Salon.com
Feb 11 2012
Alice Peurala: A Woman of Steel
`They’re telling workers they’ve got to step back and do with less.
What does that mean? Not having a car? Not being able to make the
payments on their house? Not being able to send their kids to college?
Not having any money for recreation? I thought that what’s it all
about-to make the life of the worker decent and with dignity and the
ability to enjoy the things of society like culture and recreation.
Now they’re saying we’ve taken too much from the corporations.’
– Alice Puerala 1928-1986.
The fires of steelmaking burned all along the southern shores of Lake
Michigan when Alice Peurala entered US Steel’s South Works in 1953.
Today most of those fires have gone out and with them the thousands of
jobs that were once the economic support system for the Southeast
Chicago-Gary region, a region that has still not recovered in 2012.
Contrary to what you may have read, this was not a `loss’ of
manufacturing, like dropping one’s car keys in a parking lot or having
a few coins slip between your couch cushions. This was deliberate
theft and vandalism by what we now call the 1%. By failing to properly
invest in modernization, failing to see the impact of globalization,
failing to see the importance of a national industrial policy as their
foreign rivals did, and turning a deaf ear to their own workers, the
steel company owners helped create the economic disaster that we have
today. The United Steel Workers(USW), the union that represented most
of the steel mills, was trapped in an organizational structure and
bargaining model that was unprepared for the employer onslaught.
A Woman Who Refused to Take No for an Answer
When Puerala entered Chicago’s South Works mill in 1953 there were few
women employed there. Most of the women who had steel jobs as a result
of WWII had left those jobs when the men returned home. The women who
remained faced gender discrimination in hiring and promotion. Still,
Peurala found that most of the male steelworkers she encountered were
pretty decent and helped her learn the tricks of the steelmaking trade
that allowed her to do the job.
Having been an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, Chicago
steelworker Alice Peurala knew that the 1964 Civil Rights Act covered
gender as well as race. So in 1967, when she was denied a promotion
from her job in the Metallurgical Division to a better job in one of
the product testing labs, she decided to fight.
The union would not take her case so she went to the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC).The product testing lab job was a day
job, which would give her her more time to be with her daughter in the
evenings. She had been told that since the job required overtime and
heavy lifting, she was ineligible as a woman. The EEOC determined
that the company had lied about the heavy lifting, the onerous
overtime, and the education requirements. They recommended that she
sue.
She found a lawyer willing to take her case, the young Patrick Murphy,
who freely admitted that he knew little about civil rights law, but
dedicated himself to the case anyway. After much foot-dragging, and
many objections from US Steel attorneys, a compromise settlement was
reached with pressure from the judge. Peurala would be next in line
for a product tester’s job. Then when US Steel tried to circumvent the
settlement, the judge hit the roof and Peurala finally got her
promotion in 1969.
It was not just a victory for her personally, but a victory for all
women in manufacturing. It was also a victory for democracy in the
workplace. The 1974 Consent Decree that was signed by 9 major steel
companies, the steelworkers union and the EEOC was a major step
forward in the battle against racial and gender discrimination in the
industry. Cases like Alice Puerala’s lawsuit helped make that
possible. As a socialist, Peurala understood how divisions within the
working class weakened the power and moral authority of the labor
movement and she was determined to change that.
She was one of the tough, smart working class leaders emerging in the
1960’s who were determined to erase decades of discrimination and
challenge the iron-fisted dictatorial control of the steel company
owners. They would also challenge the leadership of the United Steel
Workers of America and fight for reforms within the union itself.
Peurala would eventually be elected the first woman president of a
steelworkers’ local, but tragically at a time when Corporate America
decided to dismantle US manufacturing, sell it off in pieces and move
much of it abroad.
A Life of Work and Struggle
Peurala was the daughter of Armenian immigrants. Born in 1928 in St.
Louis, she grew up in a family that was well acquainted with
persecution. In the wake of the Armenian genocide perpetrated by
Turkey, her father had deserted the Turkish army and come to the USA
on a false passport. Her mom never did find out what happened to her
parents in the wake of the killings. While her mom stayed at home, her
dad worked as molder in a foundry and served as shop steward in the
union. Her family was pro-union and politically involved in trying to
recover Armenian lands from Turkey, as had been promised by President
Wilson after World War I. Like the children of most immigrant
families, Peurala was well acquainted with hard work, taking her first
job at 14.
