Hang in there...

...It is the story of Jack's father, Johnny Metzgar, who, starting in 1930 at the age of seventeen, worked for four decades in the steel mills in Johnstown, Pennsylvania...

...RUNT, in today's jargon, was my father's role model...

...Take 1946, for example...

...The worst part was that he didn't, that he couldn't, just say no—that even in refusing the foreman's request, he couldn't "stand up to him," couldn't maintain his dignity...

...The union wanted twenty-five cents (most other CIO unions wanted closer to thirty cents), but the company allowed it could afford only a dime...

...But the easy use of "bureaucracy" as a broad.pejorative with rich negative connotations allows them to avoid the issue of what the alternative to living by impersonal rules might be...

...Runt was also vain—he liked to be recognized as a leader and to be deferred to...

...history—involving five hundred thousand workers on strike for 116 days—and, until now, virtually ignored by historians...

...Though you needed the union to ensure that the rules were followed and, indeed, to get the rules written down and agreed to in the first place, you didn't need to be in anybody's good graces...

...He transferred out of molding in 1940 to the Lower Shop, where he eventually worked as a machinist making rolls for U.S.S...

...In a brutally cyclical industry like steel, this gave a security and predictability to life that allowed steelworker families to pursue long-term goals and investments (whether buying a house, expanding the one you had, or saving for children's education...

...Johnstown Works of U.S...

...According to my father, he could have had a job at the much larger complex of Bethlehem Steel because it had a policy of hiring the sons of its disabled workers, but he wouldn't "give them that satisfaction after what they did to my father...

...82 n DISSENT / Spring 2000 to the accident itself...

...Both the right and the left have a point...

...It did not relate to us...

...he also brought homemade kielbasa and other goodies to the foreman on a regular basis...

...We needed a guy like that in those days," he said...

...It meant, first, that you could routinely cover the basic necessities of life...

...But nobody's perfect, even role models, and that's why the union wouldn't really be a union if it had to depend on the consistent righteousness of the Runt Espeys...

...besides, many foremen, like most rank-and-file workers, were none too sure what the new system required of them...

...He remained in the Lower Shop until he retired in 1969, at the age of fifty-six...

...Steel, but he would also have been put on a do-not-hire "blacklist" at Bethlehem and at the various smaller fabricating plants in town...

...In 1952 when my mother had her first heart attack and spent quite a while in the hospital, most of our costs were covered by the health insurance...

...It was pretty simple to figure out that without the union we wouldn't have gotten eight and a half of those eighteen and a half cents in 1946, and only a little more complicated to reason that without the union the companies would never have offered that dime in the first place...

...Such complaints are directed simply at "bureaucrats" who lack common sense or a human touch in applying the rules to specific situations...

...At first, in 1937, it just gave a guy like Runt Espey something additional to work with, a way to extend to others some of the protections he enjoyed based on his craft skills...

...Runt had a mean streak, and he would sometimes humiliate others just for the satisfaction of doing it...

...He worked six days a week, from eight to ten hours a day...

...In 1946, we did not have a car, a television set, or a refrigerator...

...on the other hand, he could not leave until the day's work was completed, even if that took more than ten hours, though that happened rarely...

...This made for more discretionary income...

...According to a mantra my father repeated almost until the day he died, "Without the health insurance, our lives would have been wrecked...

...I was young, and I really didn't care if they fired me or not—I hated the mill—and they knew that...

...The grievance procedure in those early years didn't take away much of the foreman's formal power, but it meant that a union griever could go over his head to a superintendent, and then the union could go over a department superintendent's head if a complaint seemed justified...

...Stick with it...

...Pretty soon the guys on the molding floor were going to Runt asking, "Can he [the foreman] do that...

...The wages and benefits were for the family...

...Today, as labor historian David Brody has shown so clearly, both the left and the right attack this "workplace rule of law" with little sense of its role in liberating workers from arbitrary authority and all the indignities, the humiliation, and the fear that come with being directly subject to the unlimited authority of another human being...

...This was done to benefit the lower pay grades, but it also had the effect of making the impact of wage bargaining more clear and meaningful to SteelDISSENT / Spring 2000 n 85 SOLIDARITY REMEMBERED worker families like mine...

...The strike was won decisively by the union...

...All the discretion that the foreman and the company were losing was flowing right into our home...

...But they were a big deal at the time, and the companies at first resisted them on principle as "un-American and contrary to the most cherished ideals of self-reliance and personal initiative...

...Think of that a minute...

...And the pension eventually turned out to be a wonder...

...We were bound before...

...In addition, in my father's words, he was a "crafty bugger" who "had something on everybody, or could make you think he did," and most foremen or superintendents had to solicit Runt's cooperation if they were to get production...

...But the casualness of current attacks on bureaucracy and bureaucrats often includes a weariness with democracy and its requirements, a weariness with the rule of law itself, and a dangerous yearning for leadership unrestricted by the results of previous generations' struggles, outcomes and decisions...

...There were certain molds that only Runt knew how to do correctly, and many others that benefited from his skills and knowledge...

...Then it meant you had something very few workers had ever had up until then—discretionary income, income that in a sense you didn't need, income that you could decide how to spend...

...There were possibilities...

...The worst part of this story, for my father, was not the man's being without work for so long...

...Few of these had been there before...

...WHEN WORK was slack during the depression, before the union, foremen were in control of who worked and who didn't on any given day...

...Others could not...

...Think what it does for a family's well-being to have more real spending power year after year, to experience a steady, relentless improvement in your standard of living for more than two decades...

