Book Review: Homestead Steel Mill—the Final Ten Years: USWA Local 1397 and the Fight for Union Democracy by Mike Stout

 

Homestead Steel Mill—the Final Ten Years: USWA Local 1397 and the Fight for Union Democracy
Author: Mike Stout • Introduction: JoAnn Wypijewski • Afterword: Staughton Lynd
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629637914/9781629638553
Published: 6/2020
Format: Paperback/Hardcover
Page count: 352

“For a short period, the rank-and-file movement at Homestead was an experiment in democracy like nothing I’ve seen or red about anywhere else. The takeover and restructuring of the grievance procedure by a few high school graduates who put it in the service of thousands of members was unparalleled anywhere in the union. The 1397 Rank and File newspaper was the ultimate expression of truth, democracy, and free speech. Every member had a voice, if he or she chose to use it. Art, culture, union politics, muckraking journalism, and a free press became a power4ful weapon in the hands of ordinary workers, The fact that it only lasted eight years is beside the point; it should serve as a temple for future generations of workers, unionized or not. Bureaucracies and structures are not the unio, or any organization, for that matter. The members are the union. The union is only as powerful as the sum of all its workers speaking with one voice.” (Stout, pp. 285-286)

I regret that it has taken me four years to get to reading and reviewing this book. Homestead Steel Mill remains a worthy guide for people engaged in organizing for power in their workplace and union and is a strong contribution to labor history and understanding working-class life and activism in the 1970s and 1980s. Mike Stout has written a readable and fast-moving account of some of the fights that took place in those years for workers’ rights, union democracy, and saving jobs and communities in what has unfortunately since come to be known as the Rust Belt. If we take Homestead Steel Mill, Jon Melrod’s Fighting Times, and David Van Deusen’s Insurgent Labor---all published by PM Press---we have a helpful compass for progressive and radical workers to use as they go about their work of building resilient democratic action and leadership and attempting to win others over to their social vision.

The Homestead Steel Works was constructed in Homestead, Pennsylvania the early 1880s and was taken over by U.S. Steel around the turn of the century. The mill once employed 15,000 people and was intrinsic to the Steel Valley that held the Pittsburgh region and extended into West Virginia and Ohio. If we consider the coal, chemicals, river and road traffic, labor pools, transportation hubs, the ancillary industries involved in producing steel, and the how that steel was ultimately used, the direct influence of the Steel Valley mills extended into Virginia, Kentucky, and Michigan. U.S. Steel and the Homestead Works produced for national and global markets.

The region formed a center for industrial unionism and other social movements as much as it formed a center for steel and other industrial production and distribution. The Homestead Works and the workers who worked there and in nearby mills, and the Steel Valley communities, still hold a preeminent place in our labor history. Even now, thirty-eight years after the Homestead Works closed, we remember the dramatic 1892 Homestead strike, the strike movements that rocked the region in the aftermath of the First World War, and the steel strikes of 1946 and 1952. All of these were accompanied by pro-union community mobilizations in the steel-producing communities and all of them worked to establish industrial unionism. And in helping to establish industrial unionism these workers and their communities did much to extend democracy and better working and living conditions for workers across North America.

The River Ran Red: The 1892 Homestead Steel Strike, 

An Uprising That Became History

Mike Stout came to work as a crane operator at Homestead in 1977. That was a relatively prosperous moment for young people going into basic industry, although the effects of the post-Vietnam War recession and the so-called “gas crisis” of the 1972-1975 years was lingering and employment in the auto industry and in coal mining and in some large steel mills was not steady.

Workers in these industries nonetheless considered that they had good reason t be optimistic about their futures. Young workers who had been influenced by the political and cultural movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, veterans returning from the war and occupation zones, workers of color, and women who were entering basic industry showed an interest in cooperating to fight for and win more than what was on the table. United Steelworkers Local 1397 (and see here), the lead union at Homestead, had members from all these demographics, and Stout quickly learned that he had walked into a complicated work and union situation that showed some promise for radical possibilities. He and some coworkers who were similarly minded founded a union caucus and set about publishing an independent newspaper and building leadership. With the skillful used of grievances and grievance handling, and through confrontations with the company and with union leadership, and by coalescing with others who represented different (and sometimes opposing) interests the militant and democratically-minded caucus took power in Local 1397.