`I think probably when I was at the end of the eighth grade, when I
was about 14. I started working as a cashier in a movie house. And
then I worked summers in little two by four factories. I remember
working when I was about fifteen or sixteen the whole summer. One was
a place where they made soles for shoes. And it was a messy job, you
did everything by hand. You had all these things that you cut out and
you soaked them in different solutions.Your hands would get messy and
the solutions would smell terrible.
I used to think in later years it was probably dangerous to your
health. I didn’t think it then because we were making money. It was
only young people working there. There was a place where they made
small tool parts and that. And then I worked in a Venetian blind
factory after school. That’s when I was in high school. I went [to
work] at four and worked until ten everyday. And then I worked all day
on Saturday. They really ended at about twelve, but because I was a
high school student they let me go home at ten.’ – from an interview by
Elizabeth Balanoff
After finishing high school, she took a job in retail and plunged into
the world of organized labor, making friends with union organizer
Bernice Fisher, one of the founders of the Congress of Racial
Equality(CORE). Besides her union activism, Peurala joined sit-ins
against racial discrimination as a member of CORE. Her was union
affiliated with the teamsters district headed up by Harold Gibbons, a
progressive socialist-minded anomaly in a union better known at the
time for its ties with organized crime. Gibbons encouraged women’s
union activism through labor education, attendance at union meetings
and writing articles for the union publications.
A very independent-minded young woman, Peurala left her home in 1950
and traveled to Chicago, much to the dismay of her parents who
expected her to stay home until she was married, as was the custom for
`good’ Armenian girls. She took jobs in Chicago retail stores and
factories, each time working as a union organizer, sometimes winning
union representation and sometimes not. The conditions in some of the
workplaces were terrible, especially where the workers were women. In
a candy factory where she worked briefly, the women who had been there
for years seemed permanently hunched over from the constant bending
that their jobs required.
Because of her leftwing views she was accused of being a communist and
had to fight red-baiting charges during a union representation battle
at a large Stewart-Warner auto parts plant. There were periods when
she was out of a job because of her union organizing work and she
relied on unemployment compensation and the support of her union
friends.
Alice Puerala in South Works
She eventually married, took a job at US Steel’s South Works as a
metallurgical observer, had a child and then quickly divorced the
father because of his alcoholism. A single mom on a swing shift with a
young daughter, she could not do union work for several years.
Fortunately she found a woman who would do childcare for her on a very
flexible schedule. Her steelworker wages allowed her the expense of
childcare plus enough left over to get by. She found work in the steel
mill an interesting challenge.
`I found the steel mill very interesting when I first went in it, very
unique. I guess it was a challenge in a way. I didn’t think too much
about the female-male ratio), about my being in a plant that was
mostly men except that there were men on the job who still, even
though women had been hired in the steel industry during the war and
there were some left (many of them had gone).
There were two other women on the job that I was on and I know when
they hired me they told me that in that particular occupation in the
steel mill they had hired women during the war and there were a number
of women still left on that occupation. It seemed to be one that women
stuck with. So the other women that were in the mill at that time were
not on the occupation I was on. They were either pit recorders ingot
buggy operators or oilers. A lot of them were oilers. They had stayed
since the war.’- from the Balanoff interview.
After her victory in the lawsuit, Peurala started becoming more active
in the union. She joined Steelworkers Fightback, a rank and file
steelworker insurgency group which developed a large following in
District 31 of the steel workers union. Led by a third generation
steelworker named Ed Sadlowski, Steelworkers Fightback introduced a
progressive militancy into the steel industry that had not been seen
since the early days of the CIO. Sadlowski was elected Local 65
president in 1964 at the age of 24 and became District 31 director in
1973. He was unsuccessful in his bid for the national presidency in
1977.
Although steelworkers had finally achieved a modest middle class
lifestyle, the work could still be quite dangerous. There was constant
harassment by supervisors and the mills were rife with racial & gender
discrimination. The national steelworkers leadership had pushed
through the Experimental Negotiating Agreement(ENA), a no-strike
clause in exchange for concessions for the company on wages and other
issues. Steelworkers Fightback was against the ENA and thought that
the national union needed more democracy and more rank and file
participation.
