For more than fifty years, Mike Stout has been an antiwar, union, and community organizer, as well as the last Local 1397 Union Grievance Chair at the U.S. Steel Homestead Works. He is currently president of the Allegheny Chapter of the Izaak Walton League, the oldest environmental conservation organization in the United States. Stout is also a singer-songwriter and recording artist, with eighteen albums and more than 150 songs written and recorded, who has used his music to raise tens of thousands of dollars for a host of social and economic justice causes.
Homestead Steel Mill–the Final Ten Years: USWA Local 1397 and the Fight for Union Democracy
SKU: 9781629637914
Author: Mike Stout • Introduction: JoAnn Wypijewski • Afterword: Staughton Lynd
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629637914/9781629638553
Published: 5/2020
Format: Paperback/Hardcover
Size: 6 x 9
Page count: 352
Subjects: Labor History/Politics
Praise
“Mike Stout’s well-constructed and splendidly illustrated memoir is
about a special place and time, but it also serves as a window on a
social insurgency that can provide inspiration for future social
progress. It is a story of skilled workers who proudly got their hands
dirty—an industrial world of crane men, machinists, mechanics,
millwrights, laborers, and electricians that once dominated a region—but
who also combined working-class culture as writers, poets musicians,
cartoonists, and even lawyers. Today, there are new skills and different
jobs, but class oppression endures. Greed without end or solidarity
forever? The choice remains and the consequences for a sick earth and an
imperial world order could not be greater.”
—Charles McCollester,
for Chief Steward, UE Local 610, Switch and Signal Plant; former
professor of labor history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania
“Shop-floor activists at U.S. Steel’s famous Homestead Works played a
key role in the democracy movement that swept through their national
union and almost topped its top leadership in the late 1970s. After that
Steel Workers Fightback campaign, they turned USW Local 1397 into a
model local union, just in time to mount spirited resistance to mill
closings throughout western Pennsylvania. Mike Stout’s firsthand account
of rank-and-file militancy and creativity in the face of
deindustrialization and capital flight contains many relevant lessons
for union members today. If every local union had the fighting spirit of
1397 in its heyday, the U.S. labor movement would be in far better
shape.”
—Steve Early, former International Representative, Communications Workers of America and author of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City
“I can see this book finding a privileged place on the shelves of
American radicals. This is a labor history which is exciting, emotional,
and thought-provoking, a splendid example of radical history at its
best.”
—Andrej Grubacic, professor and chair of Anthropology and Social Change, CIIS–San Francisco; author of Wobblies and Zapatistas
“‘Women of Steel’ was a pretty apt name for the women working in the
mills, as Mike Stout shows us. These women stood together and stood up
for themselves, plus organized the guys against corporate greed and
union officials’ sexism. Stout’s description of the women’s strength,
smarts, and leadership comes from the heart. He worked for members’
rights alongside these women or stood behind them when they stepped
forward.”
—Martha Gruelle, former coeditor of Labor Notes and coauthor of Democracy Is Power
“The best movements have the most leaders, and Mike Stout does a
great job introducing us to some of the many people who took on the
steel industry and devious union bureaucrats during the last decade of
U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works in Pittsburgh. Mike’s union sisters and
brothers built community alliances, and they had fun, partied together
and mourned together. They made mistakes and built victories. It’s a
story from the era of deindustrialization, but with lessons for all of
us working to rebuild a powerful labor movement for the future.”
—Ken Paff, national organizer for Teamsters for a Democratic Union
Book Events
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Reviews
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