Stout became an exceptional union steward. Stout and the movement for democratic change within Local 1397 were greatly assisted by the existence of Section 2-B of the Basic Steel Agreement that, as Staughton Lynd says in his afterword in the book, “provided that local practices and agreements, even oral agreements, could be enforced” and by the relative freedom Stout and another steward had to “decide whether to take a grievance to arbitration” and to involve workers at every step of the grievance process. Jon Melrod also details in Fighting Times how important it was to have outstanding contract language at American Motors that helped stewards organize their coworkers and gave union members an active stake in the outcome of grievances. Corporate America has fought unions before arbitrators and in the courts and through the political process to get rid of such contract language, and most unions have conceded in these attacks or have lost heroic fights over maintaining such strong contract language, and so it is hard to impress upon union members today why we need to take back what has been lost.

Stout’s book sets the record straight here and makes a compelling case for strong contract language that allows for winning past practices grievances and helps stewards organize their coworkers to use a variety of strong tactics to win grievances. He doesn’t say it, but what Stout is arguing for is a sophisticated understanding of how workers control some aspects of our work, formally and informally, and for union-led fightbacks when this control is challenged by management. Union contracts are negotiated in the workplace every day and in every grievance and in the actions taken by workers and their unions and, as well, by the employers and managers.

Another strong factor that helped the militants in Local 1397 get elected to union offices and build their local union’s capacity to beat the company in many areas was capable leadership. To hear him tell it, Stout was a strong and fearless union leader, and he worked with many others who were most often driven by good and selfless intentions. It’s to Stout’s great credit that he mentions most of the people who he allied with and gives them their props. Ron Weisen, who served as president of Local 1397 for many years, rightfully gets top billing here. Weisen was larger-than-life, pugnacious, and complex. Stout gives readers an excellent introductory study of Weisen. I say “introductory” here because Ron Weisen deserves a book of his own.

Rank and File Demonstration led by the late Ronald Weisen, activist

 and later President of Homestead Local

USWA Headquarters, April 14, 1977

(Steffi Domike Collection, UE/Labor 97:20)

So, what happened?

 U.S. Steel didn’t invest in the Homestead Works and in the Steel Valley much after the Second Word War. Taxpayers and the regional, state, and federal governments often footed the bill for what the steel industry demanded. Industrial policy, such as it was, gave the industry needed breaks without looking at the long-term picture or the consequences of these policies. U.S. Steel grew lazy, inefficient, and bureaucratic and used some of its profits to buy Marathon Oil and other entities and to invest in foreign steel production. The company took a harder line in its relations with Local 1397 as it closed facilities and departments and laid-off workers, willfully violating the contract and attempting to bribe Stout and others rather than negotiate. In one political moment the company was threatened by globalization, made globalization work for its own interests, and shaped globalization by using its economic and political power.

Stout records that over 27,000 U.S. Steel workers in the Mon Valley region, or the towns and municipalities situated on or near the Monongahela River, lost their jobs between 1979 and 1986. “The Company relentlessly poured capital into facilities overseas and downsized their steel operations at home, while divesting into other more profitable businesses like oil and real estate,” Stout says. “No number of concessions would have changed this reality. It would have taken a nationwide workers’ revolution, a general strike, and a federally funded industrial policy to reverse this globalization process.”

We did not respond with a general strike, of course, and the United States does not have a real industrial policy. But Steel Valley and Mon Valley communities responded to the crises created by U.S. Steel and other companies and globalization by fighting back as the shock of the blows directed against them wore off. Organizations of the unemployed, food banks, and committees of one kind or another were created through the region. The Tri-State Conference on Steel (TSCS) was the most creative and far-reaching of these efforts. TSCS at one time or another fought for the use of eminent domain to save the mills, helped get the needed studies done to demonstrate that steel and other regional production could be carried on and make money, and supported a strategy of worker or cooperative ownership of facilities where that might have been feasible. Stout helped lead the TSCS effort. It was a remarkable coalition effort that was sabotaged by capitalists who did not want competition, Mellon Bank and other financial institutions who stood to profit from disinvestment in steel and the remaking of the Pittsburgh region, and politicians and bureaucrats who were swept along by the globalization tsunami. There was ineptness on labor’s part as well. Stout gives a credible behind-the-scenes account of why the TSCS vision didn’t prevail, but he’s right in pointing to it as an advance n working-class struggles and as something still worth studying.

More difficult to situate is the Denominational Ministry Strategy (DMS), a small church-based project that still exists. DMS may have its origins in the movement started by Saul Alinsky, but it has remained under the leadership of Charles Honeywell since its founding and has taken a path that few other organizations of its kind have. The group never believed in building a movement or in joining in mass action. Rather, Honeywell and some of those around him focused on exposing the links between Mellon Bank and other financial institutions and corporate, church, union, and community leaders and sometimes taking actions to expose these ties and underscore how unjust and ruinous these ties were. Stout shows how Honeywell and DMS did a good job of mapping these ties and turning people out to community meetings when the mills began to close, but he also makes a good argument that the focus and tactics used by DMS often worked to distract from the caucus work being done in Local 1397 and to undermine the work being done by TSCS and other organizations. There were moments when DMS actions were destructive. Still, Ron Weisen and some of his closest followers stuck with DMS through some very tough times.

What Stout misses here is that Honeywell and DMS often challenged potential followers to clarify their values and commit to engaging in dramatic tactics in the context of being members of a church- or affinity-based collective and that this process, when done through even a small and wannabe hierarchy during a time of social crisis and disorientation, pushed people to the margins and gave DMS the appearance of being a cult. DMS was, and is, anti-political and has tended to be driven in part by conspiracy theories. It has sought to use confrontation and polarization both as a means of making clear that there are conflicts with opposing sides and as a means of winning people over to the DMS side. All of this has been done from what DMS has taken to be a prophetic and Biblical position.

From a DMS point of view the U.S. Steel acquisitions in the 1980s looked something like the mergers that created the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (1988) and the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union out of the old United Steelworkers (2004). A conspiracy theory-driven religious group will see a need to expose and fight what they perceive as being top-down, systemic, and ungodly evils no matter where these evils show themselves. The DMS road is full of potholes, but Stout forgets or overlooks that a core group of DMS participants paid stiff prices, including jail time and blacklisting, for their work and still had nothing to show for all of that. He does note that DMS lost much of the following that it had among union activists, but the core DMS group persisted despite the overwhelming evidence that they were headed in the wrong direction. 

Stout also neglects to mention that one local union leader with ties to DMS ran for president of his union and was shut out from winning when the union’s administration violated labor laws and the union’s constitution and by-laws and when he was betrayed by leftists in his union---and he still did not believe in forming a union caucus to carry on the fight. Stout is more focused on how he was unfairly attacked by DMS and by the damage done by the group in Local 1397 and the TSCS. It was common for DMS to refer to Stout and others on his side of things as “whores” and it is striking and unfortunate that Stout uses that terrible epithet to describe others in the book.

Some good questions arise here. Is it not to be expected that people will question their deepest-held beliefs when a social crisis of the sort that U.S. Steel and the banks created takes place? Stout states in his book that the attention and pressure needed to stay on Mellon Bank and U.S. Steel in order for workers to win the day and that DMS took away from that. But is it reasonble to expect that people won't go in many different and sometimes contradictory directions once the gates open and organizing takes off? Could the drive that created DMS have been channeled into creating a positive and progressive response and organizing by the churches and other religious institutions in response to the crises of the mills closing? Why hasn’t a theology of liberation taken root in the Steel Valley?

Wrapping Up

This is an important book and I hope that it will be widely read. It’s written with honesty, heart, and soul. The book correctly emphasizes how important face-to-face contact, relationships, workplace newspapers, honesty and integrity, and good grievance handling and contract language are to workplace organizing. The book describes most of the qualities that every left-of-center activist and organizer needs to be successful.

There are sections of Homestead Steel Mill that remind me of scenes in Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace, a 1930s novel about immigrant steel workers and their families and communities and the founding and early growth of the United Steelworkers in the Steel Valley. That novel is our greatest proletarian novel. In one winning scene Bell has a leading character thinking

Yet he clung to his belief that the mass of men were in their hearts good, preferring the excellent to the shoddy, the true to the false, striving for all their blunders toward worthy goals and failing most often when they put their trust in leaders rather than themselves. Unless this was so he felt that there was no use going on. Unless this could be proved true here and now, today, in the teeming alleys and courtyards and kitchens of the First Ward, it was true nowhere, never. And unless it was true there was no hope.

It never entered his mind that he himself was all the proof and hope he needed. 