After several attempts at union office in Local 65 which represented
US Steel’s South Works, Puerala was elected to the grievance committee
in 1976.
`Being a griever is very time consuming and it’s very exhausting. When
you are not working, you’re fighting grievances for workers that are
getting suspended and fired. You become involved in those human beings
who are being fired and need their jobs. You rack your brain to do
your best in representing them and it takes a lot out of you. You’re
also working within the union, trying to make your grievance committee
more effective…I have spent a lot of years in the union fighting for
certain things. For example, we passed resolutions against the war in
Vietnam, probably one of the few steelworkers’ local unions that did.
I felt pretty good about that. So many people that I personally like,
and thought a lot of, really didn’t think it could be done.’ – – from
the Balanoff interview
Despite the 1974 Consent Decree, gender discrimination still dominated
the mills. Women were being forced to take sick leave for pregnancy
and made ineligible for unemployment of medical insurance. There were
reports of women feeling compelled to have abortions to survive
economically. Women steelworkers suspected that the companies were
using pregnancy to rid themselves of women they never wanted to hire
in the first place.
There were problems with promotions. Puerala felt that the company was
hiring inexperienced women off the street to do jobs they couldn’t
handle instead of promoting experienced women from inside the plant.
They could then get rid of them before their promotion periods were
up.The new hires were being set up to fail. Another insidious tactic
was suddenly enforcing rules that had been ignored for years when
women were hired. According to Local 65 member Roberta Wood:
`There was an informal agreement between the men working the blast
furnace that they could exchange assignments if they didn’t want to
work a specific job on a particular day. They traded jobs and took
turns on the worst assignments. In the rush to prove that women can’t
do the job, the company came down hard and stupid. The showed us the
rules from the book. This caused a a lot of resentment toward the
women. I think the company knew it would.’ – from conversations with
Mary Margaret Fonow
Inexperienced women felt pressured to prove themselves in situations
that could be dangerous. Diane Gumulauski was seriously injured that
way:
`While I was working on the lids (the coke ovens), I was told to move
these 100 lb lead boxes. I wanted to prove i could do it. That all
women could do it. After the third lift, I ripped open my intestines
and had to be rushed to the hospital. It took surgery and a three
month recover period. What I didn’t know at the time was that no man
would have lifted that much weight. They would have asked for a helper
or simply refused.’ – from the Fonow conversations.
Puerala responded to Gumulauski’s story in anger:
`We can’t allow men to decide what women’s rights are. They aren’t the
ones who’ll get hurt, we are. If those bastards try that trick again,
tell them where to shove it. The men never put up with this shit.’
Puerala helped to organize the Local 65 Women’s Committee as well as
the District 31 Women’s Caucus. Steelworker women activists plunged
themselves into a wide variety of campaigns from fighting for stronger
affirmative action enforcement to improving the decrepit state of the
women’s washrooms. They formed alliances with feminist groups across
the region, refuting the rightwing smear that feminism was only a
movement for privileged white women. They became active in the newly
formed Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW).
District 31 made a major push for the passage of the Equal Rights
Amendment (ERA), sending hundreds of steelworkers, both men and women,
to state legislatures to lobby for equal rights. While some local
media tried to make a joke out of `burly male steelworkers’
campaigning for women’s rights, steelworker women didn’t think it was
funny at all. They understood the important of working class
solidarity against social injustice. Peurala herself was also active
in the anti-war and the reproductive rights movement.
Once dubbed `Alice in Wonderland’ by men who thought a woman could
never lead a largely male steelworks local, Alice Peurala won the
presidency of the Local 65 in 1979.
`I did not win as a woman. I campaigned as a candidate who would do
something about conditions in the plant that affect 7500 people – men
and women…People in the plant looked on me as a fighter. I think it
demonstrates that the men in the plant will vote for someone who is
going to for them, make the union work for them.’ – from Rocking the
Boat
But Peurala’s victory came when the American steel industry was about
to collapse. In an atmosphere of fear caused by mass layoffs, she was
was narrowly defeated for re-election in 1982, but was re-elected in
1985. But by 1985, the local was down to 800 members and Alice Peurala
faced a new enemy. – cancer. On June 21, 1986, her steelworker’s heart
went silent and the working class lost one of is finest and most
steadfast leaders.
