(Photo courtesy of MotorCities National Heritage Area)
Posted: Tuesday, 01 July 2008 2:44PM
MotorCities Story of the Week: The Eyes of the Nation Were on Monroe
For workers at the Newton Steel plant in Monroe, the decision to strike in 1937 was a calamity. Just about everything that could go wrong, did. And it wouldn’t be until several years after World War II before the workers under the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) banner recovered from this dispiriting episode.
Monroe city officials, with an eye to bringing jobs to this tiny town whose main employer was a small paper mill, were able in 1929 to coax a steel company from Newton Falls, Ohio to open a steel mill in their town. Not only did the plant bring over a thousand jobs to Monroe but hundreds of workers relocating with the company needed food, shelter and diversion providing the local economy with a big boost.
And for the first six years after arriving in Monroe, Newton Steel and its employees worked in relative harmony. But that wasn’t to last. By the end of 1936, acrimony between management and its workers was growing and tensions began to rise.
A string of circumstances, some company induced, some employee initiated, some the result of poor planning, came to a head in June 1937 engulfing the 18,000 citizens of Monroe in unwanted national attention.
The rift between labor and management really began when the plant was being built on the marshland of the River Raisin in 1929. The cost of bringing materials to the site by boat and expensive dredging forced structural costs skyward, many of the costs passed on to its newly-assembled work staff, therby forcing wages down.
Another institutional problem plaguing the new Newton Steel mill was its outdated design model which, unlike more modern plants, increased operational costs of the mill, again putting pressure on workers wages.
From the laborers point of view, however, the slide toward the picket line really began in 1935 when the plant was bought by Republic Steel, an employer with a reputation for being vigorously anti-union. In fact, the new owners maintained a practice of not signing labor contracts with his company's employees to the chagrin of its labor force.
Another grievance workers had with Republic was the inconsistency of steady work. The steel industry in those days was subject to erratic business cycles and during slow periods the company would temporarily lay off its workforce…without pay. In fact, it wasn’t unusual for idled workers to go months without a paycheck from the mill.
For more of this story from Motorcities.org, click here.
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