Annemarie Schwarzenbach nos EUA II

(Unemployed workers of the coal mines at Scottsrun, West Virginia, 1937)

America’s Iron City, 1937

“Dress inconspicuously. Don’t keep a Leica constantly pressed against your eye. Don’t have your Ford washed too frequently!” Those were the final instructions I was given in Washington before I set out for the coal mining districts of the Alleghenies and the mighty center of the U.S. steel industry, the “Iron City” of Pittsburgh.
I had been prepped like a war correspondent about to depart for the front lines. I had even been warned. The General Motors strike was in full swing. In Washington, I had been able to gain an overview of the aims of the struggle and of the entire American labor movement. I knew that the issue was not pay raises but fundamental demands of enormous import. The slogans “Industrial Union” versus “Craft Union” or “Company Union” were as familiar to me as the concept of “collective bargaining,” recommended by Roosevelt himself as a solution to the problem of strikes but bitterly opposed by the owners of the companies because it would give workers a legal basis and legal representation for their demands. The labor leader John L. Lewis, a Welsh miner, was demanding recognition for his Industrial Unions as representatives of all workers and employees united within an industry. The entrepreneurs feared him more than the entire Communist Party (of which he is not a member)—many already considered him the most powerful man in America.
There was a certain willingness to accommodate the workers by granting them a degree of quasirepresentation within the factory—a manageable arrangement, since the workers’ chosen representatives were company employees and could therefore be fired if necessary. But no one wanted “outside interference” from an independent union leader like John L. Lewis, who was not only powerful but had the effrontery of negotiating on an equal footing with the company bosses and directors. (...)"

(Annemarie Schwarzenbach)