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  • Alice Peurala: A Woman of Steel

    Salon.com
    Feb 11 2012


    Alice Peurala: A Woman of Steel

    `They're telling workers they've got to step back and do with less.
    What does that mean? Not having a car? Not being able to make the
    payments on their house? Not being able to send their kids to college?
    Not having any money for recreation? I thought that what's it all
    about-to make the life of the worker decent and with dignity and the
    ability to enjoy the things of society like culture and recreation.
    Now they're saying we've taken too much from the corporations.'
    - Alice Puerala 1928-1986.


    The fires of steelmaking burned all along the southern shores of Lake
    Michigan when Alice Peurala entered US Steel's South Works in 1953.
    Today most of those fires have gone out and with them the thousands of
    jobs that were once the economic support system for the Southeast
    Chicago-Gary region, a region that has still not recovered in 2012.

    Contrary to what you may have read, this was not a `loss' of
    manufacturing, like dropping one's car keys in a parking lot or having
    a few coins slip between your couch cushions. This was deliberate
    theft and vandalism by what we now call the 1%. By failing to properly
    invest in modernization, failing to see the impact of globalization,
    failing to see the importance of a national industrial policy as their
    foreign rivals did, and turning a deaf ear to their own workers, the
    steel company owners helped create the economic disaster that we have
    today. The United Steel Workers(USW), the union that represented most
    of the steel mills, was trapped in an organizational structure and
    bargaining model that was unprepared for the employer onslaught.

    A Woman Who Refused to Take No for an Answer

    When Puerala entered Chicago's South Works mill in 1953 there were few
    women employed there. Most of the women who had steel jobs as a result
    of WWII had left those jobs when the men returned home. The women who
    remained faced gender discrimination in hiring and promotion. Still,
    Peurala found that most of the male steelworkers she encountered were
    pretty decent and helped her learn the tricks of the steelmaking trade
    that allowed her to do the job.

    Having been an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, Chicago
    steelworker Alice Peurala knew that the 1964 Civil Rights Act covered
    gender as well as race. So in 1967, when she was denied a promotion
    from her job in the Metallurgical Division to a better job in one of
    the product testing labs, she decided to fight.

    The union would not take her case so she went to the Equal Employment
    Opportunity Commission (EEOC).The product testing lab job was a day
    job, which would give her her more time to be with her daughter in the
    evenings. She had been told that since the job required overtime and
    heavy lifting, she was ineligible as a woman. The EEOC determined
    that the company had lied about the heavy lifting, the onerous
    overtime, and the education requirements. They recommended that she
    sue.

    She found a lawyer willing to take her case, the young Patrick Murphy,
    who freely admitted that he knew little about civil rights law, but
    dedicated himself to the case anyway. After much foot-dragging, and
    many objections from US Steel attorneys, a compromise settlement was
    reached with pressure from the judge. Peurala would be next in line
    for a product tester's job. Then when US Steel tried to circumvent the
    settlement, the judge hit the roof and Peurala finally got her
    promotion in 1969.

    It was not just a victory for her personally, but a victory for all
    women in manufacturing. It was also a victory for democracy in the
    workplace. The 1974 Consent Decree that was signed by 9 major steel
    companies, the steelworkers union and the EEOC was a major step
    forward in the battle against racial and gender discrimination in the
    industry. Cases like Alice Puerala's lawsuit helped make that
    possible. As a socialist, Peurala understood how divisions within the
    working class weakened the power and moral authority of the labor
    movement and she was determined to change that.

    She was one of the tough, smart working class leaders emerging in the
    1960's who were determined to erase decades of discrimination and
    challenge the iron-fisted dictatorial control of the steel company
    owners. They would also challenge the leadership of the United Steel
    Workers of America and fight for reforms within the union itself.
    Peurala would eventually be elected the first woman president of a
    steelworkers' local, but tragically at a time when Corporate America
    decided to dismantle US manufacturing, sell it off in pieces and move
    much of it abroad.

    A Life of Work and Struggle

    Peurala was the daughter of Armenian immigrants. Born in 1928 in St.
    Louis, she grew up in a family that was well acquainted with
    persecution. In the wake of the Armenian genocide perpetrated by
    Turkey, her father had deserted the Turkish army and come to the USA
    on a false passport. Her mom never did find out what happened to her
    parents in the wake of the killings. While her mom stayed at home, her
    dad worked as molder in a foundry and served as shop steward in the
    union. Her family was pro-union and politically involved in trying to
    recover Armenian lands from Turkey, as had been promised by President
    Wilson after World War I. Like the children of most immigrant
    families, Peurala was well acquainted with hard work, taking her first
    job at 14.

