The Great Steel Strike and its LessonsFoster, William Z.
History
The Great Steel Strike and its Lessons
Foster, William Z.
Steel Strike, U.S., 1919-1920; United States Steel Corporation
This is their tremendous victory.
No less than the steel workers themselves, the whole trade-union
movement won a great moral victory in the steel strike and the campaign
that preceded it. This more than offsets the failure of the strike
itself. The gain consists of a badly needed addition to the unions' thin
store of self-confidence. To trade-union organizers the steel industry
had long symbolized the impossible. Wave after wave of organizing effort
they had sent against it; but their work had been as ineffectual as a
summer sea lapping the base of Gibraltar. Pessimism regarding its
conquest for trade unionism was abysmal. But now all this is changed.
The impossible has been accomplished. The steel workers were organized
in the face of all that the steel companies could do to prevent it. Thus
a whole new vista of possibilities unfolds before the unions. Not only
does the reorganization of the steel industry seem strictly feasible,
but the whole conception that many of the basic industries are immune to
trade unionism turns out to be an illusion. If the steel industry could
be organized, so can any other in the country; for the worst of them
presents hardly a fraction of the difficulties squarely vanquished in
the steel industry. The mouth has been shut forever of that insufferable
pest of the labor movement, the large body of ignorant, incompetent,
short-sighted, visionless union men whose eternal song, when some
important organizing project is afoot, is "It can't be done." After this
experience in the steel industry the problem of unionizing any industry
resolves itself simply into selecting a capable organizer and giving him
sufficient money and men to do the job.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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