February 12, 2013
Speaker: CHARLES McCOLLESTER
About the Speaker: Author of “The Point of Pittsburgh” and director of the Pa. Center for the Study of Labor Relations, and professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Indiana University of PA.
McCollester has written a new and different history of Pittsburgh —“The Point of Pittsburgh” — and by doing so has assembled in a remarkable way a history of this country. –from:William Serrin, former labor and workplace correspondent for The New York Times
Charles McCollester is the director of the Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Labor Relations and a professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He holds a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Louvain in Belgium. He was a machinist and the Chief Steward of UE 610 at the Union Switch and Signal in Swissvale Pennsylvania. He edited Fighter With a Heart: Writings of Charles Owen Rice, Pittsburgh Labor Priest (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).
The “1913 Stogie Strike” — The most successful strike in Pittsburgh during this period was the IWW led strike of the stogie workers in the Hill District, in 1913. Led largely by Jewish immigrants and socialists, the stogie workers had been denied membership in the AFL in 1912. They joined the IWW the following year and went on strike for eighteen weeks.
Squirrel Hill Historical Society 