“Mike Stout’s well-constructed and splendidly illustrated memoir is about a special place and time, but it also serves as a window on a social insurgency that can provide inspiration for future social progress. It is a story of skilled workers who proudly got their hands dirty—an industrial world of crane men, machinists, mechanics, millwrights, laborers, and electricians that once dominated a region—but who also combined working-class culture as writers, poets musicians, cartoonists, and even lawyers. Today, there are new skills and different jobs, but class oppression endures. Greed without end or solidarity forever? The choice remains and the consequences for a sick earth and an imperial world order could not be greater.”
—Charles McCollester, for Chief Steward, UE Local 610, Switch and Signal Plant; former professor of labor history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania
“Shop-floor activists at U.S. Steel’s famous Homestead Works played a key role in the democracy movement that swept through their national union and almost topped its top leadership in the late 1970s. After that Steel Workers Fightback campaign, they turned USW Local 1397 into a model local union, just in time to mount spirited resistance to mill closings throughout western Pennsylvania. Mike Stout’s firsthand account of rank-and-file militancy and creativity in the face of deindustrialization and capital flight contains many relevant lessons for union members today. If every local union had the fighting spirit of 1397 in its heyday, the U.S. labor movement would be in far better shape.”
—Steve Early, former International Representative, Communications Workers of America and author of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City
“I can see this book finding a privileged place on the shelves of American radicals. This is a labor history which is exciting, emotional, and thought-provoking, a splendid example of radical history at its best.”
—Andrej Grubacic, professor and chair of Anthropology and Social Change, CIIS–San Francisco; author of Wobblies and Zapatistas
“‘Women of Steel’ was a pretty apt name for the women working in the mills, as Mike Stout shows us. These women stood together and stood up for themselves, plus organized the guys against corporate greed and union officials’ sexism. Stout’s description of the women’s strength, smarts, and leadership comes from the heart. He worked for members’ rights alongside these women or stood behind them when they stepped forward.”
—Martha Gruelle, former coeditor of Labor Notes and coauthor of Democracy Is Power
“The best movements have the most leaders, and Mike Stout does a great job introducing us to some of the many people who took on the steel industry and devious union bureaucrats during the last decade of U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works in Pittsburgh. Mike’s union sisters and brothers built community alliances, and they had fun, partied together and mourned together. They made mistakes and built victories. It’s a story from the era of deindustrialization, but with lessons for all of us working to rebuild a powerful labor movement for the future.”
—Ken Paff, national organizer for Teamsters for a Democratic Union
