Blacks battled for rights before downsizings

By Stephen Franklin
Tribune staff reporter
Published February 18, 2007


They did the dirty, dangerous jobs nobody else wanted. They worked in coke plants where the air was foul and filthy, and at the blast furnaces where safety was always a life and death issue.

Black workers helped build the steel plants that sprawled a century ago along Indiana's lakeshore, and were employed in steel mills across the U.S.

Their complaints about the mills' discrimination surfaced when the United Steel Workers union was organizing in the 1930s and became a driving force among black workers with the civil rights drive in the 1960s, says Ruth Needleman, a labor expert at Indiana University Northwest in Gary.

By the late 1960s black workers at mills in Birmingham, Ala., were the most outspoken about the problems they faced, followed by others in Chicago and Gary, explains Needleman, author of a study of black steelworkers' quest for equality.

Their efforts led to a consent decree reached by the federal government in 1974 with nine steel makers and the United Steel Workers aimed at ending discrimination in the mills. The agreement allowed black workers to seek jobs outside the areas where they had been slotted, and to take their seniority with them, she explains.

But some blacks workers did not seek new jobs, fearful of the problems they might face, Needleman said.

Others lost their jobs as the steel companies shuttered coke plants and open hearth facilities because of new technology. Then the industry's steep downturn in the 1980s cost many many more African-American workers their jobs, along with others.

"Just when they got their rights, the downsizing began," she says.

----
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ ... i-news-hed