Our party helped build the first rank and file committees that organized the United Steel workers of America.

We took the initiatives that became the backbone for the union organizing drives of the

outer workers the textile electrical rubber and oil workers amongst others.

Our party pioneers the union organizing drives in all of the mass production industry

communist workers and trade unionists were the spark that ignited and gave rise to the CIO and the greatest labor up a podcast from the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State

University and Jackman magazine.

I'm your host Benjamin Fong. Speaking at the beginning there

was Gus Hall, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USA for over 40 years,

but for my purposes 27-year-old militant charged with dynamiting 80 feet of

railroad track between Warren and Niles, two steel company towns in Ohio in June 1937. This was but one of the many dramatic actions taken during the

five-month little steel strike the subject of this episode. It might appear

excessive to devote an entire episode of the podcast to one strike, but little

Steel is in many ways a turning point, a key hinge in our story.

To capture it well, we also need to delve into the more general history of steel organizing in America,

a fantastically brutal affair that reveals the soul of American capitalism.

Here's David Brody setting the scene by describing the transformation of the steel industry in the late 19th century.

Before the modern steel industry emerged or became dominant. The production of iron and steel was a sort of a

craft process. The puddlers who took molten pig iron and worked it into steel the rollers who took this and made slate and other steel forms was all craft workers. And the steel industry was

transformed by a new technology in the late 19th century that is new blast furnaces, very large,

december refining, automated rolling, and all these steps integrated into regular flow. You got these great steel plants like at Homestead and these new steel corporations which emerged as the United States Steel Corporation

1901.

With the creation of these large modern steel plants, the older craft unions of puddlers and rollers declined

...