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AFL-CIO Convention Meeting in City Rich with Labor History |
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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—the Homestead steel mill strike in 1892 and the U.S. Steel strike in the 1930s.
Labor historian Charlie McCollester writes in The 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.
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While the American Federation of Labor was founded in Pittsburgh in 1886, this city was already host 5 years earlier to those who were the progenitors for organized labor’s future world-class work skills.
On November 18, 1881, Sam Gompers, later founding president of the AF of L, met in Pittsburgh with other union leaders to confront a nationwide diminishing of work skills by profit-obsessed employers in the building and construction industry. This deteriation of work skills, accompanied by some contractors who made common use of sub-standard materials, were in some cases severe enough to cause the collapse of commercial and industrial structures, with insuing injury and death.
These same labor leaders petitioned the U.S. Congress to mandate nationwide standards for technical knowledge and work skills: “…necessity demands the enactment of uniform apprentice laws throughout the country…”
The 47th Congress, dominated by business and industry interests and led by Ohio Republican Joseph Keifer (later a bank president) scorned this desparate appeal for federal action, leaving organized labor to further develop its own skills while ignoring the critical need for national standards.
Many years later, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) included construction industry codes and rules regulating apprenticeship programs, but it was soon declared unconstitutional by the then conservative U.S. Supreme Court. Finally in 1937 Congress took direct action on that 1881 Pittsburgh petition, passing the National Apprenticeship Act (Fitzgerald Act). Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Act established a national advisory committee charged with drafting minimum standards for apprenticeship programs. The present Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training provides services and technical assistance to both existing and proposed apprenticeship programs, as well as promoting fair labor standards. This federal bureau also works closely with State Apprenticeship Councils and educational systems.
Today, Union Building and Construction Trades represent a clear majority of all registered apprenticeships in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and they are equal or superior to the very best in the world.
And it all began in Pittsburgh.
Tom Mathews
When in Pittsburgh please visit The Waterfront, the former site of the USS Homestead Works, The Pump House, Rivers of Steel & The Carnegie Library of Homestead. Our web sites for info: http://www.svmatters.com & http://www.steelvalleyavenues.com Enjoy your stay in the “Steel City”!!!!!