Jack Metzgar's Striking Steel

...It was a time when workers, as in the 1959 strike, stuck together...

...The industry's chief negotiator, R. Conrad Cooper of U.S...

...In that decade, he contends, seniority and work-rule provisions, along with well-functioning grievance procedures, provided relatively stable and secure industrial systems as an institutional framework for large wage and benefit improvements...

...JoHN HOERR, author of And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry, grew up in the steel town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania...

...This was, as Metzgar concludes, "a decisive victory for the union," which makes its omission from history texts all the more curious...

...But when a board of inquiry impaneled by President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked for examples of overstaffing, the companies could produce only one example and no evidence of widespread inefficiencies...

...114 n DISSENT / Fall 2000...

...It was a massive display of solidarity rooted in a working-class culture that subsumed unionism, and it won the day...

...The industry partially succeeded in convincing the public that 2-B was synonymous with featherbedding...

...He may have thought that rank-andfile unhappiness with USW president David J. McDonald would weaken the union in a showdown...

...Scanning this evidence, Metzgar might well think of the 1950s as "wonderful" and "liberatory," a conclusion undoubtedly influenced by his own happy years as a boy, aged five to fifteen, growing up in Johnstown...

...I do, as a twenty- to thirty-year-old, and I have a distinctly different memory...

...Because the number of workers assigned to a given mill or furnace was defined as a past practice, any attempt by management to eliminate or consolidate jobs would violate 2-B...

...Looking back, one can infer from the 1961 publication of The Feminine Mystique that women were becoming restless...

...The more general conclusion to be drawn is that, although 2-B "sure looked like a license to loaf," as Metzgar writes, local unions generally had not used it irresponsibly...

...Ronald Reagan had not yet demonstrated how to break a strike and decertify a union by hiring strikebreakers...

...They went on strike in July 1959 and stuck together through the summer and into the fall...

...Metzgar's father, Johnny Metzgar, was a semiskilled machinist and USW grievanceman in the Johnstown Works of U.S...

...Many steelworkers themselves seem to have forgotten what they achieved in this strike, their recollections perhaps corrupted by the faulty version of contemporary union history accepted by the larger society...

...An industrial engineer enamored of Taylorism, he wanted to convert the mills into workplace bureaucracies run by stopwatch engineers...

...Most steelworkers exhausted their savings or scraped along on pick-up work and perhaps their wives' incomes...

...Without union-paid strike benefits, more than five hundred thousand steelworkers had stayed out for four months and shut down nearly 90 percent of the nation's steelmaking capacity...

...Metzgar makes a valid point in acclaiming his father's generation of steel workers...

...The union did not come close to taking control of the workplace away from management...

...The story of his father, the shop-floor leader who struggled day in and day out to force management to deal with workers "as men, not just 'hands,' will not be forgotten...

...women began discarding limited expectations...

...For him, "making the world right and fair was a daily, practical struggle...

...The Eisenhower administration obtained a TaftHartley injunction forcing steelworkers to return to work during a sixty-day "cooling off" period...

...The incipiency of liberating social movements does not seem so wonderful before the liberation starts...

...The women's movement was a decade in the future...

...Over the years, aggressive arbitration specialists at the USW expanded the scope of 2-B to cover crew size...

...With the backing of U.S.S...

...But there were no back-to-work movements by disaffected workers, and the steel companies knew better than to import scabs...

...The USW agreed to limit cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) increases...

...Big Labor" is not a pejorative term for Metzgar...

...In the 1940s, 2-B was incorporated in many company contracts to protect "past practices" that workers had grown accustomed to in individual plants, such as unusual weekly work schedules...

...This is one of the more fascinating aspects of the 1959 battle...

...The story of the 1959 strike is the central narrative in the book...

...He was the quintessential shop steward who did not hate bosses but understood labor-management relations as a struggle between opposing interests...

...Plant managers who had allowed outsized crews in the first place were reluctant to admit their error...

...Johnny Metzgar went to work at the Johnstown Works in 1930 and risked his job to join the USW in 1936, before the company granted recognition...

...With Vice President Richard Nixon acting as mediator, the two sides reached agreeDISSENT / Fall 2000 n 113 BOOKS ment on a new, two-year contract in January 1960...

...To him, the apparatus was a tool that, if you mastered it, could be used to confuse and intimidate management and, if everybody stuck together around the contract, could slowly but consistently erode management authority, put management on the defensive, and put lots of liberty and control in workers' hands, even without their filing a grievance...

...What I do see are sharply drawn profiles of relationships inside a working-class family and a marvelously complex description of union culture and work practices in a 1950s steel mill...

...As a result, not only the 1959 steel strike but most accomplishments of unions in the 1950s have I12a DISSENT /Fa112000 been ignored or downplayed by historians and many in the New Left...

...Metzgar is not a descriptive writer...

...A company could reduce crew size only by changing the "underlying circumstances," for example, by installing new technology...

...But the social and political revolutions of the 1960s confused Johnny, and he ended his union career in disillusionment...

...Steel Corp...

