Activist Stephen Millies after being issued a summons for protesting the hike in transportation fees in New York City.
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By Stephen Millies
Published Aug 8, 2009 3:16 PM
The Rockefeller and Du Pont billionaire dynasties are hated around the world. Outside of Pennsylvania the super rich Mellon family isn’t as well known.
They should be. When Fortune magazine listed the eight richest people in the United States in 1957, four of them were Mellons. The family’s crown jewels then included Alcoa Aluminum, Gulf Oil—which merged with Rockefeller’s Chevron in 1984—and the Mellon National Bank.
Alcoa had sales of nearly $27 billion in 2008. Chevron was ten times bigger with sales of $273 billion.
In 2007 the Mellon Bank merged with the Bank of New York to form a financial octopus that operates in 34 countries. Bank of New York vice president Lucy Edwards admitted conspiring to launder more than $7 billion from Russia. (Bloomberg News, July 26, 2006)
The Bank of New York Mellon has $20.7 trillion in assets under custody or administration. That’s $6 trillion more than the entire gross domestic product of the United States.
Yet it still received a bailout of $3 billion while it was supposed to “oversee” the Troubled Assets Relief Program.
Much of the Mellon wealth is locked up in tax-dodging foundations. The Andrew W. Mellon foundation had $6.5 billion in assets in 2007.
Political power went along with this loot. George Bush made Paul O’Neill—the former CEO of Mellon-controlled Alcoa—his first treasury secretary in 2001.
Eighty years earlier, Andrew Mellon had to resign from 51 corporation boards when he became treasury secretary in 1921. Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover took orders from the financier.
Mellon’s reign—the longest of any treasury secretary—extended the misery of the Great Depression. According to Herbert Hoover’s memoirs, Andrew Mellon’s attitude was to “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers.”
“Liquidate labor” is exactly what happened to Pittsburgh where the Mellon fortune originated. Pittsburgh finally recovered from the Depression. But in the early 1980s the area lost 56,000 steel industry jobs and 54,000 other manufacturing jobs. (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, May 16.)
Deindustrialization has led to 21 percent of Pittsburgh’s total population and a third of its African Americans living under the poverty line. Pittsburgh is where the G-20 summit is being held in September.
A bigoted miser
Founder of the family fortune was Thomas A. Mellon, an immigrant from Ulster who was born in 1813. He took great pride that his ancestors had crossed over from Scotland to Ulster after Oliver Cromwell slaughtered the local Irish population.
Mellon wrote in his autobiography, “It is very manifest that it would have been well for Ireland had this policy of extirpation been carried into effect throughout the entire island.”
This bigot became a lawyer and a loan shark. Mellon lent money at high interest rates and foreclosed on those who couldn’t pay up. He started a real estate empire that benefited from Pittsburgh becoming the steel capital.
By 1860 Thomas Mellon got himself elected judge. Later he wrote that there was nothing wrong with condemned prisoners committing suicide: “This growing tendency of self-destruction ... is not to be discouraged.”
The same year Mellon became a hanging judge Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Over 360,000 Pennsylvanians joined the Union Army to fight the slave masters. Pennsylvania Congressperson Thaddeus Stevens demanded land and freedom for Black people.
Even James Mellon, Thomas Mellon’s second son, wanted to enlist. Judge Mellon was furious. “It is only greenhorns who enlist,” wrote the father to his son. “There are plenty of other lives less valuable.”
It is “less valuable” workers who continue to fill Veterans Administration hospitals and military cemeteries.
The Mellon fortune takes off
As soon as his judgeship ended, Thomas Mellon opened a private bank on Jan. 2, 1870, on Smithfield Street. “T. Mellon & Sons’ Bank” had to close its doors during the 1873 crisis but reopened in a few months.
It was Thomas’s son Andrew who really sent the Mellon fortune into orbit. Daddy Mellon was already financing Henry Clay Frick and swindling farmers out of their land that lay over valuable coal deposits.
Like Wall Street’s J.P. Morgan, who started General Electric and U.S. Steel, Andrew Mellon began organizing corporations.
Charles Martin Hall discovered how to separate alumina from bauxite rock at the same time French inventor Paul Heroult did so.
