Hard hit western Pennsylvania marches for relief in the early Great Depression.

‘Steel Workers and Miners on Hunger March to Pittsburgh’ by Rebecca Grecht from the Daily Worker. Vol. 8 No. 282. November 24, 1931.

ON November 25, workers of Allegheny County, western Pennsylvania-steel workers and miners, suffering the cruel misery of unemployment, blacklisted, driven out of the mills and mines, will march into Pittsburgh to demand immediate unemployment relief from the county government.

They will come from the steel and metal fortresses of McKeesport, Clairton, and Duquesne; from the company-owned mining camps of Coverdale, Mollenauer, and the Allegheny Valley, from all sections of Pittsburgh, stronghold of the steel trust.

Over 150,000 workers are without jobs in Pittsburgh and vicinity, this third winter of the crisis. Lay-offs continue to swell the army of unemployed, wage-cuts in the steel and metal plants are further deepening the misery of workers, already impoverished through part-time employment.

In Coverdale, ruled by the Pittsburgh Terminal Coal Company, the tent colony of blacklisted miners and their families, victimized for their activities in the recent miners’ strike against starvation, stands out as a glaring testimony to capitalist oppression and cruelty. In Pittsburgh 2,000 families on the South Side alone are threatened with having their water shut off.

The attacks have been extended to the city employees, 3,000 of whom have been compelled to take “vacations without pay” in order to enable the city to lower the taxes of the real estate capitalists.

Everywhere hunger and want increase, but the government has ignored the needs of the jobless. The County poor directors can build $70,000 piggeries, with graft and corruption, but there are no funds for unemployed relief. Instead of taxing the coal and steel magnates who have made millions out of the toil of workers now thrown on the streets to starve, the city and county government demand that the workers still employed shall pay out of their meagre. earnings,

This is the meaning of the six million dollar drive of the Welfare Fund and Emergency Association in Allegheny County, for the purpose, it is stated, of assistance to “neediest cases” and for some public works. This is the line of the Hoover charity program.

By this means the government throws off all responsibility for relief. The Pittsburgh Department of Public Works cuts off one million dollars from its 1932 budget, announcing that it will employ fewer men this winter and put into effect the stagger system. The campaign bulletin of the Welfare Fund carries a streamer that “the workers must give first”! Collections are made in the factories, forced upon the workers. Andrew Mellon, multi-millionaire Secretary of the Treasury, sponsor of tax reductions for the bosses and wage-cuts for the workers, came to Pittsburgh for a public speech, to save the “self-respect” of the starving jobless. Mellon, who recently endorsed the 10 per cent wage-cut in the Mellon-controlled Aluminum Plant of America, is deeply concerned that the workers shall be “spared the bitter experience of receiving money for which no compensating labor has been given,” and therefore attacks the demand for direct government aid, and unemployment insurance. “Let the workers pay!” is the slogan of the bosses and their government.

The Allegheny County hunger march will demand free food and clothing for the children of unemployed and part-time workers, no evictions, no shutting off of gas, light, or water.

The workers will insist that the $6,000,000 subway fund, raised through a bond issue in Pittsburgh several years ago for a subway that has not even been started, shall be turned over for winter relief for the unemployed. The demand for full wages for part-time workers, for the 7-hour day without reduction in pay as against the stagger system proposed by the bosses: the immediate re-employment of the blacklisted miners, and the housing of all miners starving and freezing in tent colonies; an end to the terror in the company steel and mining towns, the right to the streets for the workers–these are also among the demands of the unemployed. The fight for unemployment insurance will be brought to the forefront as a principal point in the struggle of the jobless and part-time workers.

The total inadequacy of charity ventures, the discrimination and degrading investigations practiced by private relief associations, the pressure brought upon the workers in the drive of the Allegheny Welfare Fund and Emergency Association, the actions of the Pittsburgh city government in adopting the stagger system on public works and cutting down its public works budget while graft and corruption permeate every department–these issues must be brought before the workers to unmask the bourgeois and reformist relief maneuvers as attempts to demoralize the ranks and dampen the militancy of the workers in their struggle for unemployment relief and insurance.

Preparations for the Allegheny County hunger march take place at the same time that Pinchot’s Legislature meets to consider Pinchot’s fake relief program. On the basis of a concrete analysis of this program we must campaign to break the illusions among masses of workers that Pinchot will fight for adequate government relief and that his aims are basically different from Hoover’s. We must show how his road-building tent colonies are an attempt to develop forced labor in a more open form in Pennsylvania. We must expose his deliberate failure to propose taxing the rich for unemployment relief, but instead throwing the burden on the workers themselves through the indirect forms of city taxation schemes. We must point out that while Pinchot makes demagogic appeals for relief in Harrisburg, his state trooper attack the unemployed in New Kensington, in Fayette County, who organize Hunger Marches to demand relief.

All forces of the National Miners Union and the Metal Workers Industrial League in Allegheny County must be thrown into the mobilization of the broadest masses of workers for the Hunger March. The National Steel Conference held in Pittsburgh on September 27th pointed out that the organization of the unemployed steel workers is a direct road to the organization of the men in the mills. Likewise, a struggle for the interests of the blacklisted and unemployed miners is a direct link with those still employed in the mines, working at the most, two or three days a week.

Every Communist nucleus in the steel and coal towns of Allegheny County must consider their principal task to organize the fighting demonstration of the unemployed. Negro and white workers, who in the strike of 40,000 coal miners in Western Pennsylvania gave an outstanding example of class solidarity in their common battle against starvation, must be rallied together in this united struggle for unemployment relief. It is necessary to establish a common fighting front of unemployed, part-time, and employed workers.

In this way we can develop a militant mass movement for the County Hunger March, for the widest response to the National Hunger March to Washington, D.C., on December 7th.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n282-NY-nov-24-1931-DW-LOC.pdf