Brody, David. Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
David Brody’s book Steelworkers in America: the Nonunion Era is a detailed, well-researched history of the relationship between the growth of technology and power in steel mills in the United States and their effect upon labor and labor unions in the steel industry in the United States. It is braudelian in sweep and intent, well-organized, and grounded in the theoretical bedrock of Marx and Harry Braverman. The book is so well written that one can easily forgive the “one damned thing after another” tendency that it has..
Brody has crafted his book according to a kind of wave pattern that he perceives in the development of labor conditions and the union movement in steel corporations in the United States between 1890 and 1921. In Brody’s account, the labor situation always moves according to the waves of economic boom and bust, the degree and intensity of competition among steel mills, and the availability of labor, particularly in the unskilled ranks.
Brody begins with a description of the steel industry in the United States in the late 19th century. The theme of this first chapter is the idea that the holy grail of business success was efficiency. By providing details about the sizes, populations of workers, production statistics, corporate earnings, and improvements in technology and organization, Brody hopes to show the degree to which steel executives including Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan pursued that efficiency.
In chapter two, Brody shows how the steel barons saw labor as only one more area where efficiency could be achieved through mechanization and organization. He also describes here how the use of technology, another area where efficiency was pursued, had a direct effect on the efficiency of labor. One of his primary supports in this is a tremendous amount of primary source material concerning mechanization rates at steel mills throughout the United States, correlated with labor dismissals in the specific jobs affected by this new machinery.
Establishing the link between mechanization and efficiency through worker replacement, Brody describes the way in which the use of new technology tended to reduce the importance of skilled workers in steel mills more than that of unskilled, hence low-cost, labor. One effect of the mechanization of steel production was thus that the steel industry was able to destroy the effectiveness of craft unions, whose power was based on control of skilled labor. One other primary reason that this was possible, according to Brody, was the power of the steel corporations, which were so much larger and better organized and financed than the unions were.
In the following three chapters, Brody discusses how the steel mills went about stabilizing the labor pool. His thesis here is that there were three elements to big steel’s control over labor. The first was the skilled workers themselves. The threat of becoming obsolete through technology allowed steel manufacturers to both reduce general wage levels, and institute an attitude of loyalty to the company through the potential promise of stability in a newly unstable world. The chief irony being, of course, that the instability in skilled work was a creation of the mills to which the skilled workers were now assigning their loyalty.
The second leg of stability for steel mills Brody identifies as a continuous stream of immigrant labor, which provided a docile unskilled workforce without union tendencies or connections to mentors and protectors in the skilled labor pool. These unskilled laborers were then promised the possibility of a rise within the labor system, and some did become skilled workers and even foremen, thereby justifying the entry into steel through unskilled ranks. Coincidentally, the fact of their foreignness served to alienate them from the skilled workers, mostly English-speaking, and provide a barrier to inclusive unionization of the entire workforce.
The last leg of the stability tripod that Brody gives is the interest of the steel towns themselves. From small one-mill towns to the large centers of steel production like Pittsburgh, steel was so large a part of the economic, political, and social organization of the community that strikes and labor unrest were often seen, sometimes with the help of the steel corporations, as contributing to instability. The interests of local business coincided with the interests of the steel mills to keep the workers at work, and increasingly after 1900, Brody shows that church leaders and politicians also came to identify stability, and their organizations’ interests, with those of the steel mills over labor.
In the last, and most dramatic, half of the book, Brody takes the reader through a whipsaw in the fortunes of steel labor. In 1909, U.S. Steel Corporation made public its commitment to an open-shop structure, repudiating its earlier willingness to deal with unions. This created a backlash in labor generally, and led to renewed, and somewhat successful attempts to organize steel workers, including the unskilled ranks. This movement, though was ultimately little more than a revival of the union movement through recognition that big steel did harbor the goal of eliminating the influence of unions altogether.
Brody, once again looking at the issue for the steel corporations of labor stability, makes it clear that the corporations by 1909 began to institute a kind of big-brother attitude toward workers, making attempts from within the industry at improving wages and working conditions. This was a result not of the revival of the labor organizing movement, but of the new stability in the steel market created by the arrival of the massive trust U.S. Steel corporation. The trust, through management of competition was able to maintain prices within a specific range, and thus to at least superficially provide workers with some respect in return for their loyalty and effort.
By 1914, the steel corporations, according to Brody, had eliminated the effectiveness of labor unions, and had created a stable pool of labor that they could control, in the same way that they had gained control over access to raw materials and to the finishing trades. But this stability was interrupted by the First World War. The demands for production increased just as the war caused the loss of the first leg of big steel’s labor stability program – the continuous stream of unskilled labor provided by Eastern European immigrants. These had to be replaced with African American labor recruited from the Southern states, and to some degree with laborers from Mexico.
The need to maintain levels of skilled workers, though, as industry across the United States increased production, and to meet the requirements of government orders meant that the industry had to accept unions as a means of labor management. This was helped by government labor relations methods that legitimized unions and made them partners in a three-way economic triangle.
Such an increase in power during the war encouraged the A.F.L. to press its demands at war’s end, when steel corporations made attempts to restore the old pre-war balance and once again eliminate unionism from the calculation of labor and resources. However, the lack of government support, combined with a post-war political climate that linked unions to communism eventually spelled the end of the Great Strike of 1919, and big steel was, until the Great Depression, able to restore its control of labor based on a somewhat modified version of the three-legged stability system employed before 1914.
Brody’s book is dramatic, well-researched, detailed, and chronological in its approach, all of which make it easy to follow, and all of which tend to garner sympathy for the trials of steel workers in this period. His theoretical base comes largely from Marx, who claimed that machines were not created to make life easier, but to make work more efficient, and from Braverman, who suggested that the process of industrial growth in the mass-manufacturing period involves the deskilling of labor to make it less expensive and more easily controlled by management.
But Steelworkers in America is not a theoretical history. It is a history of labor, based in events which are corroborated by strong research in primary sources. Brody is telling a story here. It is one of the most literary histories I have read, and, with Brody’s skill as a writer, is not only informative and useful, but a page-turner as well. It is easy to see why this book may have generated some controversy when it was published. It not only tells the story, but leads the reader to take sides in the narrative, though Brody self-consciously avoids any overt statements of position.