Joining forces with metallurgist Alfred E. Hunt, they turned to the Mellon Bank seeking money to exploit Hall’s invention. In 1888 the Mellons financed the Pittsburgh Reduction Company—now called Alcoa—keeping 40 percent of the stock for themselves.
Hall’s U.S. patent—not recognized in Europe—and high tariffs gave Alcoa an absolute monopoly on aluminum in the Unites States until World War II.
But oil provided even more profits than aluminum. The Mellons were able to take over the fabulous Spindletop oilfield in Texas to form Gulf Oil.
After Andrew Mellon left the Treasury, he became U.S. ambassador to Britain. He demanded and got 50 percent of any oil found in Kuwait, which was then a British colony.
Sixty years later U.S. imperialism went to war with Iraq to protect Gulf Oil’s stake in Kuwait.
The Mellon family war against workers
Coal mines and machine guns
By Stephen Millies
Published Aug 17, 2009 6:50 PM
“You could not run a coal company without machine guns,” sums up the Mellon style of labor relations.
Richard Mellon broke the United Mine Workers union at the family’s Pittsburgh Coal Company in 1925. Three years later the U.S. Senate’s Interstate Commerce Committee traveled to Pittsburgh to question this strike-breaking brother of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.
They asked Richard Mellon about the machine guns of Pennsylvania’s Coal and Iron Police, a notorious private strike-breaking outfit that functioned like Blackwater (now named XE) mercenaries do. Mellon answered, “It is necessary. You could not run without them.”
While Mellon was testifying, his coal bosses had been told to “keep our police in the background.” Eleven months later on Feb. 9, 1929, they beat union miner John Barkoski to death. Union supporter John Philipovich was shot to death on the porch of his store.
Much bloodier were the East St. Louis, Ill., race riots in 1917. Two thousand workers had gone on strike there at the Mellon-controlled Aluminum Ore Company plant. Unionists were conducting organizing drives at other local plants.
Mellon and other employers recruited thousands of African Americans from the South with false promises of employment. Whites were told that Black workers were going to take their jobs. The strike at Mellon’s plant was broken.
Unlike future Communist leader William Z. Foster, who was then organizing African-American and white meatpacking workers in Chicago’s stockyards, the white AFL union leaders in East St. Louis catered to racism.
These misleaders demanded Black workers be driven out of the city while local newspapers printed lurid, lying stories of a Black “crime wave.”
This deliberate instigation of racism led to a mob of thousands of armed whites hunting Black people on the streets on July 2, 1917. W.E.B. Du Bois estimated in his autobiography that 125 African Americans were murdered then.
Years before railroad tycoon Jay Gould bragged he could “hire half of the working class to shoot the other half.” Big capitalists became experts at pitting one group of workers against another.
The anger of white and U.S.-born workers against their bosses would often be diverted into hatred for African Americans, Latinas/os and immigrants.
Mellons are again today involved in attacking the working class and oppressed—this time in the debate on health care. Right-wing groups are conducting a vicious fight against any reforms of a rotten system where nearly 50 million people are uninsured. One of the biggest backers of the tax-free foundations leading this smear campaign is Richard Mellon Scaife, whose fortune is an estimated $1.2 billion.
Bayoneting workers
Family patriarch Thomas A. Mellon hated unions. He called union leaders “labor parasites” who were “promoters of socialism and anarchy.”
In 1880 Thomas Mellon busted a strike at the Waverly Coal Coke Company, which he partially owned. Mellon even had union leader David Jones prosecuted on “criminal conspiracy” charges for seeking to fix the price of labor!
Andrew Mellon’s friend and financial partner Henry Clay Frick broke the Homestead steel strike in 1892. Workers at Andrew Carnegie’s steel plant outside Pittsburgh had driven out Pinkerton private police thugs.
The 1892 presidential campaign receded into the background as the whole country focused on the long strike. Frick was so hated that anarchist Alexander Berkman tried to kill him. Berkman spent 14 years in prison for his deed.
It took the whole summer and 8,000 Pennsylvania National Guard troops to finally break the strike. Not until 45 years later in 1937 did the workers at Homestead win a union.
Alcoa workers spent decades winning a union. The Industrial Workers of the World led a 1913 strike at the company’s New Kensington plant, 18 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Women armed themselves with blacksnake whips and lashed strikebreakers.
