Pittsburgh is unique in its dramatic and powerful labor history. It's the site of legendary strikes—Homestead in 1892 and U.S. Steel in the 1930s—and the birthplace of both the AFL and the CIO, as well as the United Steelworkers, the Ironworkers and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers. Most fundamentally, it's where generations of workers toiled to make America.
Take a virtual tour of Pittsburgh's rich labor past. Click on any of the balloons on the map to find out about important labor history.
Writes labor historian Charlie McCollester in The Point of Pittsburgh. The city'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."
Just as critically, McCollester noted, "If Pittsburgh has a tradition of production, it also has a tradition of struggle: whiskey rebels, cordwainer conspirators, cotton mill rioters, anti-slavery militants and especially the generations of union organizers who fought for an organizational voice, due process and justice in the workplace."
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. The 1909 McKees Rocks strike was even bloodier, and it also was broken, largely because of the lack of unity between immigrant and native-born workers.
Nothing came easy for Pittsburgh's workers trying to form unions and seek a better life. But against all the odds, they won victories, one by one, and made this a true union city.
Pittsburgh workers won their largest victory at Big Steel's biggest corporation, U.S. Steel. With the New Deal in Washington, auto workers' advances in Michigan—and after the corporation received a huge order from the British government for armor plate and needed continued production without strikes—U.S. Steel agreed in 1937 to recognize the CIO's Steel Workers Organizing Committee. It was only a matter of time before Little Steel companies followed suit. These were no ordinary organizing triumphs. As Charles McCollester wrote, they "refashioned American economic and political reality."
The following year, hard on the advances of the steelworkers in Pittsburgh as well as the vast numbers of Pennsylvania and West Virginia miners who had eagerly signed up with the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis thundered at the CIO's founding convention that "The Pittsburgh area today is the most completely organized of any city or area in industrial America."
As you explore the city's neighborhoods, you'll be walking where generations of workers organized, rallied, marched, defied bosses and politicians, dreamed of a better life and spilled their blood. If the American union movement has hallowed ground, Pittsburgh is here.