    `I think probably when I was at the end of the eighth grade, when I
    was about 14. I started working as a cashier in a movie house. And
    then I worked summers in little two by four factories. I remember
    working when I was about fifteen or sixteen the whole summer. One was
    a place where they made soles for shoes. And it was a messy job, you
    did everything by hand. You had all these things that you cut out and
    you soaked them in different solutions.Your hands would get messy and
    the solutions would smell terrible.

    I used to think in later years it was probably dangerous to your
    health. I didn't think it then because we were making money. It was
    only young people working there. There was a place where they made
    small tool parts and that. And then I worked in a Venetian blind
    factory after school. That's when I was in high school. I went [to
    work] at four and worked until ten everyday. And then I worked all day
    on Saturday. They really ended at about twelve, but because I was a
    high school student they let me go home at ten.' - from an interview by
    Elizabeth Balanoff

    After finishing high school, she took a job in retail and plunged into
    the world of organized labor, making friends with union organizer
    Bernice Fisher, one of the founders of the Congress of Racial
    Equality(CORE). Besides her union activism, Peurala joined sit-ins
    against racial discrimination as a member of CORE. Her was union
    affiliated with the teamsters district headed up by Harold Gibbons, a
    progressive socialist-minded anomaly in a union better known at the
    time for its ties with organized crime. Gibbons encouraged women's
    union activism through labor education, attendance at union meetings
    and writing articles for the union publications.

    A very independent-minded young woman, Peurala left her home in 1950
    and traveled to Chicago, much to the dismay of her parents who
    expected her to stay home until she was married, as was the custom for
    `good' Armenian girls. She took jobs in Chicago retail stores and
    factories, each time working as a union organizer, sometimes winning
    union representation and sometimes not. The conditions in some of the
    workplaces were terrible, especially where the workers were women. In
    a candy factory where she worked briefly, the women who had been there
    for years seemed permanently hunched over from the constant bending
    that their jobs required.

    Because of her leftwing views she was accused of being a communist and
    had to fight red-baiting charges during a union representation battle
    at a large Stewart-Warner auto parts plant. There were periods when
    she was out of a job because of her union organizing work and she
    relied on unemployment compensation and the support of her union
    friends.

    Alice Puerala in South Works

    She eventually married, took a job at US Steel's South Works as a
    metallurgical observer, had a child and then quickly divorced the
    father because of his alcoholism. A single mom on a swing shift with a
    young daughter, she could not do union work for several years.
    Fortunately she found a woman who would do childcare for her on a very
    flexible schedule. Her steelworker wages allowed her the expense of
    childcare plus enough left over to get by. She found work in the steel
    mill an interesting challenge.

    `I found the steel mill very interesting when I first went in it, very
    unique. I guess it was a challenge in a way. I didn't think too much
    about the female-male ratio), about my being in a plant that was
    mostly men except that there were men on the job who still, even
    though women had been hired in the steel industry during the war and
    there were some left (many of them had gone).

    There were two other women on the job that I was on and I know when
    they hired me they told me that in that particular occupation in the
    steel mill they had hired women during the war and there were a number
    of women still left on that occupation. It seemed to be one that women
    stuck with. So the other women that were in the mill at that time were
    not on the occupation I was on. They were either pit recorders ingot
    buggy operators or oilers. A lot of them were oilers. They had stayed
    since the war.'- from the Balanoff interview.

    After her victory in the lawsuit, Peurala started becoming more active
    in the union. She joined Steelworkers Fightback, a rank and file
    steelworker insurgency group which developed a large following in
    District 31 of the steel workers union. Led by a third generation
    steelworker named Ed Sadlowski, Steelworkers Fightback introduced a
    progressive militancy into the steel industry that had not been seen
    since the early days of the CIO. Sadlowski was elected Local 65
    president in 1964 at the age of 24 and became District 31 director in
    1973. He was unsuccessful in his bid for the national presidency in
    1977.

    Although steelworkers had finally achieved a modest middle class
    lifestyle, the work could still be quite dangerous. There was constant
    harassment by supervisors and the mills were rife with racial & gender
    discrimination. The national steelworkers leadership had pushed
    through the Experimental Negotiating Agreement(ENA), a no-strike
    clause in exchange for concessions for the company on wages and other
    issues. Steelworkers Fightback was against the ENA and thought that
    the national union needed more democracy and more rank and file
    participation.