After six weeks of state troopers attacking picket lines, the workers had to settle for promises of arbitration.
Two years later in 1915 workers revolted at the Mellon’s Massena, N.Y., aluminum mill. Anticipating the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, they captured every section of the big plant while management fled.
St. Lawrence County Sheriff Thaddeus Day deputized a gang of businessmen to break the strike. New York state Gov. Whitman sent in two companies of the National Guard who bayoneted workers. They killed strike leader Joseph Solunski, who died in an Ogdensburg hospital on Aug. 2, 1915.
Aluminum Workers Local 19256 finally compelled the company to sign a contract in 1941.
In 1919 William Z. Foster led a national steel strike against the 12-hour day that was drowned in police violence. Members of Troop D of the Pennsylvania State Constabulary assaulted workers at Mellon’s Standard Steel Company plant outside Butler, Pa.
As terrible as the conditions in these U.S. plants were, workers were treated even worse in Mellon’s aluminum trust mines in Guyana, Surinam, Jamaica and Guinea.
Sources: “Mellon’s Millions” by Harvey O’Connor; “Mellon” by David Cannadine; Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the “Kerner Commission.”
The Mellons: Keeping Pittsburgh poor
By Stephen Millies
Published Aug 23, 2009 8:46 PM
Pittsburgh made the Mellons rich. The city was hell for workers.
A 12-hour day was standard in the steel mills.
Five hundred twenty-six workers were killed on the job in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, between July 1, 1906, and June 30, 1907.
Sixty percent of women workers earned less than $7 per week, according to the “Pittsburgh Survey,” a pioneering sociological study.
Pittsburgh had the highest death rate from typhoid fever in the country, since the water wasn’t even filtrated until 1907. Children suffered the worst. Between 1900 and 1907, an average of 226 out of 1,000 babies died before their first birthday.
This misery mattered to the Mellons about as much as the Johnstown, Pa., flood did.
Henry Clay Frick established the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club for Pittsburgh’s wealthy elite, including steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie. Frick’s friend Andrew Mellon was one of the first members.
On May 31, 1889, the club’s poorly maintained dam broke, pouring out 20 million tons of water that would kill 2,209 people in Johnstown. It conveniently put out of action the Cambria Iron and Steel works, Carnegie’s biggest competitor, for more than a year.
Bighearted Andy Mellon gave $1,000—45 cents per victim—in chump change to the relief fund.
In those “good old days” before successful lawsuits, legal cases against the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club were thrown out of court. Club member and Mellon family lawyer Philander Knox successfully claimed the Johnstown flood was an “act of God.”
Knox collected his reward by being selected to be a U.S. senator, attorney general and secretary of state. After Panama was stolen to build a canal, Attorney General Knox advised President Teddy Roosevelt, “Do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”
Summoning Black labor to Pittsburgh
The “Great Migration” of African Americans from the South to Pittsburgh started during World War I. The Pittsburgh Courier became one of the most influential Black newspapers in the country.
By August 1917 there were 4,000 Black workers in the U.S. Steel plants around Pittsburgh. Jones and Laughlin Steel employed 1,400 African Americans. A generation later, in 1944, there were 11,500 Black workers in the area’s steel mills.
The dirty and dangerous jobs that African Americans held often gave them a chokehold on production. Steel mills need coke, and apartheid in steel had reserved coke ovens for Black workers.
African Americans at U.S. Steel’s Clairton, Pa., works carried out a series of strikes against discrimination between December 1943 and February 1944. They threatened to idle nearly 30,000 employees by cutting off coke and coal gas.
African-American communist Ben Careathers signed up 2,000 Black workers at J&L in the late 1930s.
In 1943, 450 Black workers at J&L’s Aliquippa plant went on strike after the company refused to upgrade two African Americans. The same year 28 Black firemen at J&L’s South Side Works in Pittsburgh—incensed that white counterparts were earning 11 cents more per hour—shut down the power plant and idled 11,000 workers.
Millions of Black sharecroppers never had the power that thousands of Black steel workers were using against the mightiest corporations in the land.