...The 1950s was Johnny Metzgar's decade, a time when "workers in major industries banded together to get a say in their lives," Jack Metzgar says, adding wistfully, "My dreams and desires are centered on making it so again...

...He was wrong...

...Jack Metzgar explains how his father viewed his union job...

...But Metzgar draws a questionable conclusion about the larger significance of unionism in the 1950s...

...He does not remember the fifties as an adult...

...One can see the beginnings of the civil rights revolution in court decisions on segregation and Rosa Parks's act of rebellion...

...In the scores of steel plants operated by twelve major companies (and three others that followed the pack) there had to have been many instances of work crews that had an extra member or two...

...What happened in the larger society scrambled his earlier coherence," Jack Metzgar writes, and turned Johnny, "like many of his kind, into the sort of 'forgotten American' to whom George Wallace and then others appealed...

...I can't see Johnstown in the text...

...Led by union wage gains in steel, auto, rubber, electrical equipment, mining, and construction, the national average rose steadily with a corresponding increase in the standard of living...

...Real wages increased more rapidly than ever before or since, producing a 62 percent improvement in the standard of living between 1947 and 1972...

...Unions used their political strength to push for social reforms...

...The fight against segregation was on the verge of becoming a mass movement among blacks...

...But this is not a typical memoir filled with bleak or charming scenes of mill-town life...

...Often, it seemed, "shit was pulled" just for the delight of it, but if my father was to be believed, the unofficial shop-floor skirmishes that industrial relations scholars called fractional bargaining were a tremendous source of daily power, control, and even dignity...

...The son writes of this painful period with unflinching honesty...

...Contract by contract, strike by strike, grievance by grievance, [unions] were building up a realm of freedom for about one-third of the workforce, affecting lots of others...

...By November, the cutoff of steel production had idled about a quarter-million workers in other industries, and the government was under pressure to halt the strike...

...Steel Corporation and eleven other major producers abandoned their attempt to challenge union power on the shop floor and came to terms on a new industry-wide agreement...

...But he is mistaken, I think, in choosing a former USW local president named Tony Tomko to exemplify the "one generation of workers who were not noble victims...

...Practically everything that Metzgar writes about has vanished, leaving flawed memories and blurry outlines in the historical record...

...There were a number of reasons for this...

...Many workers may not have had to invoke 2-B to protect their jobs or even be aware that it existed, but they knew instinctively that management's demands would eviscerate the contract and take away that small portion of control over their working lives that the union had won...

...But Johnny Metzgar's union career petered out in the 1960s...

...Etched in acid and love, this portrait of a militant union man with all his strengths and contradictions is the best I have read...

...Radiating from this core are meditations on several related issues, including workplace relations, social class, and historical memory, along with fragments of a memoir...

...A local manager may have agreed to a specific crew size in return for a work-rule concession in another area by the local union...

...True enough, one can look back from the end of the century and match the upward slant of the wage line with now-documented improvement in living standards...

...None of this diminishes the valuable contribution Jack Metzgar has made to labor history...

...In the early 1950s, Johnny became a part-time "griever," representing workBOOKS ers in his zone on all kinds of problems, mainly dealing with contract violations by foremen...

...Even for a white person, racial segregation can be infinitely painful, and we lived in the middle of it...

...Chairman Roger Blough, Cooper chose 1959 contract negotiations as the time to "win back control of the plants...

...In some cases, smart foremen had minimized the effect of 2-B by tinkering with operating technology just enough to change the "underlying circumstances...

...Striking Steel is, among other things, a persuasive argument against this willful and pernicious blanking out...

...But one set of shop-floor rules, known as Section 2-B, frustrated local managers more than all others...

...Steel pretty much ran the industry in those days...

...Supreme Court, the United Steelworkers (USW) ended-116 days after it started—one of the largest strikes in U.S...

...But the industry granted wage and benefit increases that raised annual labor costs 3.7 percent and, most important, dropped the 2-B demand...

...Steel towns like Johnstown, Pa., where he grew up, lost their mills and fell into deep decay...

...Steel, was particularly offended by this restriction on the right to manage...

...American mills still dominated the world steel market...

...Shortly before the bargaining deadline, Cooper injected new demands, proposing the elimination of 2-B among other things...

...Tomko was a leading rank-andfile activist in the 1950s and 1960s, but he played a less than constructive role in the union—getting involved in election fraud—in later years...

...history...

...But it could not convince mediators...

...A photo montage on the cover shows a shadowy steel mill, an onion-domed church, a grim-looking mill worker in a hard hat, and a family of four outside their home in what obviously is a mill town...

...I can accept all this and still not remember the 1950s as a "wonderful, liberatory decade...

...In the process, he sometimes forgot his debts [to the union...

...One did not have to be blacklisted to hate McCarthyism...

...The USW still bargained on an industrywide basis (though this structure was beginning to crack...

...it did exist, to the betterment of society in general, but now it is being expunged from national memory...

...Family life did not seem threatened by the easy availability of drugs, guns, and divorce...

...It was a different time...

...But only twenty years later, in the 1980s, the union culture that Jack Metzgar describes so vividly in Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered had no defense against a new economic order...