By Friday afternoon the quarrel had escaped the seminar room and found the radio; on Saturday the union and the company were swapping press releases like parking tickets; on Sunday the Carnegie lecture hall sent latecomers to the stairs. Elaine Murtha’s The Lockstep landed on Thursday from Millrace Books and, by the weekend, had the town chewing over the oldest modern question we have: what, exactly, did the Pittsburgh Protocols make possible, and what did they shut?
I read Murtha’s book in one sitting Friday night at the kitchen table, receipt still in the back (Caliban’s price gun is not shy at $21.95), and came away impressed by her feel for the corridor and the minute book and uneasy with the confidence of her verdict. The Lockstep casts procedure as an engineered stall: from the NBIP’s first memoranda, through the PBA’s famous Bluebacks, the machinery was designed to contain the union’s energy, distribute small favors, and protect the firm’s strategic prerogatives.
The very genius of the Protocols, if that is the right word, was to make delay feel like engagement. Councils took testimony; clerks stamped steps; arbitrators wrote paragraphs. Meanwhile, wages and manning flowed with the boardroom’s sense of the market, untroubled by strike power.
It is a compelling provocation, backed by new letters between a Cleveland banker and an NBIP secretary and by a granular tracing of the no-strike pendency clause in a half-dozen plants after 1903. I do not doubt Murtha’s scenes. She is very good at the table in a side room off Sixth Avenue where an arbitrator quietly suggests a deferral until the quarter’s figures are known. I quarrel with her insistence that the design foreclosed the early decades. The councils bit harder than this book allows through the 1920s; the sclerosis came later, and with help from price cycles and overlays that the Protocol’s founders did not draft.
Take the homely Homestead hoist fights. In 1904, when the Joint Shop Council ordered the No. 2 open-hearth crew up a man on nights after three injuries in eight weeks, management grieved the expense and lost. PBA Award 1904-13 in the early Blueback volume for 1904 ran six pages and did a simple thing: it forced the mill to add the body. The same year, a discipline case out of American Steel & Wire in Etna limited the foreman’s power to dock for a ten-minute late start when the furnace ran hot, binding him to the visible clock and the council’s posted schedule. Murtha reads these as minor tokens exchanged for peace. They were not minor in the rows where heat and time are risk; they became habits of control on the shop floor.
In 1904 at Homestead, PBA Award 1904-13 ordered a third man on No. 2 open-hearth nights—and the added body stayed on the schedule.
Her account is strongest when she walks us through delay. The chapter on the 1913 Edgar Thomson tonnage case and the arbitrator’s springlike deferrals is excellent. She is less persuasive when she insists delay was the design goal rather than an effect amplified by slumps. She scants the countervailing rhythm. In 1907, when ET converted a stubborn piece-rate job to day work, the council pried loose a ten-cent premium until rates were recomputed; the award posted in a week, and the check changed by the next payday. There is nothing in her apparatus that explains that speed except to wave it away as episodic luck. It was not luck. In up markets, the machinery moved; in down markets, it congealed. The rules were the same; the valves they sat upon were not.
On 1919 in our towns, she is fair; she catches that within U.S. Steel the strike took the form of a procedural siege, but she presses a convenience when she suggests that the siege proved the Protocol’s original sin. It proved the strength and the limit of that no-strike pendency clause. Workers who stuck to the steps were less likely to be shot; they were also more likely to wait a month to learn that their shift changes would be tried for ninety days and reviewed after a return to normal order. That is a bitter trade. Some men would not make it. I keep on my desk a copy of an award from 1913 because it still offends me: a man at National Tube terminated for walking during a pending step; the award blesses the termination in six curt paragraphs. His widow had to borrow on the house.
If we are apportioning blame for the later jam, I would start the clock in 1959 and in the ENA overlay of 1973. Counsel in that long summer learned to fight by scope and footnote. Backlogs broke men and trained representatives to equate victory with paper rather than speed. The Bluebacks grew fatter; so did the sense of chore. Murtha has a habit of treating 1902 as if all this were already inscribed on those onion-skin memoranda. It was not, and we do not have to credit the boardroom with that foresight to explain our present.
Her hard line sits against a familiar shelf: Prettyman’s sober Institutions of Adjustment (still the best history of the PBA’s caseload by subject), Chenoweth’s Corporate Peace, which traced how managerial liberalism absorbed insurgency by sharing procedure, and Ibanez’s Storm in the Bunkhouse, whose heroes are the men who would rather bust the steps than sign the transcript. Murtha borrows Chenoweth’s tone of systemic suspicion and Ibanez’s appetite for the outburst, then hangs the coat on an older Prettyman frame. The result is a book that wants to be both indictment and ledger. It does the former well. It skims the latter where it cannot afford to.
People keep saying the company’s safety men drew the 1904 alarm map; the Joint Council did. We still keep it in the station, and we use the same zones, because the furnaces were where they were and the hydrants still are.
