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July 15, 2025

Today in 1959

 Half-million steelworkers began what is to become a 116-day strike that shutters nearly every steel mill in the country. The strike occurred over management's demand that the union give up a contract clause which limited management's ability to change the number of workers assigned to a task or to introduce new work rules or machinery which would result in reduced hours or numbers of employees. The strike's affects persuaded President Eisenhower to invoke the back-to-work provision of the Taft-Hartley Act. The union sued to have the Act declared unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court upheld the law. The union eventually retained the contract clause and won minimal wage increases. The strike led to significant importation of foreign steel for the first time in U.S. history, which replaced the domestic steel industry in the long run. 

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The Assault On Workers Seventy Years In The Making
Posted On: Jan 06, 2020
Jan. 6, 2020 | THE WAR ON WORKERS | Workers who fought to build strong unions turned horrible jobs in the auto factories into the kind of employment that became the backbone of the American Dream. Liberals yearn nostalgically for a time when corporate leaders seemed more responsible, for an era when CEOs seemed to understand that employees, the people who make the profits, were considered more important than, if not equal to, the shareholders. Elite thinkers today seem to think the CEOs of the inter- and post-war period actually cared about “their” workers. But the “leadership role” CEOs once played, like the corporate culture liberals yearn for, was produced by the power of workers on strike. It’s workers, through their unions, who played the leadership role.
 
 
Teamsters Local 355
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