Even with unions defeated and worker resistance tamed, steel companies still struggled to control labor in their mills and reduce labor costs, an imperative in periods of intense competition. With sprawling physical facilities and a large array of jobs, managers had difficulty even knowing what all their workers did, let alone how efficiently they were working. Skilled workers retained considerable autonomy, using knowledge accumulated through formal or informal apprenticeships to determine their methods of work, often effectively setting their own pace. Foreman pushed unskilled workers using threats and verbal abuse, with little planning or measurement of productivity.
Throughout American industry, factories had swollen in size and complexity without a proportionate increase in managerial personnel or sophistication. Well into the 1880s, many major firms still managed labor through the direct presence of top executives. Cyrus McCormick’s brother and his four assistants long managed the giant McCormick Works in Chicago. Thomas Edison and three assistants personally supervised production at his factories in Harrison, New Jersey, and New York City.51 But with the development of giant multiplant firms, such personal, informal control was no longer tenable.
“Systematic management,” later more widely known as “scientific management,” grew out of a quest for internal corporate controls and increased productivity, a sweeping effort at reorganizing production. Its development involved many different companies, engineers, and managers over an extended period, who instituted a series of incremental changes that together represented a substantial transformation in how manufacturing—and later office work—was carried out. But in the public mind, scientific management became largely associated with one man, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who emerged as its leading theoretician, ideologue, and publicist.
Taylor, the son of a prominent, liberal Philadelphia family, followed an unusual path in spurning college to become an apprentice machinist and patternmaker, before taking on a series of factory-management positions and then a career as an industrial consultant. (In 1876, he took six months off from his apprenticeship to work at the Centennial Exhibition.) Many of Taylor’s key innovations took place during the 1880s at Midvale Steel Works, a Philadelphia producer of high-quality steel products, and then, during the last years of the nineteenth century, at the much larger Bethlehem Steel Company. Taylor had an intense interest in the mechanics of steel production and metalworking, particularly high-speed machine tools, making numerous technical advances. But his greater importance lay in applying a systematic, engineering mind-set to what commonly had been a seat-of-the pants, chaotic approach to managing manufacturing.
Taylor’s contributions included improvements in cost accounting, inventory control, tool standardization, and shop floor layout. But his best-known innovations involved labor. Working among machinists, Taylor realized how commonly workers set a stint, a maximum output, designed to conserve their energy and spread out the work. Managers had no idea what the maximum output could be or what should constitute a full day’s work. The first step to boosting productivity, Taylor came to believe, lay in the careful observation and measurement of workers as they did their jobs, using stopwatches and, later in the hands of his disciples, stop-action photography and motion pictures. Once managers understood the elements of any given task, they could determine the best way to carry it out and the time it should take to complete.
Critical to the Taylor method was the separation of the planning of work from its execution, breaking the hallmark of the skilled craftsperson, his or her ability to conceive of how to make various items and then to do the work themselves. All planning, Taylor believed, should be in the hands of management, in a specialized planning department (something previously all but unknown). Using knowledge of machinery and worker practices gathered through systematic observation, workers would be given detailed instructions about how to carry out each task (usually in the form of an instruction card). Pay would be calculated by a piecework system that rewarded with higher rates workers who met specified production norms and penalized those unable or unwilling to meet management-dictated standards.
For skilled workers in particular, like the machinists that steel companies employed to make finished products and maintain their equipment, Taylorism meant a loss of autonomy and an attack on craft pride, as well as an intensification of work, leading to fierce battles. But Taylor always claimed his system would benefit workers as well as company owners, because the increases in productivity that would result from scientific management were so great that workers could be given higher pay even as company profits rose. In an example Taylor repeatedly used in publicizing his system, a Bethlehem laborer he called Schmidt, who was loading pig iron into railroad cars, increased his daily tonnage to forty-seven tons, from a previous gang average of twelve and a half, by following precise instructions. For his increased output, Schmidt received a wage boost from $1.15 to $1.85 a day. His wages thus went up by roughly 60 percent, while output nearly quadrupled, a good deal for the company though also a gain, if much more modest, for the worker. At least in theory, scientific management, or Taylorism as it was sometimes called, made the struggle between workers and owners over wages no longer a zero-sum game. For this reason, in the eyes of many Progressive Era reformers, scientific management held the promise of eliminating or at least ameliorating the class conflict that had come with industrialization and the giant factory, without fundamentally restructuring society.52
The Road to 1919
In practice, at least in the short run, scientific management failed to have much effect on the growing class tensions in the steel industry and the nation. Steelmaking remained a difficult and dangerous undertaking even with greater managerial presence and after mechanization eliminated some of the most arduous labor (along with many skilled, higher-paid positions).
After Carnegie’s Homestead victory, the twelve-hour day became the norm in iron and steelmaking jobs. (Some positions, especially finishing work, had shorter hours.) Bessemer furnace workers and many others typically toiled for thirteen consecutive twelve-hour day or night shifts and then, after a day off, worked a “long turn” of twenty-four hours, which put them on the opposite shift for the next two weeks. The schedule wreaked havoc on their lives, making normal family life impossible and wearing men out at an early age.
