‘Voice in your workplace’: Johnstown helped shape United Steelworkers, now 80 years old and reaching into many industries – TribDem.com

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. North American Hoganas steelworker John Swanson takes pride in leading a union, which he calls a voice in your workplace.

Swanson is president of a local branch of the United Steelworkers union USW Local 2632, which includes 342 workers at companies including North American Hoganas powder metal facilities in Hollsopple and Johnstown, Highland Tank & Manufacturing Co. and Gautier Steel Ltd.

With a membership of 1.2 million across North America, he said, the USW is seeing membership grow at a rate it hasnt experienced in decades.

The USW organized 80 years ago, in May 1942.

John Swanson, president of Local 2632 of the United Steelworkers of America, speaks during an interview Aug. 29, 2022, at the union's localoffice at 525 Tire Hill Road.

You want safe working conditions. You want to be able to go to work, put your hours in and go home, Swanson said. You want to go home. You dont go to work to get killed. You go to work to go home with a paycheck for your family.

One of the USWs watershed victories in recent times unfolded in 2020 and involved Johnstown, said USW Pittsburgh education department member John Lepley. That was the unionization of University of Pittsburgh faculty, which includes the Johnstown campus as well as the main campus in Pittsburgh.

The establishment of the United Steelworkers of America began a process of lifting families from generational poverty to middle-class status and safer working conditions, historians say.

Pitt-Johnstown history professor Paul Newman said he is intensely proud of being a USW member.

I think of the incredible work the USW did in the 1930s and 1940s to bring American laborers out of the 19th century and into the modern world, he said.

Johnstown had an important and largely untold role in the creation of the USW, which exists today as North Americas largest industrial union.

A long arc of disgruntlement in the mills in Johnstown and a desire for unionization can be traced back to the 1870s, Johnstown Area Heritage Association President and CEO Richard Burkert said.

Exploitation had followed people for generations as many immigrated to America from Europe and working in the steel mills of Johnstown where they could die any number of ways, but certainly poor, in the fiery, dusty mill plants.

Leading up to the formation of the USW, Johnstown steelworkers were part of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), which carried out strikes in steel towns across America in 1937.

Johnstown was a national flashpoint in the SWOCs 1937 Little Steel Strike.

Johnstowns then-mayor, Daniel Shields, received funding from Bethlehem Steel Corp. to supply hundreds of vigilantes with gas munitions to patrol the streets of Johnstown and provide physical support for the back to work movement, said a Johnstown Area Heritage Association publication.

Following the strike, a special committee of the U.S. Senate known as the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, held the most extensive hearings in American history at the time into employer violations of the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively.

A record of the hearings archived on Congress official website reads: The mayor of Johnstown, Pa., Daniel J. Shields, was confronted with evidence that he had received large donations of gas and gas equipment from the Bethlehem Steel Corporation during the 1937 steel strike. Mr. Shields attempted to deny that he had received such gifts People engaged in a controversy should not provide public officials with arms to shoot the other fellow; yet this is just what happened in Johnstown, as the record shows, and in many other towns.

The strikes culminated in organization at companies including Bethlehem Steel Corp. and confirmed the validity of the National Labor Relations Act, paving the way for the United Steelworkers of America, labor histories say.

When the USW was firmly established in the 1940s, the steelworkers ability to improve working conditions and increase wages began reaching not only to the thousands of workers at Bethlehem Steel Corp., but other sectors of the Johnstown economy, too.

The USW continues today, representing workers of AmeriServ Financial Bank, Gallikers Dairy, Safari Contract Cleaners and the Church of the Brethren nursing home.

Unionization of bank tellers was welcomed by AmeriServ officials in 1971, said Michele Scanlan, AmeriServ vice president for human resources. AmeriServ is among 10 or fewer banks out of 4,900 in the U.S. with unionized employees, she said.

The steel workers were our customers, she said. You want to do union work with a union bank. I was always told unionization was a welcomed addition at the bank. It wasnt met with, Oh, we dont want this. It was, Yes, this makes sense for our business.

More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic era ushered in a new generation of laborers to join the USW.

The organization of Pitt faculty was four years in the making.

Paul Douglas Newman sits in his office in Krebs Hall at the Pitt-Johnstown campus in Richland Township on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2019.

Newman helped lead a successful union vote at the Johnstown campus in 2021.

Since then, university administration and the union have not come to terms on a contract, Newman said.

Here we are a year later, and we still dont have a contract, he said. One of the paramount things when we pushed to unionize was we felt like we were never consulted about any safety protocols during COVID. Protocols were changing on a daily basis, and we were never really included in making decisions about our own safety and health. So that was one of the big issues that pushed us toward the union, and of course there are a bunch of others.