    After several attempts at union office in Local 65 which represented
    US Steel's South Works, Puerala was elected to the grievance committee
    in 1976.

    `Being a griever is very time consuming and it's very exhausting. When
    you are not working, you're fighting grievances for workers that are
    getting suspended and fired. You become involved in those human beings
    who are being fired and need their jobs. You rack your brain to do
    your best in representing them and it takes a lot out of you. You're
    also working within the union, trying to make your grievance committee
    more effective...I have spent a lot of years in the union fighting for
    certain things. For example, we passed resolutions against the war in
    Vietnam, probably one of the few steelworkers' local unions that did.
    I felt pretty good about that. So many people that I personally like,
    and thought a lot of, really didn't think it could be done.' - - from
    the Balanoff interview

    Despite the 1974 Consent Decree, gender discrimination still dominated
    the mills. Women were being forced to take sick leave for pregnancy
    and made ineligible for unemployment of medical insurance. There were
    reports of women feeling compelled to have abortions to survive
    economically. Women steelworkers suspected that the companies were
    using pregnancy to rid themselves of women they never wanted to hire
    in the first place.

    There were problems with promotions. Puerala felt that the company was
    hiring inexperienced women off the street to do jobs they couldn't
    handle instead of promoting experienced women from inside the plant.
    They could then get rid of them before their promotion periods were
    up.The new hires were being set up to fail. Another insidious tactic
    was suddenly enforcing rules that had been ignored for years when
    women were hired. According to Local 65 member Roberta Wood:

    `There was an informal agreement between the men working the blast
    furnace that they could exchange assignments if they didn't want to
    work a specific job on a particular day. They traded jobs and took
    turns on the worst assignments. In the rush to prove that women can't
    do the job, the company came down hard and stupid. The showed us the
    rules from the book. This caused a a lot of resentment toward the
    women. I think the company knew it would.' - from conversations with
    Mary Margaret Fonow

    Inexperienced women felt pressured to prove themselves in situations
    that could be dangerous. Diane Gumulauski was seriously injured that
    way:

    `While I was working on the lids (the coke ovens), I was told to move
    these 100 lb lead boxes. I wanted to prove i could do it. That all
    women could do it. After the third lift, I ripped open my intestines
    and had to be rushed to the hospital. It took surgery and a three
    month recover period. What I didn't know at the time was that no man
    would have lifted that much weight. They would have asked for a helper
    or simply refused.' - from the Fonow conversations.

    Puerala responded to Gumulauski's story in anger:

    `We can't allow men to decide what women's rights are. They aren't the
    ones who'll get hurt, we are. If those bastards try that trick again,
    tell them where to shove it. The men never put up with this shit.'

    Puerala helped to organize the Local 65 Women's Committee as well as
    the District 31 Women's Caucus. Steelworker women activists plunged
    themselves into a wide variety of campaigns from fighting for stronger
    affirmative action enforcement to improving the decrepit state of the
    women's washrooms. They formed alliances with feminist groups across
    the region, refuting the rightwing smear that feminism was only a
    movement for privileged white women. They became active in the newly
    formed Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW).

    District 31 made a major push for the passage of the Equal Rights
    Amendment (ERA), sending hundreds of steelworkers, both men and women,
    to state legislatures to lobby for equal rights. While some local
    media tried to make a joke out of `burly male steelworkers'
    campaigning for women's rights, steelworker women didn't think it was
    funny at all. They understood the important of working class
    solidarity against social injustice. Peurala herself was also active
    in the anti-war and the reproductive rights movement.

    Once dubbed `Alice in Wonderland' by men who thought a woman could
    never lead a largely male steelworks local, Alice Peurala won the
    presidency of the Local 65 in 1979.

    `I did not win as a woman. I campaigned as a candidate who would do
    something about conditions in the plant that affect 7500 people - men
    and women...People in the plant looked on me as a fighter. I think it
    demonstrates that the men in the plant will vote for someone who is
    going to for them, make the union work for them.' - from Rocking the
    Boat

    But Peurala's victory came when the American steel industry was about
    to collapse. In an atmosphere of fear caused by mass layoffs, she was
    was narrowly defeated for re-election in 1982, but was re-elected in
    1985. But by 1985, the local was down to 800 members and Alice Peurala
    faced a new enemy. - cancer. On June 21, 1986, her steelworker's heart
    went silent and the working class lost one of is finest and most
    steadfast leaders.

