The 26th AFL-CIO Convention, Sept. 13-17, will convene in a city rich with labor history. Pittsburgh is the birthplace of both the AFL and the CIO, as well as the United Steelworkers (USW), the Ironworkers and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM). It also is the site of two legendary strikes—theHomestead steel mill strike in 1892 and the U.S. Steel strike in the 1930s.
Labor historian Charlie McCollester writes inThe Point of Pittsburgh:
[Pittsburgh's] workers and industries had produced incalculable volumes of coal, iron, steel and glass. Its inventors and laborers had been the first to refine oil, manufacture aluminum and create some of the primary mechanisms of electrical generation and distribution. In a stupendous effort, its mills and factories had been the arsenal of democracy, providing much of the muscle that made the United States of America the world’s most powerful nation.
Delegates and guests can view a map of labor history sites within walking distance from the David Lawrence Convention Center, where the convention is meeting. Click here to see the map.
One of the area’s most famous struggles, the Homestead steel mill strike, took place after robber baron Andrew Carnegie assigned Henry Clay Frick the task of breaking the union. Seven workers and three Pinkertons were killed in a riverfront battle and the state militia crushed the strike.
Pittsburgh workers later went on to victory at U.S. Steel, the nation’s largest steel company. Following passage of the New Deal’s National Labor Relations Act, U.S. Steel agreed in 1937 to recognize the CIO’s Steel Workers Organizing Committee. Other steel companies followed suit.
The following year, after the advances of the steelworkers in Pittsburgh, as well as the vast numbers of Pennsylvania and West Virginia miners who had joined the Mine Workers (UMWA), the legendary John L. Lewis told the CIO’s founding convention that
The Pittsburgh area today is the most completely organized of any city or area in industrial America.
blog.aflcio.org
August 23, 2009