Urban removal
The Mellons didn’t like this power. Pittsburgh had the worst anti-communist witch hunt.
Ben Careathers and fellow Communist Party members were framed in both state and federal courts on thought-control charges. Steve Nelson, who fought in Spain against fascists, spent two years in jail.
In 1940 the Census counted 90,060 Black people in Allegheny County. Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, had 87,145 African Americans.
By 1970 the Black population in Cuyahoga County had increased more than four times to 351,574. African Americans in Allegheny County saw their numbers increase by only 67 percent, to 150,118.
Why the difference in these two industrial areas just 130 miles apart? No other Black community in a major Northern metropolitan area grew more slowly than Pittsburgh’s. No other metropolitan area is under the thumb of one billionaire family—the Mellons.
“We have saved this city from becoming a Camden or a Gary,” bragged John P. Robin in 1980. The head of the local urban removal authority was actually claiming he prevented Pittsburgh from becoming a Black and Latino/a majority city.
“The philanthropist Richard King Mellon” was described by the New York Times (May 13, 2000) as having led this urban removal campaign, dubbed “Renaissance I.” In the Lower Hill District 1,500 Black families were driven out so an arena and luxury apartments could be built.
One result of this relatively smaller Black community was Local 1199 being thrown back when it tried to organize Pittsburgh’s hospitals in 1970. John Black, a founding member of Workers World Party who died in 2006, was one of the organizers. Even today health-care workers’ wages in Pittsburgh are among the lowest in the country.
Source: “Out of the Crucible, Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980,” by Dennis C. Dickerson
The Mellons: Blood, oil and profits
By Stephen Millies
Published Aug 30, 2009 11:54 PM
The Mellon fortune drips with blood and oil from every pore.
Gulf Oil Corp. became the biggest gusher of money for the Mellon family empire. By 1956 it was taking $160 million annually in profits out of Kuwait alone.
Violence was a vital ingredient of this stolen wealth. President Barack Obama admitted in his June 4th Cairo speech that “the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”
The CIA’s “Operation Ajax” overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. It was masterminded by CIA executive Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of President Teddy Roosevelt. Mossadegh’s “crime” was nationalizing his country’s oil.
Iran was plunged into 26 years of dictatorship under the U.S.-imposed Shah. Thousands were tortured to death by the SAVAK secret police, which was modeled on the Nazi Gestapo. SAVAK agents were trained by Herman Norman Schwarzkopf, whose son, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., led the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
This was wonderful for the Mellons, since Gulf Oil got a slice of Iranian oil. Kermit Roosevelt left the CIA and became a Gulf Oil vice president.
As in 1953, the U.S. is once again trying to overthrow a “democratically elected Iranian government.” Congress has approved $400 million for a new CIA destabilization campaign.
U.S. billionaires want to overthrow Iranian President Ahmadinejad, just like they got rid of Prime Minister Mossadegh.
It started in Texas
Croatian immigrant Anthony Lucas was convinced there was oil under an East Texas salt dome. Native people had known this for centuries.
Vindication came on Jan. 10, 1901, when the Spindletop gusher began throwing 100,000 barrels of oil into the sky every day. Nearby Beaumont became a boomtown.
The prospector—whose original name was Luchich—was forced to sell seven-eighths of his stake to Pittsburgh oilmen J.M. Guffey and John H. Galey. These oilmen needed more financing from the biggest Pittsburgh moneylenders—the Mellons.
The J.M. Guffey Petroleum Co. was born with a $15 million capitalization. Lucas—who was a classmate of Serbian electrical genius Nikola Tesla—got $400,000. Galey got something. The workers who risked their lives to put out a huge oil fire at Spindletop got nothing.
Guffey was kicked out by the Mellons in 1907 when Gulf Oil was incorporated. Andrew Mellon’s nephew, William Larimer Mellon, was installed as Gulf’s president.
He had organized the Crescent pipeline, which stretched across Pennsylvania. The Mellons sold it to the Rockefellers’ National Transit pipeline in 1895 for $4 million.
W.L. Mellon then organized a Pittsburgh streetcar monopoly in 1901 valued at $110 million. The Mellons were big into trolleys at that time, since it served their real estate interests.