Although the USW is evolving, the company it was most closely associated with in Johnstown has become a memory.

From the 1950s through the early 1970s, a high school graduate could get a good job with generous benefits and vacation time working at Bethlehem Steel Corp.

Tom Leslie, 67, of Johnstown, followed his father and his grandfather into the Bethlehem mills by the early 1980s. He worked at the Franklin steel plant for 18 years as a stockyard crane operator.

The town had brightened up. People were making money. People were getting old clapboard houses sided, so now they are not just gray company houses everywhere, he said. My dad had a new car every three years, and everybody in the West End of Johnstown were blue- collar workers.

Tom Leslie, curator of A Steelworker's Story at the Frank & Sylvia Pasquerilla Heritage Discovery Center, displays on Sept. 18, 2020, the stopwatch that was in possession of his grandfather Hetrick Miller when he died during a train accident at Cambria Steel Company's Gautier yard, 100 years ago on Sept. 22, 1920.

The prosperity of the steel industry looked like it was going to last forever, but in a matter of years it fell apart, he said.

There was more than one reason for Bethlehem Steel Corps bankruptcy in 1992 after 130 years of steelmaking in Johnstown.

Across the country, the bulk of steel job losses occurred between 1974 and 1986 as foreign competition exported cheaper, below-market steel and steelmaking technology evolved to require fewer man-hours, archives show.

On the final day in business at Bethlehem, Leslie filled a furnace with a few massive bucket-loads of steel ingredients and went home.

In my mind on that last day, Im saying this cant be shutting down, he said. This plant is too big and too important to the defense industry, to General Motors, to Ford. There were manufacturers that demanded Johnstown steel.

Leslie has since worked in health insurance and has built an immense exhibit of Bethlehem Steel Corp. artifacts at the Johnstown Area Heritage Associations Heritage Discovery Center, where he gives historical talks.

The Gautier division of Bethlehem survived and exists today as Gautier Steel Ltd. It continues a 100-year-old process of rolling steel billets to complex shapes for construction of steel buildings. The USW continues its work there, too, negotiating benefits and working conditions around its century-old 14-inch rolling mill as well as its newer, 2010 plate mill.

Gautier has 70 USW union members who negotiate with the companys 30 managers and CEO at 80 Clinton St. in Johnstown, union leader Jeff Plummer said.

Jeff Plummer, financial secretary for USW Local 2632, talks about the history of the United Steelworkers of America in Johnstown during an interview Aug. 29, 2022, at the union's local office at 525 Tire Hill Road.

Plummer, 34, is a Gautier electrician, USW unit president for Gautier and financial secretary for USW Local 2632. He said his motivation to take a leadership role in the union grew from his experience of benefiting from the unions contract when he joined Gautier 11 years ago.

Its nice knowing you can make a better life for not only yourself, but the members beside you, he said. When you can help someone in a way that makes them feel good about themselves and their jobs theres pride in knowing that no matter what, the union always has your back.

Years after Bethlehems bankruptcy, Johnstowns steelmaking workforce attracted the Sweden-based company North American Hoganas to open sites in 2002. The company has a site in Hollsopple and another in Johnstowns Moxham neighborhood. The companys production process involves melding steel to make powder for automobile parts.

Ninety percent of cars on the road have our powder in them, Swanson said.

Swanson, 58, has worked at North American Hoganas Hollsopple location since it opened and at First Mississippi Steel at the same site before that.

When we went from the prior company here First Miss to North American Hoganas there was a clause that they had to recognize the United Steelworkers, he said. And they did, without hesitation, which was the best thing ever.

Organizing is often difficult and always political, Swanson said. The education of young members and constant awareness of political candidates positions regarding unionization is crucial to maintaining labor laws won by the unions forefathers.

We are political, he said. We back candidates to back labor laws and back unions and workers and not just unions, but all workers, because labor laws belong to everybody.

The United Steelworkers of America sign on the wall at the Tire Hill office, 525 Tire Hill Road, on Aug. 29, 2022.

The local USW representatives see the union branching out to new types of workers in the future, Plummer said.

We have active campaigns going on with workplaces, he said. I cant name where, but its happening. We are also looking at places where people maybe 20 or 30 years ago wouldnt form a union, but they are now.

The USW in Pittsburgh has Google contractors among its members.

I think this is a novel workforce, but they still have a lot of the same issues than any other working person would have, Plummer said. In Canada, weve already organized several Starbucks locations very different industries, very different kinds of workplaces. But the bottom line is they go to work to put bread on their table. They have concerns about safety, health care and treatment on the job.

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'Voice in your workplace': Johnstown helped shape United Steelworkers, now 80 years old and reaching into many industries - TribDem.com