...DISSENT / Spring 2000 • 87...

...In my father's view of things, the very impersonality of the labor contract as a binding document was the foundation of his freedom and dignity, and a great deal of peace of mind as well, He believed in what was called then "the sanctity of the contract": "You have to live by the contract...

...All this meant more discretionary income, more discretion itself, more freedom to develop your life in relation to your own values and choices...

...Likewise, health insurance only covered certain hospital costs and major procedures by doctors, and the company only paid half the premium...

...In these first years, Runt gained some of the arbitrary power the foremen used to have, and though Runt could be mean, both to foremen and to workers who didn't support the union strongly enough, he never, according to 84 DISSENT / Spring 2000 my father, used his power "against the men...

...The pension formula committed the companies to supplement Social Security so that a steelworker with enough service could receive $100 86 n DISSENT / Spring 2000 a month in retirement (at a time when it took at least $250 a month to live...

...He learned the molder's trade from a friend and second cousin of his father's, Runt Espey, and enjoyed the work at first along with the camaraderie among the men, though not the dusty conditions that left you "still coughing two or three hours after you left work...

...to ensure his employment, he cut his foreman's grass in the summer and shoveled snow for him in the winter without pay...

...By 1952 we had all those things, and I can remember vividly the excitement of the day when each arrived...

...And by 1959 these were all necessities, without which we could not have imagined living...

...The rules laid out in the union contract determined who got laid off and who worked during bad times, who got overtime and who worked night shift, who worked in Job Classification 10 and who worked in Job Classification 15...

...That's not why I joined...

...JACK METZGAR is professor of humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago...

...He got his job as a molder's helper, a good job because you learned a skill, through a combination of family connections and persistence...

...Though I never met him, I have a clear memory of Runt Espey from the stories my father told me when I was very young...

...This system of rule-making and rule-observing is the essence of bureaucracy, and it has its disadvantages for both workers and managers...

...It was yours according to the rules everybody had agreed to...

...Speaking as much about himself as about Runt, he would say, "Not everybody can be like your Mom and Stan [who we all recognized as models of the quiet, selfless Christian humility we were supposed to strive for...

...Bureaucratic work rules, and the legalistic grievance system designed to interpret and enforce them, take away a lot of management discretion that may be desirable for competing in a more fiercely competitive world...

...But it is also the essence of industrial democracy in the American system...

...They also bind workers as well as managers, restricting them from taking things into their own hands with wildcat strikes and other spontaneous job actions that might oppose injustices allowable under the contract...

...Evidently there was work in 1930 and into 1931...

...Eventually, and this had happened by 1959, it meant an upgrading in what counted as necessities...

...Once, sometime in the 1950s while we were out shopping together, my father pointed to a man who had been fired from Bethlehem before the union and explained that the blacklist was why "even today" that man had to work as a grocery-store clerk...

...in 1933, only eighty...

...There were prospects...

...The next day the worker arrived with a particularly large supply of freshly made kielbasa, but told the foreman he would be unable to arrange the date...

...They went after the guys with families, the guys who couldn't afford to lose their jobs...

...They weren't...

...Now they were...

...There were choices...

...Sometimes complaints about "bureaucracy" refer simply to the excesses of the impersonal observation of rules and regulations...

...these were the fundamentals, "the big thing," as he said...

...The worker said he'd see and would let the foreman know the next day...

...To my father, who was 25 then, it was indescribably exhilarating to observe this process...

...the working conditions, for him alone...

...when work was slack, he bumped down several job classifications to become a "hooker," the person who attached things to an overhead SOLIDARITY REMEMBERED crane for delivery elsewhere in the mill...

...Though it didn't happen all at once, the union eventually stripped not only the foreman but even the company itself of this arbitrary power...

...I was just rebelling...

...41- OHNNY METZGAR entered the mill in 1930, shortly after graduating from high school...

...Before the Wagner Act, the companies made sure everybody knew about the blacklist and were very demonstrative in using it, After Wagner, which made such practices illegal, they were more subtle about it, but according to local legend, once you got on the blacklist, you never got off...

...He was seventeen years old...

...My mother had more heart attacks, but we all just kept plugging along...

...BUT THE real wage increase doesn't cover the half of it...

...Nobody SOLIDARITY REMEMBERED gave it to you...

...If you let them know you were afraid for your job, they owned you...

...From the time my father joined the union in 1936 until the 1959 strike, the average real wage of steelworkers increased 110 percent, with the bulk of the increase coming after the war...

...The next day at work the foreman, a married man with a family and himself only slightly younger than his employee, asked the worker if he could arrange a "date" with his daughter...

...its basic function was to produce equipment for other U.S.S...

...Assigning work, firing, disciplining, even warning a steelworker—by the 1950s nobody— not the foreman, the company, nor any union leader, from the shop floor to international headquarters—had much discretion in doing any of these things...

...The fear, he explained, was the fear of losing your job, and some foremen used that fear like a whip...

...This is certainly true of the free-market right with its deep belief in Great Men operating unfettered in the marketplace, but it was also true of a large part of the New Left with its attraction to the style and drama of revolution more than to its substance...

...In good times, when there was lots of work, he was a machinist...

...After forty-two days, the companies gave up on that principle, and the union then improved on the substance with each negotiation in the 1950s...

...Through ten sets of negotiations and five strikes from 1946 to 1956, the steel companies fought every advance the union sought—and did so in a highly public way...