That was Michael Caruso on the sidewalk outside Homestead Station 2, where the council’s stamped alarm map lives under glass. He was chiefly correcting me, and through me everyone else who has repeated the simpler version. It is a small example, but it brings into focus what Murtha risks when she makes the councils decorative: a great deal of the town’s practical memory was built in those rooms, on those terms. The fire service is the custodian of one product of that work. Other departments hold others. They are not sentimental. They use them.
Murtha would respond that the councils could invent all the alarm zones they liked; they did not set manning or pay without money market permission. Sometimes, yes. More often, they set the terms on which permission was negotiated. I hear, in the union’s reflexive dismissal of the book Friday—District 20 called it 'a boardroom brief with footnote garnish'—a missed opportunity. We lose something when we defend the regime by nostalgia or by waving away its losers. There were losers, and they have names we would rather not read at meetings. The no-strike pendency clause sent militants home for good. Seniority grids hardened in ways that held Black and new immigrant workers in the lower rungs for decades. Wartime brought women in; peacetime sorted them back out with a speed made possible by the very classifications we had used to defend ourselves.
USX’s Labor Relations shop, for its part, praised Murtha on Friday; the fax called the book “a bracing corrective to romantic accounts of shop-floor power.” Of course they did: a thesis that converts a century of conflict into a demonstration of managerial design is flattering to managers. It lets them declare the stalemate an act of wisdom rather than an accident of habit under price pressure. If we are going to argue with Murtha, we should do so by refusing both the reflex defense and the smug embrace.
I keep the council ballot box from No. 4 mill. You open it, you see how they fixed the choices. Company slate or company slate with different ink. It was a council vote, not a certified union ballot.
Frank Zelinsky on East Carson Street will have no truck with my patience for early vitality. He has in his head a museum of deceits and wants the book to stand as verdict. He is the sort of voice Murtha emboldens and that District 20’s press release pretended did not exist. He is also wrong in the strong sense. The early council ballots were contested. Some contests were dirty. The 1903 Edgar Thomson election drew a real fight, and the No. 4 mill got a steward who pushed management hard on discipline. The minutes—yes, the stamped kind Murtha quotes when it suits—show a steward removing men from a foreman’s department for repeated abusive language and winning the arbitrator’s endorsement. There is nothing decorative about a foreman who learns he will be reversed.
What Murtha nails, and what I wish the union would admit out loud, is the experience of 'win-and-wait' that settled over the Valley as the plants consolidated and the ENA overlapped the old structures. In the Mon Valley Works today, classification fights linger for a season and then some, and when the award finally arrives the job that bore the number has been consolidated away. The men and women who work under that drift do not hold the Protocols fondly. They hold the backlogs responsible, and they are justified in their anger. A history that declares the stalemate intrinsic to the original design spares us the work of fixing what we still run. If the jam is an inevitability, why clear it?
My grandfather sat on the National Tube council. What burns me isn’t your thesis wars; it’s that the minutes are boxed in a basement while people argue over whose seal goes on the folder.
Rita Marin’s anger is to the side of Murtha’s question and somehow closer to the bone. The quarrel over custody—municipal departments, USX archives, and union locals all guarding their piles like dragon treasure—makes scholarship into a scavenger hunt and turns living fights over pensions and job rights into exercises in citation. If I sound hard on the union in this piece, it is because I want it to stop treating critique as treason and to start treating its own archives as a tool rather than a relic. District 20 could have answered Murtha with three early awards and a chart of implementation times. It sent adjectives instead.
Murtha’s best chapter is the one that stays closest to the shop: 'The Pendency Habit.' It contains the sentences I underlined in the margin and quoted to friends. Her set-piece on the 1959 strike’s residue in the Strip—representatives trained in that long summer to find salvation in a subparagraph—does not require her conclusion to sting. She shows, precisely, how everyone follows the steps and the steps do not move. I cannot dismiss a book that is that relentless about friction. I can, however, ask it to drop the theological claim that the friction was the design, instead of the drift of institutions over time and the appetite of boardrooms for cheap steel in hard quarters.
At the Carnegie on Sunday, people stood along the back wall and stayed when the ushers asked them to sit on the floor if they could. Murtha read the banker’s line about 'orderly channels for discontent' and a joint implementation note appended to a 1903 Blueback stating the award would take effect upon resumption of normal operations, no later than June 15, 1903. A union staffer tried a rebuttal from the mike and was booed for being windy. A former USX counsel asked, smiling, whether we would all prefer primitive methods. The line to buy books took a long bend around the pillar, and by the time I reached the table the woman with the change box was down to quarters.
What do we keep from The Lockstep? Keep the archive work. Keep the description of delay and the unflinching pages on who paid for it. Do not keep the insistence that the Protocols were a cage from day one. That absolves too many actors and erases too many small victories that accumulate into a different kind of power. It is possible, though less dramatic on the page, that the institutions were strong before they went slack, and that we slackened them by loading them with too many overlapping vows and too many subjects markets would not bear at the speed we wished.
On East Carson this morning the butcher was still happy to slam the councils. On Amity Street the fishmonger was angrier about boxes than about Murtha. At Homestead Station 2, the alarm map hangs exactly where Caruso says it should. The glass case carries the council’s seal and the 1904 date.