You know how this works
Many other countries besides Great Britain turned to steel. The 19th-century world seemed to have turned up its collective nose to cast iron as a building material and chosen steel as its replacement. And who could blame them? With how durable, and now affordable, steel had become, builders would be silly to stick with cast iron.
American entrepreneurs capitalized on the Bessemer Converter to the same degree as the British. In no time at all though, America would outpace British steel production. Around 1889, The Carnegie Steel Company alone produced about half as much steel as the entire country of England. More and more American steel producers popped up every year.
Steel manufacturers created a job boon and the U.S. started building high-quality bridges, skyscrapers, and rail lines that were significantly safer than their cast iron predecessors. The standard of living increased as work moved from the rural fields to the urban city centers. There was no shortage of labor demand. If a man wanted a job as a builder or a laborer in a steel mill, he could easily find one.
But not everything was prosperity and sunshine.
The Frying Pan
Those newly created jobs were horrible. Crippling accidents were common, and I mean common to the point you question how they ever got away with it. One steel company, in particular, kept uniquely accurate reports of accidents in their mill. From 1905 to 1917, they kept metrics on the number of people they employed, accident rates, and accident severity.
In 1905, the company reported 300 in every 1,000 of their 6,400 employees were involved in an accident which amounted to 34 workdays lost per 300 workers.1 That means most employees didn't get any time off after an accident. Those who did were almost certainly not paid while they healed. Crazy enough, this plant was one of the first to develop and actually enforce safety measures.2
While most companies did not keep as detailed reports as the one above, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, still managed to compile a 1918 report on the state of safety in the steel industry.
The report found that In 1907, approximately 27,600 people worked in the U.S steel industry. Of those workers, 242 out of every 1,000 experienced an accident. 4 out of every 1,000 died from the accident, 4 were permanently disabled, and 236 were temporarily disabled.3 Just jaw-dropping accident rates.
The worst accidents occurred in blast furnace departments. In the same year, 961 employees worked in blast furnace departments across the entire U.S. steel industry. 6 of them were killed, 7 permanently disabled, and 291 were temporarily disabled. Almost a 32% accident rate! Asphyxiating gases put off by the blast furnaces caused a significant chunk of those 291 accidents.4
Risk to Reward
What did these men get for working in such atrocious conditions? Not much.
Steel mill wages were low, and laborers worked longer hours than anyone today would ever consider. In 1890, a steel mill employee working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week made just $10 per week, an equivalent of about $250 today. For some context, $520 a year put mill workers just above the poverty line of $500 a year. Oh yeah, and they only got one day off a year; July 4th.
Steel mills aged workers at an expedited rate. Sociologists even have a term for the physical toll the hard labor had on workers called "old age at forty." A Homestead Steel Mill laborer in 1894 observed no "old men" working in the mills. While he meant no old men according to age, after a few years of work, mill employees certainly looked old:
Hard! I guess it's hard... I lost forty pounds the first three months I came into this business. It sweats the life out of a man. I often drink two buckets of water during twelve hours; the sweat drips through my sleeves, and runs down my legs and fills my shoes.
Workers toiled for hours on end in blistering heat with little to no protective equipment. Companies typically issued their employees only two layers of wool long-johns as protection. These extra layers of clothing did not go far in shielding workers from the perils of volcanic flames pouring from Bessemer Converters, heavy iron slag spilled from ladles, and random explosions which threw hot sparks and bits of molten metal across the plant floor. Not to mention, no protection from the insane heat produced by open-hearth furnaces.
Open-Hearth Hellscape
Near the turn of the 20th century, clunky Bessemer Converters were torn from mill floors and replaced by open-hearth furnaces. This new technology was bigger, faster, and hotter. They could reach temperatures as high as 3000 degrees and produced 40 tons of steel in just 6 hours.
It was custom on plant floors to give nearby workers a warning to take cover before pouring steel from open-hearth furnaces. They put off so much heat workers could burn their faces if they got too close. The furnaces made molten metal so hot it could shatter a mold or container if any moisture was present, sending hot shrapnel everywhere.
Open-hearth furnaces in 1919 required manganese and carbon additive to finish steel. Workers manually combined the additives and molten metal by chucking bags of charcoal and shoveling manganese into massive ladles. One employee of the time described the job in his diary:
You lift a large sack of coal to your shoulders, run towards the white-hot steel in a hundred-ton ladle, must get close enough without burning your face off to hurl the sack, using every ounce of strength, into the ladle and run, as flames leap to roof and the heat blasts everything to the roof. Then you rush out to the ladle and madly shovel manganese into it, as hot a job as can be imagined.
Imagine repeatedly chucking heavy sacks over your head and moving heaping shovel after heaping shovel for 12 hours a day. It’s a wonder any of these people survived even one day in the workplace.
The Fire
The economic reality of the time trapped many in dangerous steel mill jobs. Where else could they go? For many, it was either the steel mills, the slaughterhouses, or the construction sites where safety measures were just as neglected and work conditions equally horrible.
Compared to the trenches of WWI, however, steel mills seemed like heaven. Workers soon found themselves dumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Part 4 coming next week
Chaney, L. W., & Hanna, H. S. (1918, June). The Safety Movement in the Iron and Steel Industry 1907 to 1917, pg 15, table 1. stlouisfed.org. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0234_1918.pdf
Chaney, L. W., & Hanna, H. S. (1918, June). The Safety Movement in the Iron and Steel Industry 1907 to 1917, pg 15, par 3. stlouisfed.org. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0234_1918.pdf
Chaney, L. W., & Hanna, H. S. (1918, June). The Safety Movement in the Iron and Steel Industry 1907 to 1917, pg 16, table 2. stlouisfed.org. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0234_1918.pdf
Chaney, L. W., & Hanna, H. S. (1918, June). The Safety Movement in the Iron and Steel Industry 1907 to 1917, pg 17, table 3. stlouisfed.org. Retrieved February 24, 2022, from https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0234_1918.pdf