About the Program

STRUGGLES IN STEEL: A STORY OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN STEELWORKERS is a fascinating and moving one-hour documentary that chronicles the little-known history of African-American steelworkers. Told through interviews with over 70 veteran African-American workers from America's "Steel Belt," STRUGGLES IN STEEL recounts their complex history-a story of grueling work combined with heart-breaking discrimination and unfulfilled potential.

While jobs at the steel mills were highly sought after since they were often the highest-paying jobs available to African-American workers, these same workers were given the toughest, dirtiest and most dangerous jobs-the so-called "man-killing" jobs. The African-American steelworkers, many of whom joined the mill after fighting for their country in World Wars I and II, faced discrimination from both their employers and their union and found that their chances for advancement, despite their education, qualifications or experience, were repeatedly thwarted.

The program is also the story of the end of an era in American industrialism; shortly after African-Americans were granted long-overdue workplace rights, the mills closed down, turning once-thriving middle-class communities into wastelands. STRUGGLES IN STEEL is the story of generations of hard-working men and women who had to fight for the right to work at difficult jobs, facing incredible obstacles to giving their families a decent life.

African-Americans in the Steel Mills

Before the Civil War, more than 2,000 slaves worked in the iron mills of the South, creating a skilled work force that the northern iron companies were quick to exploit after the war. When a labor dispute shut down the industry in Pittsburgh in 1875, African-American workers were brought in, setting a pattern that would continue for decades. Strike breakers were resented by whites for working for lower wages and, at the time, unions were not willing to accept minorities.

African-American mill workers reached record numbers during World War I and, by the 1930s, white unionists depended on African-American participation in the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) to ensure the success of the Steelworkers Organizing Committee. But union membership did not translate into equality for African-American workers. Discriminatory work practices were sanctioned by the union, which kept African-American workers in hazardous, low-paying "Negro" jobs for decades, continuing uninterrupted through the years of civil rights activism in the 1960s.

As one veteran steelworker in the film recounts, "A white man would come in and you had to train him. In two weeks-he was your boss." Through years of partial gains and tremendous losses, African-American activists came to trust the government more than the steel companies. Following a series of lawsuits based on Civil Rights legislation, a consent decree was brokered in 1974 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the U.S. Department of Justice, nine steel companies and the United Steelworkers of America. The decree established goals and timetables for the hiring and promotion of minorities, specifically African-Americans, women and Hispanics.

By the 1980s, when the industry's decline decimated most steel jobs, important gains attained by more than a century of steel employees and a new African-American labor movement fell by the wayside, as both blacks and whites stepped together onto the unemployment line.

Discussion Questions

• How were the experiences of African-American and white steelworkers different and how were they similar?

• Most of the workers featured in the film came of age during the 1940s and '50s; many of them served in the Armed Forces. How do you think they compare with young people entering the work force today? What values do they share, and on what issues do you think they differ?

• In the film, Ray Henderson says, "Our kids don't know what kind of progress we have made over time....They don't realize that we had to fight to go work hard." Would you be willing to do one of the steelworking jobs described in the film? What rights would you be willing to fight for?

• The job reservation system described in the film locked black steelworkers into "Negro jobs"-dirty, dangerous, unskilled, and low-paying-until 1974, a decade after passage of the Civil Rights Act. How did the steel companies benefit from this job classification system? Why didn't the union challenge it? What could you have done if you were a black steelworker in the 1950s and were prohibited from "bidding" on (applying for) a higher skilled job in the mill?

• What do you think the situation of black steelworkers would be today if there never were any 1974 Consent Decree mandating affirmative action in 1974? What do you think might happen if affirmative action is abolished? Do you think there are alternative remedies that would not be based on race to address the continuing problem of African-American unemployment? If yes, what might these be?

• Why did the loss of manufacturing jobs so disproportionately hurt African Americans? What kind of job opportunities are there for young people or other unskilled or semi-skilled people in the inner city today?

• The making of this film was inspired by a television program on unemployed steelworkers which didn't mention African-American millworkers. How do you think the media handles the issue of labor and workers in general? How has the media shaped people's perceptions of organized labor? African-American men? Affirmative action in the workplace?
  

About ITVS and this Guide

STRUGGLES IN STEEL was funded for broadcast on public television by the Independent Television Service (ITVS), which was created by Congress to "increase the diversity of programs available to public television, and to serve underserved audience, in particular minorities and children."

For more information about ITVS or to obtain copies of this guide in print, contact us at 51 Federal Street, Suite 401, San Francisco CA 94107; tel: (415) 356-8383, fax: (415) 356-8391; email: itvs@itvs.org, web: http://www.itvs.org.

Very special thanks:

Larry Adelman, California Newsreel

Dennis C. Dickerson

Norman Hill, A. Philip Randolph Institute