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1909 McKees Rocks Strike

Pressed Steel Car strike of 1909
Funeral Procession for Strikers.jpg
Funeral procession in McKees Rocks for Bloody Sunday victims
Date July 10 - September 8, 1909
Location McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania
Goals wages
Methods Strikes, Protest, Demonstrations
Resulted in Wage increase; end to housing abuses
Parties to the civil conflict
Pennsylvania State Police; Strikebreakers
Lead figures
Norton Hoffstot;
Pearl Bergoff
Arrests, etc
Deaths: 12
Injuries: 26+
Arrests:
Deaths: 1
Injuries:
Designated October 14, 2000

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 major industrial labor dispute in the Pittsburgh district after 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, most 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". "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," said Rev. A.F. Toner, a priest at St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in McKees Rocks, in an interview with The Pittsburgh Leader. 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 wives and daughters were subject to sexual harassment to repay food and rental debts to the company agents.

Particularly galling to the workers was the use of the Baldwin contract, commonly known as "pooling." Under this system, jobs were parceled out in lots by a foreman who contracted that it be done for a given sum, with the money paid to be divided pro rata by the men under him. The system was rife with corruption, with workers often paying substantial kickbacks to the foreman to retain their jobs. The system resulted in unpredictable and often insufficient rates of pay, as one sympathetic journalist reported:


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