During their shifts, workers had stretches of extremely demanding labor in almost unbearable heat. When open-hearth furnaces were tapped, the molten metal could be as hot as three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Workers had to stand over giant ladles containing the liquid steel to throw in heavy bags of scrap metal and alloys to adjust the final chemical composition. In a sheet mill, John Fitch observed “men standing on floors so hot that a drop of water spilled would hiss like a drop on a stove.” They wore special shoes with thick wooden soles to provide at least some protection.53
Long hours, giant mechanical devices, crisscrossing rail lines, and molten metal made steelwork extraordinarily dangerous. In just one year, from July 1, 1906, to June 30, 1907, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which included Pittsburgh, Homestead, Braddock, and other metalmaking towns, recorded 195 accident-related deaths in the iron and steel industry. If death or maiming did not get a steelworker, occupational disease very well might, like the fine dust that pervaded the air in steel mills, ravaging workers’ lungs, or the relentless noise that led to widespread hearing loss.54
For years the companies showed little concern about the effect of long hours and dangerous conditions on their employees, whom they regarded—at least the unskilled workers—as easily replaceable. And they were. Starting in the 1880s, a flood of Southern and Eastern European immigrants entered the steel mills (except in the Birmingham, Alabama, area, the major southern iron and steel district, where African Americans filled many of the unskilled jobs). In March 1907, in the former Carnegie mills in Allegheny County, 11,694 of the 14,359 common laboring jobs were filled by Eastern Europeans. The immigrants largely had been peasants or migrant laborers, coming to America wi
thout their families for what they expected to be a limited period, hoping to make enough money to buy land, pay off a mortgage, or set up a shop back home. Some eventually decided to stay, sending for wives and children, but many returned. As in Lowell, the rotating workforce provided something of a safety valve for the owners, less likely to organize than more permanent workers. Linguistic and cultural barriers between the unskilled immigrants and the skilled workers, who generally were native-born or from the British Isles, and among the immigrant groups, also made organizing difficult, giving the steel companies free rein.55
Or at least for a while. In the early years of the twentieth century, immigrant steelworkers began demonstrating their discontent in protests and strikes. Most were short and without union involvement. But in 1909, five thousand immigrant and native-born workers conducted a prolonged walkout at the Pressed Steel Car Company, a U.S. Steel subsidiary, in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. More than a dozen men died as the company and local authorities repeatedly tried to bust the strike through physical force. Ultimately, U.S. Steel was forced to give in to the strikers’ demands, a sharp reversal after a string of company victories against organized labor and its declaration, just before the walkout, that going forward it would operate on a strictly nonunion basis in all of its plants.56
The episodic immigrant strikes led the steel companies to pay more attention to labor policies and to seek favor with their workers, especially because they occurred at the same time that the industry was coming under scrutiny from middle-class reformers. Their interest flowed from a broad concern with what came to be called “the labor question.” Narrowly construed, the labor question meant how to maintain orderly relations between employers and employees and prevent the outbursts of labor warfare that had become common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1875 and 1910, state troops were called out nearly five hundred times to deal with labor unrest and at least several hundred persons died in strike-related violence. But for many labor activists, reformers, politicians, and even some business leaders, the question implied more. What place should workers have in American society? What say should they have in the workplace and in politics? And, most broadly, was democracy possible in an industrialized society with great economic inequality, and if so, what did it mean?57
By the start of the twentieth century, the factory-based, corporate-controlled Industrial Revolution had radically changed society. For millions of workers who entered the factory, leaving behind villages or farms in New England, Ireland, Italy, or Eastern Europe, wage work, industrial time discipline, and mechanized production were new and often troubling experiences. Just as industrial work was strange to them, the industrial worker was strange—and threatening—to many more prosperous Americans, especially employers. In 1889, three years before he crushed his workers at Homestead, Carnegie wrote, “We assemble thousands of operatives in the factory, and in the mine, and in the counting-house, of whom the employer can know little or nothing, and to whom the employer is little better than a myth. . . . Rigid castes are formed, and, as usual, mutual ignorance breeds mutual distrust.”58
Early in the new century, a number of middle-class writers dressed up as workers and plunged into working-class life to report about a world utterly unfamiliar to better-off elements of society. Whiting Williams, a former personnel director at a Cleveland steel mill, spent nine months working undercover in steel mills, an iron mine, a coal mine, and an oil refinery to write What’s On the Workers Mind, By One Who Put on Overalls to Find Out. Pioneer social workers and social scientists set out on a similar mission, in line with the Progressive Era belief in the reforming potential of exposure. Concerned about the brutalization of moral life brought about by industrialization and sympathetic to the plight of immigrant workers, these middle-class reformers nonetheless worried about the threat they posed unless assimilated to civil society and national culture.
The steel industry was a natural focus for their concern. The centrality of steel to the economy gave it special importance. The formation of U.S. Steel as the largest corporation ever created added to the sense that steel had to be a matter of public concern, not strictly a private endeavor. The juxtaposition of the toll steelmaking took on workers with the extraordinary rewards reaped by mill owners—the formation of U.S. Steel made Carnegie “the richest man in the world,” Morgan told him—commanded the attention of not just unionists and political radicals, but a broad swath of the nation.59
In 1907 and 1908, several dozen investigators descended on the Pittsburgh area to conduct a massive study of work, workers, and civil life centered on the steel industry. Funded by the newly formed Russell Sage Foundation, the Pittsburgh Survey staff included some of the leading reform intellectuals of the day, like economist John L. Commons and Florence Kelly, a settlement house resident, suffragist, and consumer advocate, who had been the first to translate Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England into English. The survey produced dozens of articles, six large books, and a photographic exhibition that documented life and labor in the Pittsburgh area, a model for the kind of foundation-funded social science that soon became prevalent. The picture painted by the survey was grim: families unable to live on an unskilled steelworkers’ wages, poor housing, dangerous jobs, and a climate of repression.60
In the wake of the Pittsburgh Survey, the McKees Rocks strike, and a subsequent walkout at a Bethlehem Steel mill in South Bethlehem, the Senate launched an investigation of the steel industry and the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against U.S. Steel. The giant corporation, mindful of its precarious legal situation, sensitive to public opinion, and not facing the competitive pressures that characterized the industry before its creation, made some modest improvements in working conditions. It started giving more workers Sundays off, reducing the seven-day workweek to six days, but it clung tightly to the twelve-hour work shift, which it claimed a necessity (even though in other countries steel companies succeeded without it). Steel companies launched employee stock-purchase and pension plans and a safety campaign (responding not just to bad publicity but also to the growing crop of state laws requiring employers to provide accident insurance to their workers). Fundamentally, though, industry leaders stood pat, successfully repulsing all efforts, from workers and middle-class reformers alike, for basic change.61
Their most severe test came in 1919, when workers across the country mounted the most radical challenge to industrial capitalism in American history, part of a great, worldwide surge of reform and revolutionary sentiment. World War I transformed labor relations. The combination of a war-induced economic boom and an immigration cutoff created a labor shortage that left workers in a strong bargaining position, no longer fearful of losing their jobs since others could be easily found. With inflation pushing up prices, workers bounced from job to job, went on strike, and joined unions to better their lot. To keep labor strife from interrupting war production, the Woodrow Wilson administration, with strong input from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), set up a series of administrative bodies and promulgated regulations designed to give workers new rights on the job. Companies were forced to end discrimination against union members and enter discussions with worker councils (though not unions per se). Under these circumstances, union membership increased by nearly 70 percent between 1917 and 1920, reaching just over five million. More than one out of every six nonagricultural workers carried a union card. Combined with the radical fervor set off by the Russian Revolution, a wave of near-millennial enthusiasm swept through working-class quarters. In 1918, the young leader of the clothing workers’ union, Sidney Hillman, wrote to his infant daughter that “Messiah is arriving. He may be with us any minute. . . . Labor will rule and the World will be free.”62
The steel industry was hit especially hard by changed labor market conditions and wartime federal progressivism. With immigration from Europe blocked by the fighting, the steel companies found themselves unable to tap their usual source for
unskilled labor. In the spring of 1916, they began recruiting black workers from the rural South. But with the military draft soon pulling men out of their plants, a labor shortage remained, emboldening workers to launch a series of strikes. Meanwhile, under intense pressure from the federal government, the industry adopted the eight-hour day as its standard, though in practice that largely meant paying workers time-and-a-half for the last four hours of their twelve-hour shifts.63
With conditions favorable, unions decided to take another shot at organizing steel. This time the impetus came from two militant, Chicago-based unionists, John Fitzpatrick, the head of the Chicago Federation of Labor, and William Z. Foster, the future head of the American Communist Party, who had developed a new organizing model in their successful drive to unionize the meatpacking industry. Recognizing the impossibility of organizing large-scale industrial companies on a craft union basis, they convinced the AFL to set up the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, with which twenty-four unions affiliated. Organizing was centrally directed, with workers steered to the union appropriate for their job only after they had signed up with the National Committee.64
Launched in September 1918 in the Chicago region, the organizing drive, with the slogan “Eight Hours and the Union,” got off to a fast start. Many immigrant steelworkers by then had decided to remain in the United States, giving them a greater stake in future job conditions. Unionists turned the democratic rhetoric of the war against industrial autocracy, giving the drive something of a patriotic air. Though short on money and organizers, it soon spread to Pittsburgh and other regions.
The end of the war made things much harder for unions. Companies began laying off workers and reverted to their hard-nosed antiunionism, defying government decrees that in theory remained in effect. In the Pittsburgh area, the National Committee had to wage a relentless battle simply to secure the right to assemble, as mill town officials, acting on behalf of the steel companies, forbid union meetings and even street rallies. It took mass arrests and national publicity to win modest cracks in the solid wall of antidemocratic practices. Still, in a measure of how much steelworkers resented company control over their lives and the new spirit ushered in by the war, more than a hundred thousand workers—the National Committee claimed a quarter of a million—signed up in the union drive.
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