A Legacy To Remember
`You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this
country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s
pocket.’-Frank Sobotka, The Wire
Today the dismantling of US manufacturing is usually blamed on
`greedy unions’. That’s nonsense of course. For a brief period, from
the 1950’s to the 1980’s, a little more than one generation, a
significant number of unionized industrial workers achieved a modest
middle class lifestyle. But even then the nature of the work could
take a heavy toll on mind and body. Their middle class status was
always precarious, with workers only one layoff or bad accident away
from serious economic troubles.
As cracks in the American economic dream began to appear in the late
1970’s, the unions representing America’s industrial workers made
concession after concession in an effort to save jobs, concessions
that were largely unsuccessful in doing that. Somehow it was always
the workers who were expected to give up hard won gains or even their
jobs, while top management and financial investors never seem to worry
about how to pay the mortgage or put food on the table when hard times
hit.
Neither government nor private enterprise stepped up to the plate to
create effective job retraining for laid off workers. The hi-tech and
service jobs that were supposed to replace manufacturing proved to be
largely illusionary or low-paid.
Both management and union stumbled, but `greedy workers’ were not the
problem. American manufacturing management was a victim of short term
thinking and a lack of imagination. It did not understand the
importance of a government industrial policy. It was clueless about
how to operate in a global marketplace. It was organized in a topdown
dictatorial bureaucratic manner. Sadly, America’s manufacturing
unions were organized in much the same way.
For all of our brave talk about `democracy’ we don’t apply it to the
area of economics. As a nation we were right to criticize the dismal
results of Soviet style centralized industrial `planning.’ We failed
to see that having our industrial `planning’ done by a relatively
small number of centralized corporations run as virtual dictatorships
wasn’t much of an alternative. The industrial unions clung to much the
same model and many workers gradually became alienated and saw them as
little more than a kind of insurance policy, resulting in low levels
of rank and file involvement. When the time came to fight for
survival, most workers just were not well prepared.
This lack of a democratic culture within US manufacturing was grossly
inefficient. Alice Peurala spent an enormous amount of her time
battling company enforced racial and gender discrimination. One of the
best grievance handlers at South Works, she also spent entirely too
much time fighting back against petty harassment of workers by
supervisors who were trying to impose an atmosphere of fear and
intimidation demanded from the top. She also spent an enormous amount
of her time battling the entrenched leadership of the steelworker’s
union, which was leading rank and file steelworkers to disaster.
Manufacturing is more than just machines and processes. It also about
living breathing people with minds. Imagine if working class leaders
like Peurala had been able to apply their formidable abilities toward
improving the manufacturing process with genuine worker involvement
instead of having to fight for clean washrooms. What a goddam waste of
working class talent, time and energy.
Throughout her life, Alice Peurala was devoted to the idea of
democracy. She was on the right track. If we are to revive
manufacturing as well as the rest of our economy, we will need to do
it differently than in the past. Until we learn how to apply democracy
to our economics we will continue to be trapped in an inefficient,
wasteful, polluting system that degrades our humanity and the planet
we live on.
I never met Alice personally, but saw her at a number of rallies
around Chicago back in the day. A steel worker friend of mine who did
know her said that in addition to being a a tough smart negotiator,
she also played a mean hand of poker. Several retired steelworkers
have contacted me and told of their high regard for her integrity.
Sources Consulted
Interview with Alice Puerala by Elizabeth Balanoff
Harold Gibbons from Wikipedia
Alice Peurala Regains Reins Of Steel Union Local By James Warren.
Alice Peurala, 58, Steel Union Leader By James Warren
The Role of Management in the Decline of the American Steel Industry
by Robert E. Ankli and Eva Sommer
Chicago’s Southeast Side Industrial History by Rod Sellers
Union women: forging feminism in the United Steelworkers of America by
Mary Margaret Fonow
Rusted dreams: hard times in a steel community by David Bensman, Roberta Lynch
Rocking the Boat: Union Women’s Voices by Brigid O’Farrell & Joyce L. Kornbluh
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
http://open.salon.com/blog/bobbosphere/2012/02/10/alice_peurala_a_woman_of_steel