Big Oil later spent decades destroying trolley systems in the interests of promoting the use of gas-guzzling automobiles. The 700-mile-long Pacific Electric system that once served the Los Angeles area shut down its last line to Long Beach in 1961.
Killing people around the world
Gulf Oil’s pipelines extended into Sapulpa, Okla., where oil was stolen from Native people. The prosperous Greenwood neighborhood in nearby Tulsa—called “Black Wall Street”—was destroyed by white racist mobs in 1921, with hundreds of African Americans killed.
The Gulf Oil refinery at Port Arthur, Texas, became the largest in the world in the 1920s. Black and Mexican workers did the dirtiest work there and got only 25 cents per hour.
Twenty-five sailors burned to death when the company’s tanker “Gulf of Venezuela” blew up in Port Arthur in 1926.
By this time Gulf had plenty of oil wells in Venezuela. The Mellons and Rockefellers backed Juan Vicente Gómez, who was the country’s dictator from 1908 until his death in 1935.
Gómez crushed unions and threw student protesters into chain gangs. Presently, democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías, with Cuban assistance, has brought health care to millions. Yet the corporate media that today attack President Chávez never even mentioned the dictator Gómez.
Gulf Oil was exploiting Mexico before it began ripping off Venezuela. But the Mellons didn’t like one important anti-imperialist result of the Mexican Revolution. In 1938 all the U.S. and British oil companies were thrown out of that country.
Colombia’s congress rejected concessions to Gulf and Standard Oil in 1928. Mellon lawyer Allen Dulles—who later was to be the CIA head during Mossadegh’s overthrow—was outraged. Colombia was forced to back down when its credit was shut off by Wall Street.
Gen. René Barrientos Ortuño staged a phony 1966 election in Bolivia with $800,000 in Gulf Oil bribes. The next year he and the CIA assassinated the heroic revolutionary, Che Guevara.
But Big Oil has now been kicked out of Bolivia.
Next the Mellons went to the Middle East and Africa. U.S. Ambassador to Britain Andrew Mellon demanded and got half of Kuwait’s oil deposits from its colonial overlords in London.
Gulf Oil was the paymaster for the Portuguese fascist regime’s war against the African people of Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.
But African liberation fighters won independence for these countries and their victories also aided the successful struggle against fascism by the Portuguese workers, who overthrew dictator Marcelo Caetano in 1974.
What did working people in Pittsburgh get out of Gulf Oil’s crimes?
When Gulf Oil was taken over by Chevron in 1984, thousands of jobs were lost at its skyscraper headquarters in Pittsburgh. Mellon foundation grants to Carnegie-Mellon University didn’t stop 500 Gulf Oil scientists from being fired.
Sources: “Mellon’s Millions” by Harvey O’Connor and “Paul Mellon: Portrait of an Oil Baron” by William S. Hoffman.
The Mellons: Making people miserable with aluminum
By Stephen Millies
Published Sep 2, 2009 7:18 PM
In 2007 Alcoa’s top boss, Alain Belda, got $25,646,420– nearly a half-million dollars a week. That year the aluminum giant racked up $2.8 billion in profits.
In 2005 workers at Alcoa’s plants in Honduras were making between 68 to 87 cents per hour, according to the International Metalworkers Federation. Alcoa fired all its workers in Honduras when the automotive market plunged in 2008.
In 2001 base pay for the 15,600 Alcoa workers assembling automotive electrical systems in Mexico was $1.20 per hour. Alcoa provoked a work action in Mexico and fired 236 workers. It even sued nine union leaders for $1 million.
This fantastic exploitation of human beings is called imperialism. It’s why people are coming to Pittsburgh in late September to protest the G-20 summit, a gathering of treasury officials and bankers from 20 countries who are plotting how to protect their profits. A National March for Jobs will be held on Sept. 20, which will be followed by a Global Week in Solidarity with the Unemployed.
A 50-year monopoly
Alcoa was founded by the super-rich Mellon family as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company in 1888. Pittsburgh Reduction became the Aluminum Company of America in 1907 and then Alcoa in 1999.
Pittsburgh is also the home of the United Steelworkers union, which represents more than 15,000 Alcoa workers in the U.S. and Canada. The Steelworkers union has endorsed the Sept. 20 Jobs March in Pittsburgh, initiated by the Bail Out the People Movement.
