My Life in Steel - Softcover

Ruttenberg, Harold J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1891231650 ISBN 13: 9781891231650

Publisher: Word Assn Pub, 2001

Synopsis

"Fight for the folks at the bottom. Make a better Product. Introduce new products and always Listen to the wisdom of people who make things."

A tough childhood in a Western Pennsylvania coal town and a career that included both union and management experience gave Pittsburgh's Harold J. Ruttenberg his unique and humanistic perspective on the requirements for the enduring success of American industry. Time and again, Mr. Ruttenberg brought his unfailing ideas to ailing metal companies and he consistently led business after business to unprecedented success.

In his meticulously researched memoir, My Life in Steel, Mr. Ruttenberg distills a lifetime of work in the labor movement, brushing shoulders with the likes of Phillip Murray and John L. Lewis. He chronicles his move from unionist to industrialist in Pittsburgh's burgeoning steel industry. And he outlines the implementation of his ideas and ideals within the companies he managed.

In his youth, Ruttenberg learned about fighting by taking a correspondence course from legendary heavyweight Jim Corbett in a desperate attempt to battle anti-semitic school yard bullies. And from those same coal miners' sons, he first became aware that the very best production ideas were spawned by the workers themselves. Through his sixty-two year career, spanning the New Deal through the Clinton administration, he developed a vision for workers, labor organizations and management. His fundamentals were simple and few. Ruttenberg believed in improving production by listening to what the workers who actually made things had to say. Second, he believed it was imperative to provide the best possible work environment for production workers. And his third belief was that a company should always strive to make a better product than the competition, and a lasting product line that offers something new every year.

My Life in Steel is more than a history; it is a guide for the future of American business. It tells how labor and management can come together and why it must happen.

About this title

About the Author

My years with the Steelworkers Union overlapped the 1933-1945 Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and the first years of Truman's. During the 1938-1945 years the steelworkers practiced two conflicting labor-union philosophies: one of Marxist origin and the other a capitalist derivative. For the ensuing year after the end of World War II in 1945, the Steelworkers Union was at the fork of the road over the decision to adopt one or the other philosophy for the second half of the twentieth century.

I set forth the essence of the capitalist labor position in 1939 and 1940 in two Harvard Business Review articles. Two years later I published the Dynamics of Industrial Democracy (with Clinton S. Golden as co-author). It was translated into German and Italian editions and reissued in hardback in 1973 by DeCapo Press. We dedicated it to Philip Murray, who in 1946 opted for the Marxist class-struggle point of view to the exclusion of all that Golden and I advocated and practiced from 1938 through the war and into early 1946. At the end of June I resigned from the United Steelworkers of America; Golden resigned the next day. Several weeks later so did Golden's assistant, Joseph Scanlon, who was the local union leader of our first basic union-management cooperation program in 1938.

My sixty-two year industrial career is unique. It spans the New Deal years through the Clinton administration. I have a story to tell the two generations after mine that will also give them a vision of the unfolding future for workplace, labor organizations, and management.

I learned two basic ideas in the twelve years of my steel union career. These I have employed in a dozen industrial manufacturing companies ranging in size from thirty to 4,300 individuals. I have been the chief executive officer of all except the first one-an integrated basic steel company-where I was the executive vice president. Every one of these companies was successful under my management because of my ability to apply the two shop fundamentals in my enterprises, including the American Locker Company, Inc., of which I have been the CEO since 1973.

The first fundamental is that workers on the shop floor where "things" are made continually learn how to improve the process and procedures. I learned this from the coal miners with whom I lived and from their children with whom I went to school in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, from 1924 to 1931, from age ten to seventeen. They were always talking about what went on in the pit. From 1933 through mid 1946 I worked intimately with steel and metal workers, helped develop joint programs between their unions and management, and learned what the managers had to do to learn from them, and why so many so often could not adapt. When I became an industrial manager, I knew how to get those who make things to apply or pass on their insights for improvements and have been doing it for fifty years.

The second fundamental is that those who make things work better in an environment where they enjoy what they do and/or derive satisfaction from their work. Elton Mayo instructed me on this basic beginning in February 1939 when I joined the Committee on Work in Industry of the National Research Council, a group that was appointed in December 1937 by the president of the National Academy of Sciences. By the time the committee's report was published in 1941 ("Fatigue of Workers and Its Relation to Industrial Production," Reinhold Publishing Corporation, New York), I had been educated in the range of subjects that Mayo's lifetime of work embraced. These years (1939-1941) of my association with Harvard enriched my understanding of what I was doing in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), which in 1942 became the United Steelworkers of America.

Edition details

• Publisher: Word Assn Pub
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1891231650
• ISBN 13: 9781891231650
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 294