Early 20th Century Sloss Furnace - Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron Company, Birmingham Alabama
Through the early 20th century, there is no evidence the company's workers were any more tractable or submissive and militant strikes in the mines continued. A strike in July 1903 closed the Sloss-Sheffield mines for two months. They were reopened on the "open shop" basis, though the strike was not called off until August 1905. During this period, production fell, labor scarcity was acute - "frequently sufficient labor could not be had to draw the ovens" - and violence included placing a bomb under the front door of President Maben's house.
In 1908, a brief violent strike closed down every mine in the district. The strike was finally broken by state intervention and the militia. One result of the strike was the decision by U, S, Steel to introduce welfare and education programs, and to become actively involved in the design of worker communities. By 1910 plans were ready for the development of Corey (now Fairfield), a landscaped community built for U. S. Steel's workers. The company's "welfare work" was admittedly self-serving, designed to reduce labor turnover and to hold workers in the South - "a difficult thing in the past." As such, it represented the district's first concentrated effort to confront the labor supply problem, though it was directed primarily at holding white labor. The supply of black labor was not yet a problem.
Despite the example of U. S. Steel, Sloss-Sheffield maintained a classic laissex-faire policy. The company's worker housing was described in 1912 by John Fitch, then doing research on steelworkers in The Survey: The village of the Sloss-Sheffield Company in Central Birmingham, with a slag dump for a rear view, blast furnaces and bee-hive coke ovens for a front view, railroad tracks in the street, and indecently built toilets in the back yards, is an abomination of desolation. The houses are unpainted, fences are tumbling down, a board is occasionally missing from the side of a house. Col. Maben, president of the company told me that he didn't believe in codding workmen.
There was some improvement one year later when the city compelled Sloss-Sheffield to abandon the use of approximately 300 coke ovens at the city plant. The ovens, closed because of excessive pollution, have since been destroyed or covered over.
The company's labor policy was partly dictated by economic considerations. It is unlikely they had sufficient capital to underwrite extensive welfare programs. Holding to an older ideal of labor management keeping the men working and driving them - Sloss-Sheffield was not involved in "welfare work. "
Though the furnace workers were generally less militant than the miners, they too continued to create special problems for the company. Absenteeism remained high, and evidence exists that Sloss-Sheffield was forced to continue carrying 50% more workers on the payroll than were needed at any one time. Blacks were said to have worked a four to five-hour day.
However, the company was becoming more aware of the problem of maintaining an adequate labor supply. Local industrialists, including Sloss-Sheffield vice-president, J. W. McQueen, and the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, actively opposed the continuance of a local legal system that supported itself by paying arrest fees to its officers. One middle-class reformer described it pointedly as a "cash nexus for crime" and believed the system encouraged arrests, consequently driving away black labor. Using the same logic, Maben and McQueen opposed the prohibition of alcohol and prohibition laws would make it even more difficult to recruit and retain labor.
These positions did not originate among local industrialists because of a simple desire for justice. Their primary concern, in supporting or opposing particular measures, was in maintaining an adequate labor supply. To this end, they were quite prepared to use the coercive power of the law. This was evident in their response to the "acute labor shortage" brought on by World War I. The war years marked a concentrated black exodus from the South. In 1913, a local vagrancy law was passed, with the support of Birmingham industrialists, which placed the burden of proof on anyone found "wandering or strolling about" on any working day. It was a clear and harsh response to a problem engendered, not only by migration, but by higher wartime wages which allowed blacks to work two or three days, and much to the consternation of the area's managers of labor, "still support themselves."
