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Concept
Pressed Steel Car strike of 1909
Summary
The Pressed Steel Car strike of 1909, also known as the 1909 McKees Rocks strike, was an American labor strike which lasted from July 13 through September 8. The walkout drew national attention when it climaxed on Sunday August 22 in a bloody battle between strikers, private security agents, and the Pennsylvania State Police. At least 12 people died, and perhaps as many as 26. The strike was the largest and most significant industrial labor dispute in the Pittsburgh area since the famous 1892 Homestead strike and was a precursor to the Great Steel Strike of 1919.
Frank Norton Hoffstot's Pressed Steel Car Company, sited downstream from Pittsburgh on the south bank of the Ohio River in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, manufactured passenger and freight railroad cars on an assembly-line basis. It was America's second-largest rail car producer. Pressed Steel employed a workforce of 6,000 people, mostly foreign born comprising 16 distinct ethnicities. The firm was infamous for its style of industrial peonage with immigrant workers.
Working conditions in the plant were primitive even by Pittsburgh standards. Pressed Steel Car Company was locally called "The Last Chance" and "The Slaughterhouse". In an interview with The Pittsburgh Leader, Rev. Father A.F. Toner, a priest at St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in McKees Rocks, said, "Men are persecuted, robbed, and slaughtered, and their wives are abused in a manner worse than death ... all to obtain or retain positions that barely keep starvation from the door." The local coroner, Joseph G. Armstrong, estimated that deaths in the plant averaged about one a day and were often caused by moving cranes. One of the charges made by Slavic immigrant workers was that their wives and daughters were subject to sexual harassment and preyed upon to deliver sexual favors as a way to repay food and rental debts, or forestall their collection, to the company agents.
Particularly galling to the workers was the use of the Baldwin contract, commonly known as "pooling.
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