By SHANNON O. WELLS
A key element to creating a strong, powerful union involves a strong level of, well, unity.
It wasn’t until Pittsburgh steel mill workers started organizing by industry, rather than by individual craft, that the true potential of organized labor really was tapped.
“The first organizing in the steel industry was a sort of spontaneous-ish strike of puddlers and boilers in Pittsburgh in 1849,” said Robin Sowards, a United Steelworkers organizer and union historian. “That right was summarily crushed. They didn’t have much in the way of … a sustained organized form, but lots of profoundly built grievances.”
In 1858, the literally pot-stirring puddlers, he continued, formed a craft union, “charmingly called the Sons of Vulcan.”
The organization of unions representing Pitt faculty and staff presents what Sowards called a unique opportunity. “All of you in this room have a role potentially in shaping what that (union) history looks like and doing something genuinely new in U.S. higher education,” he said.
Sowards shared such insights with a packed Department of History classroom in Posvar Hall on Jan. 25, where he led a discussion on the past, present and future of academic unions as part of the Department of History’s Alice and Staughton Lynd Working Class History Seminar. Sowards, who has a Ph.D. in English literature, linguistics and philosophy from Cornell University, was a lead organizer for the Union of Pitt Faculty campaign and other academic unionization efforts.
Because the puddlers, who, as Sowards explained, practiced a skilled trade that involved stirring pots of steel and deciding “the moment in which it was cool enough to pour out into a kind of ball-shaped ingot,” their leverage led to forming a craft union that grew considerably. In 1865, they won recognition from the steel companies and bargained the first contract in what may be one of the first collective bargaining agreements in the U.S. “That’s a little hard to know for sure,” he noted.
Despite initial successes, membership based on the specific skill set ultimately limited their influence. “But it was typical of 19th-century crafting,” Sowards said, along with provisions in their constitution that would restrict membership to “white men of high moral standing.”
Eventually joining with two Chicago-based unions of rollers, the three formed the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers in the 1870s. That combined group was more effective than one, he said, leading to successful strike in Homestead in 1882, which “set conditions in the steel industry to a significant extent.”
Following years of modest gains and larger setbacks, it became increasingly clear that trying to get “24 unions to all pull in the same direction and agree with each other and feel comfortable with how the spoils will be divided in the end,” was not an effective model. There were “all those sorts of things you would expect in having each little segments of the mill organized into different unions that were inherently, I think, in competition with one another,” Sowards said.
What he called the “big shift” happened in the 1930s when the United Mine Workers union, which in 1936 created the steelworkers organizing committee in Pittsburgh, created a model organized not by craft but the industry. “You organize everybody in a particular facility … but the vision is also organizing everybody in the entire industry, regionally but also nationwide, as large as the industry goes, basically.”
With everybody in one big union, instead of divided by craft, Sowards said the inaugural convention produced its first objective “to unite in one organization regardless of creed, color, or nationality, all working men and working women eligible for membership.”
Sowards draws parallels between the factors that brought together steel, iron, timber and coal workers and higher education. Because of factors such as “capital mobility” and replaceability, faculty and staff at an institution like Pitt have more power and leverage than may be readily apparent.
For capital mobility, Sowards explained that Pitt, unlike some manufacturing facilities, can’t “pick up and leave town … the University of Pittsburgh is not going anywhere, right? Very low capital mobility.”
In terms of worker replaceability, he noted that faculty are a “little vulnerable there” because they aren’t the only ones who do instructional and research work. However, “at the scale you would need, it would be very hard. If the entire (Pitt faculty) were raptured tomorrow, the University would have a very difficult time finding substitutes for all of that, right?”
A third factor, he said, is closure targets. “How long can the employer stay closed if you shut them down? In the case of higher ed, closure tolerance is a real issue” because tuition is the major revenue stream “and creditors require you to have a certain number of contact hours (for tuition fees).
“You can shut down for a few days and not feel it, but if you start talking about weeks,” he added, “you are essentially losing an entire semester anytime you’re closed for just a few weeks.”
These and other reasons are likely behind what Sowards had read: That “administrators in general are very nervous about anything that might shut down the university for a period that to a (well stockpiled) steel mill would be nothing,” he said. “(They’d) continue selling and stay shut for a few weeks. They’ll wait you out for months. You know, a university can’t really wait out its employees. So, little closure tolerance.”
Noting that “lots of campuses are heavily organized but in a bunch of different unions,” Sowards said “Here at Pitt, I think we have a particular opportunity to sort of do this in a systematic way, and it’s intentional from the beginning — that is to embark on consciously building an industrial union at Pitt, piece by piece.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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