The growth of the iron and steel industry in Pittsburgh was portrayed and written about as a triumph of the “great man of history”, Andrew Carnegie, but no steel would have been made without the labor of the steel and ironworkers in Carnegie’s mills.
My questions when analyzing the statistical data about the steel industry in Pittsburgh are firstly, what sort of workers were involved in the mills? Where did they come from and how does it compare with other steel producing cities and how did this change over time? And finally, how organized was labor in the steel mills and how many strikes were there compared to other steel towns?
To answer these questions, I am going to need data about the population of iron and steelworkers in major steel producing cities, and the data about their country of origin and their age and sex. For my final question I will need the strike data from each state filtered by the iron and steel industry.
The source I found that can help me with these questions is a report about strikes in the United States between 1880 and 1936. The report contains tables that collate data from all previous reports of the Department of Labor and previous state boards of labor statistics about strikes. The data is somewhat fragmentary, the data was only really as specific as the city level after 1905, but it still provides useful data between this date and 36′ and it give me an overview of 1880-1905.
The data was collected and published by the Department of Labor under Frances Perkins, who was a part of FDR’s New Deal administration. This might lead to some bias towards workers accounts of labor disputes, but the raw numbers are not susceptible to bias and many of the tables are re-publishing data collected much earlier. I can use this data to find the amount of strikes in the iron and steel industry and where they occurred. And I might be able to look at the sources used in the report to find some data that they missed.
Peterson, F. (1937). Strikes in the United States, 1880-1936 (No. 651). U.S Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Fraser: St. Louis Fed. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0651_1938.pdf