Steel Industry

Steel is a metallic substance made from the chemical elements iron and carbon. Until the nineteenth century, iron was the primary metal used in manufactured products. Development of the Bessemer and Siemens-Martin processes for making steel in the 1850s led to steel replacing iron as the primary industrial metal, paving the way for growth of the steel industry in the United States.

The Memorial Day Massacre

After forming in 1936, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) worked to be recognized by steel companies, including U.S. Steel Corp. At that time smaller steel companies were collectively called Little Steel. SWOC organized strikes to force the companies to meet with its representatives and discuss its demands. U.S. Steel Corp. recognized the union in March 1937, but Little Steel persisted in refusing to talk with the SWOC.

In May 1937 Chicago SWOC leaders called for a Memorial Day rally to protest how roughly police were treating workers on the picket lines. During the rally, strikers and police clashed. Ten strikers were killed, many shot in the back by police. Eighty other strikers were injured, along with twenty-two policemen. The event became known as the Memorial Day massacre.

Little Steel eventually met with the SWOC four years later, when the National Labor Relations Board ordered the companies to recognize the SWOC as the workers' legitimate union.

Before the advancements of the 1850s, making steel was expensive, so the United States imported the steel it required prior to the American Civil War (1861–65). From 1870 to 1900, annual U.S. steel production rose from around one million to ten million tons. As the price for steel dropped, demand rose, and production companies competed for business. Most steel companies were antiunion and reluctant to negotitate with union representatives. A major steel union called the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers, founded in

1878, was forced to dissolve after the violent aftermath of the Homestead Strike in 1892.

In 1901 financiers J. Pierpont Morgan and Elbert H. Gary formed the U.S. Steel Corporation. With assets of 1.4 billion dollars, it was the largest industrial company in the world. In general, the United States produced twenty-four million tons of steel annually by 1910.

In 1935 Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers a federal right to organize unions for bargaining with employers. The following year workers formed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC). By March 1937 U.S. Steel Corp. had agreed to negotitate and work with the SWOC and signed a contract guaranteeing a forty-hour workweek and a minimum wage of five dollars a day for SWOC members.

At SWOC's annual convention in 1942, it changed its name to the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). The president of USWA, Phillip Murray, cooperated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45) to prevent steelworker strikes during World War II (1939–45). The USWA continued into the twenty-first century as the main union for steelworkers as the American steel industry became one of the first of the major domestic industries to experience severe economic problems.