This is the splendid poetry of class struggle but it gives room for exploring contradictions and questions that hover in the backgrounds of Bell's great book and Homestead Steel Mill. Should we not trust in leaders even when these leaders come from the working-class, when they are the women and men working next to us, when they are the Mike Stouts and Ron Weisens of our world? Can every other class in society produce and maintain leaders except the working class?     

With those questions in mind I offer these reservations that I have when I consider Homestead Steel Mill: 

1.      Stout does not mention having been part of a politically-motivated collective while he did his best union work. He relied on networks of coworkers and friends instead. I’m left pondering why he apparently rejected existing political organizations that shared his views and how his work might have been different if he had joined a left-wing organization.

2.     Stout makes a good case that an independent working-class political organization is needed now, but he doesn’t identify what this might be or how it should develop. Why didn't the defensive strikes that were underway in the Steel Valley region as the mills were closing and the movement that pushed the Tri-State Conference on Steel forward create a regional progressive political formation of some kind?

3.      Stout’s social vision depends on radical solidarity, and yet he records in his book many instances when solidarity went missing or failed and when union militants voted for Reagen. He is honest about the deep-running racism and sexism that he ran up against in dealing with his coworkers and fellow militants. How does he square his long-term social vision with the knowledge that working-class solidarity can be weak, non-existant, contradictory, or even sometimes buttress and support exclusivism, racism, and sexism? Has the reality that he has worked with ever caused him to question his goals and vision and adjust his thinking?  

4.     Stout wants labor to speak with one voice and have one program and bring along with us the politicians who he despises. It may be better said that he and those who agree with him want labor to be remade in their image, with their voice and their program. I’m not sure that people who we despise will come along with us, no matter how compelling our voice and our unity. It seems dangerous and unwise for radicals to argue for uniformity; this can turn against minorities, and majorities speaking with one vpoice and one program can become tyrannical. Aren't we better served by a diversity of opinions expressed through united front organizations? Does it make sense that a highly disciplined labor movement can or will fit into the divided and undisciplined and identity-politics-driven and street-driven U.S. left?  

5.      Stout wants one big union of steel workers and other workers, and yet he was dissatisfied (often for good reason) with the one big union that was the United Steel Workers. I think that our argument here is less about form and more about content. Will labor radicals forever look to creating alternative institutions when mainstream institutions fail?

6.      Stout ran for a state legislative position. Readers would have benefitted from learning more about his campaign and his political program.

7.      The book makes a case for what is often called “workerism” and “rank-and-fileism,” or the centering of the experiences and knowledge of workers in movement-building and as an alternative to politically-based organizing. This has great value to the extent that it helps us understand some of the dynamics of class struggle but it begins to lose its luster when we consider big-picture and broad political questions. The fightback shown by the militants in Local 1397 and by the activists in the Tri-State Conference on Steel were valiant efforts. They were not so much defeated as they were outmaneuvered, and they have become part of a working-class legacy that still holds lessons for us and much promise for the future. But what are the practical limits to centering our working-class knowledge and experiences and leaving things there?

8.      I want to take issue with Stout’s defense of smoking dope and his offhanded rejection of sobriety. The left and labor both have much to learn from the recovery movements, and both the left and labor need to be open to workers who are in recovery.

In closing, I want to say that I knew Ron Weisen and met many of the people mentioned in Homestead Steel Mill. The book helped me recall many people and events that have slipped from my memory. Ron took an almost paternal interest in me and one late night convinced me to do something absolutely crazy on behalf of DMS or Local 1397. I was never sure which body I was acting on behalf of. I was married by a DMS-affiliated pastor. I went on the road with the DMS-influenced local union officer referred to above who was running for president of his union and I hit a wall when I tried to convince him to see a bigger picture. Still, we and Ron Weisen and some others travelled to Minnesota together several times in order to support the striking Hormel workers and we participated in the founding conference of the short-lived National Rank and File Against Concessions organization. I tried to work with the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee (MVUC), which Stout talks about in the book, and duplicate what it was doing in West Virginia without success. I took some of what I learned from the TSCS, the MVUC, and DMS into many other struggles with mixed results. I deeply regret that that I was temporarily blinded by some anti-left prejudices and workerism in the years that Stout wrote about. These prejudices stopped me from appreciating his great work. I could have done much more, and done it all much better, had I paid more and better attention to Mike Stout.

For more on Mike Stout and Homestead Steel Mill watch this: