Charlie’s Monday Marker ~ Episode 24: Pittsburgh Working-Class Sports

JULY 1933: U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins visited Homestead and Pittsburgh, speaking to hundreds of steelworkers ... Perkins was the first woman named to a White House cabinet position and known as "The Architect of the New Deal" and a solid advocate for worker rights.

PITTSBURGH WAS the site of one of the landmark gatherings of modern unionism — the founding on Nov. 14, 1938, of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), with 34 unions represented and spirited invocation delivered by Fr. Charles Owen Rice, who would gain fame as Pittsburgh’s “labor priest” in an activist career spanning 60+ years.

IN 1937, in the case of National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, or Wagner Act.