Over the ages, people have learned to use copper, tin, iron and dozens of other metals. It took the Mellons to enforce a 50-year monopoly on aluminum in the United States. They controlled the patents of Charles Hall, who found out how to get alumina from bauxite—aluminum ore—at the same time French inventor Paul Heroult did.
The Cowles brothers, owners of the Electric Smelting & Aluminum Company in Lockport, N.Y., contested Hall’s patent. The brothers claimed that Hall got his ideas from their similar efforts.
But they lost a court battle when federal Judge William Howard Taft ruled for the Pittsburgh Reduction Company and its patents in 1894. Author Harvey O’Connor estimates that Taft’s decision was worth $100 million to the Mellons.
It was a smart decision for Taft, who became a U.S. president and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Taft also served as U.S. Governor-General of the Philippines when hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were massacred.
The Mellons responded to Taft’s decree by jacking up the price of aluminum. After their patents expired, the Mellons used high tariffs to maintain their aluminum monopoly inside the United States. It didn’t hurt that Andrew Mellon was treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932. They also grabbed every bauxite mine.
Prices were kept so high that even Henry Ford complained that he couldn’t afford to use aluminum in his cars. Despite an antitrust suit filed in 1937, Alcoa still controlled 100 percent of all aluminum smelting in the United States as World War II began. They even made half of the country’s aluminum kitchen utensils.
“If America loses this war,” said Interior Secretary Harold Ickes on June 26, 1941, “it can thank the Aluminum Corporation of America.”
The emerging military-industrial complex was forced to break Alcoa’s total monopoly just to get enough aluminum to build planes. A federal court in 1950 carved up production capacity, with Alcoa getting 51 percent, Reynolds 31 percent and Kaiser 18 percent.
Worldwide plunder & strikebreaking in the U.S.
Alcoa also spread misery around the world. Pollutants from the company’s plants in Massena, N.Y., and other industries on the St. Lawrence River have poisoned fish caught downstream by the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne.
Alcoa came to Suriname, then a Dutch colony, in 1916. During World War II, 75 percent of U.S. bauxite imports came from Suriname. In 1963 Alcoa flooded 600 square miles of Surinamese land when the Afobaka Dam was built. Six thousand Maroons, descendants of escaped
enslaved Africans, were driven out; each was given $3 in compensation.
Alcoa imposed draconian trade policies on other countries as well. Jamaica got only 12 cents per ton for its bauxite. When Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley imposed a 7.5 percent levy on the selling price of alumina in 1972, Jamaica’s bauxite revenues increased nine-fold in seven years.
Alcoa retaliated, and Jamaica’s percentage of world bauxite production fell from 27 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 1975. Production was shifted to Guinea and Australia.
In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister and then president of the country, planned to industrialize Ghana by harnessing the Volta River. The plan was thwarted by Alcoa. And in 1966 the company’s friends at the CIA overthrew Nkrumah.
Alcoa was also one of the biggest beneficiaries of the 1965 coup in Indonesia, in which a million people were killed.
The company also brutalized U.S. workers. The New York National Guard broke a 1915 strike at Alcoa’s Massena works and bayoneted strike leader Joseph Solunski to death. In appreciation, Alcoa plant manager Charles Moritz tried to give each guardsman a set of aluminum cooking utensils.
In 1917 an Alcoa subsidiary sparked the race riots in East St. Louis, Ill., in which at least 125 African Americans were murdered.
Workers at Alcoa, Tennessee went on strike in 1934 and 1937, where two strikers were killed. This company town had a segregated neighborhood for Black people.
Only in 1941 were many of Alcoa’s plants organized. The Steelworkers won recognition at the Cressona, Penn., plant in October 2008.
Sources: “Mellon’s Millions” by Harvey O’Connor; “Alcoa’s High Tech Sweatshop in Mexico” by Charles Kernaghan, published by the National Labor Committee.
Next: Mellon’s million-dollar lie machine.
Part 1: Mellons over Pittsburgh and the planet
Part 2: Coal mines and machine guns
Part 3: Keeping Pittsburgh poor
Part 4: Blood, oil and profits
Part 5: Making people miserable with aluminum
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