    A Legacy To Remember

    `You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this
    country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's
    pocket.'-Frank Sobotka, The Wire

    Today the dismantling of US manufacturing is usually blamed on
    `greedy unions'. That's nonsense of course. For a brief period, from
    the 1950's to the 1980's, a little more than one generation, a
    significant number of unionized industrial workers achieved a modest
    middle class lifestyle. But even then the nature of the work could
    take a heavy toll on mind and body. Their middle class status was
    always precarious, with workers only one layoff or bad accident away
    from serious economic troubles.

    As cracks in the American economic dream began to appear in the late
    1970's, the unions representing America's industrial workers made
    concession after concession in an effort to save jobs, concessions
    that were largely unsuccessful in doing that. Somehow it was always
    the workers who were expected to give up hard won gains or even their
    jobs, while top management and financial investors never seem to worry
    about how to pay the mortgage or put food on the table when hard times
    hit.

    Neither government nor private enterprise stepped up to the plate to
    create effective job retraining for laid off workers. The hi-tech and
    service jobs that were supposed to replace manufacturing proved to be
    largely illusionary or low-paid.

    Both management and union stumbled, but `greedy workers' were not the
    problem. American manufacturing management was a victim of short term
    thinking and a lack of imagination. It did not understand the
    importance of a government industrial policy. It was clueless about
    how to operate in a global marketplace. It was organized in a topdown
    dictatorial bureaucratic manner. Sadly, America's manufacturing
    unions were organized in much the same way.

    For all of our brave talk about `democracy' we don't apply it to the
    area of economics. As a nation we were right to criticize the dismal
    results of Soviet style centralized industrial `planning.' We failed
    to see that having our industrial `planning' done by a relatively
    small number of centralized corporations run as virtual dictatorships
    wasn't much of an alternative. The industrial unions clung to much the
    same model and many workers gradually became alienated and saw them as
    little more than a kind of insurance policy, resulting in low levels
    of rank and file involvement. When the time came to fight for
    survival, most workers just were not well prepared.

    This lack of a democratic culture within US manufacturing was grossly
    inefficient. Alice Peurala spent an enormous amount of her time
    battling company enforced racial and gender discrimination. One of the
    best grievance handlers at South Works, she also spent entirely too
    much time fighting back against petty harassment of workers by
    supervisors who were trying to impose an atmosphere of fear and
    intimidation demanded from the top. She also spent an enormous amount
    of her time battling the entrenched leadership of the steelworker's
    union, which was leading rank and file steelworkers to disaster.

    Manufacturing is more than just machines and processes. It also about
    living breathing people with minds. Imagine if working class leaders
    like Peurala had been able to apply their formidable abilities toward
    improving the manufacturing process with genuine worker involvement
    instead of having to fight for clean washrooms. What a goddam waste of
    working class talent, time and energy.

    Throughout her life, Alice Peurala was devoted to the idea of
    democracy. She was on the right track. If we are to revive
    manufacturing as well as the rest of our economy, we will need to do
    it differently than in the past. Until we learn how to apply democracy
    to our economics we will continue to be trapped in an inefficient,
    wasteful, polluting system that degrades our humanity and the planet
    we live on.

    I never met Alice personally, but saw her at a number of rallies
    around Chicago back in the day. A steel worker friend of mine who did
    know her said that in addition to being a a tough smart negotiator,
    she also played a mean hand of poker. Several retired steelworkers
    have contacted me and told of their high regard for her integrity.

    Sources Consulted

    Interview with Alice Puerala by Elizabeth Balanoff

    Harold Gibbons from Wikipedia

    Alice Peurala Regains Reins Of Steel Union Local By James Warren.

    Alice Peurala, 58, Steel Union Leader By James Warren

    The Role of Management in the Decline of the American Steel Industry
    by Robert E. Ankli and Eva Sommer

    Chicago's Southeast Side Industrial History by Rod Sellers

    Union women: forging feminism in the United Steelworkers of America by
    Mary Margaret Fonow

    Rusted dreams: hard times in a steel community by David Bensman, Roberta Lynch

    Rocking the Boat: Union Women's Voices by Brigid O'Farrell & Joyce L. Kornbluh

    http://open.salon.com/blog/bobbosphere/2012/02/10/alice_peurala_a_woman_of_steel



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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