Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism

Dismissed as a flimsy front for management interests, industrial unions nonetheless carved out a role in the Carnegie Steel Company empire and then at U.S. Steel. James D. Rose examines the pivotal role played by these company-sponsored employee representation plans (ERPs) at the legendary steel works in Duquesne, Pennsylvania. 

As Rose reveals, ERPs matured from tools of the company into worker-led organizations that represented the interests of the mills' skilled tradesmen and workers. ERPs and management created a sophisticated bargaining structure. Meanwhile, the independent trade union gave way to the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), a professionalized organization that expended huge resources on companywide unionization. Yet even when the SWOC secured a collective bargaining agreement in 1937, it failed to sign up a majority of the Duquesne workforce. 

Sophisticated and persuasive, Duquesne and the Rise of Steel Unionism confirms that what people did on the shop floor played a critical role in the course of steel unionism.

"This excellent work has far-reaching implications not only for historians but also for labor activists. Rose provides a very persuasive analysis of the dynamics of union organizing in the steel industry, as well as important lessons in how it was done.' No other scholar has developed with such clarity the argument that in-plant organizing produced not one movement but two." -- David Montgomery, author of The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925

"The thoroughness of Rose's research and the breadth and depth of his knowledge are truly impressive. At a time when many labor historians have chosen to focus mainly on issues of ethnicity, gender, and race, Rose's unapologetic concentration on the shop floor and the "inner" history of unionism at the Duquesne Works offers a neglected--but instructive and richly textured--angle of vision."

Bruce Nelson, author of Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality