Gather up a minute before the whistle. I want to talk about October.
Seventy-seven years ago this week, on the first of October 1949, about half a million steelworkers set down their tools and walked out of the mills. Pay was part of it. What put them on the street was the question of what happens to a worker when the mill is done with him.
Back then you could give a steel company thirty years and leave the gate with a sore back and a handshake. The companies’ position was that if you wanted a pension, you could pay for it out of your own envelope. The union said the company had been drawing interest on our bodies for decades and could cover the retirement too. A board appointed by the President looked it over that summer and agreed the companies should pay for pensions and insurance. The companies said no anyway. So the men walked.
Bethlehem broke first, before the month was out. It signed for a company-paid pension, a hundred dollars a month at sixty-five with Social Security counted in, and insurance on top. The rest of Big Steel followed within weeks, and that pension became the pattern across the industry.
Remember how that happened. Nobody in a corner office got generous. Five hundred thousand people agreed on one thing at the same time and held to it through a month without a paycheck.
Now look at where we stand. The corporations have gone from buying our labor to buying our government. They write the bills, they staff the agencies that are supposed to watch them, and they decide which rules get enforced. When the referee is on the other team’s payroll, you stop waiting for a fair call.
What we have left is each other. All we have is our solidarity, and solidarity you keep to yourself does about as much work as a wrench left in the box. We need to show it.
Look at what’s on the table: pensions, insurance, pay. Those are the same three things those steelworkers carried out the gate in ’49, and they add up to a whole life. They decide whether you can see a doctor, whether your kids eat, and whether you get to rest when your body gives out.
So here’s the order of operations, and it’s the same one our grandfathers used. First we vote, at the hall and at the polls. We put our voice on the record where they can’t claim they missed it. Then, if they ignore that voice, we walk. We walk together, on the same day, the way they did in 1949.
A strike is a heavy tool, and it works the way a pry bar works. Somebody has to put their weight on it, and the more of us who lean, the easier the load moves.
Working people have to stand together, and we have to do it now. The steelworkers of 1949 left us the proof. The rest is on us.
— Philip Randolph Wright
