JOE GYURKO

Joe Gyurko was a union man. His whole life was dedicated to the fight for

social justice for all working people. His own words best show what he was

about, and Ruth Needleman of IUN and I have interviewed him a number of

times. I worked with Joe for many years at Local 1010 of the United

Steelworkers of America (USWA). He was a mentor to me. A real leader,

who walked the walk. Like the fabled Joe Hill, Joe never seemed to miss a

picket line or a demonstration. If there was a fight for people’s rights, Joe

was in it.

I met Joe and his wife Mary in 1970. I was a young radical "Independent

Democrat" running for City Council in Hessville. I was for open housing.

Not knowing the Gyurkos at all, I went to the house to meet them and ask

for their support.

  The very first question they asked me was how I stood on open

housing!  I thought, oh boy, I sure hope I'm not in the wrong place!

Well, I confessed I was for open housing, and the rest is history. Your

father walked the precinct door to door for our campaign, I joined the

Rank & File and Joe and Mary became an inspiration to me.

Born in Chicago in 1919, the same year as the Great Steel Strike, Joe

Gyurko embodied the labor struggle for justice and equality. He dedicated

his life to fighting for workers’ rights, from his first day in the steel mill to

his final years as an active SOAR member and president of his local chapter

(Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees).

Joe Gyurko was a first generation Midwesterner. His father was an

immigrant from Hungary, and one of many who walked the picket lines at

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US Steel South Works during the 1919 steel strike. His mother emigrated in

1912 also from Hungary.

Joe grew up in the 1920s in Chicago and was in high school for most of the

Depression years, 1934-1938. While still in school, he worked at Goldblatt’s

but got fired for refusing to work for free on Sundays—even that early in his

life. Goldblatt’s had workers come in Sundays to do inventory but never

paid them. Joe refused and ended up in court testifying against the company.

The books proved he had not been paid for Sunday work but he got fired

anyway—Joe’s first lesson in how the system works against workers!

In 1923 the Gyurkos built a house in Hammond, where the family remained.

The bank almost took it back during the Great Depression. Joe went to

Hammond Tech. The ’37 graduating class all got jobs but when Joe

graduated in ‘38 there was nothing—except another depression. He finally

got hired into a steel mill in ‘39. He worked 4 days at Youngstown Sheet

and Tube, but there was not enough work to hold him, and Inland had called

him. “Inland called me and goodbye!” is the way Joe Gyurko put it.

Gyurko recalled his first day in the mill. “When I walked in my first day, it

was the pipe mill at Youngstown, it was filthy dirty, gassy, the ovens where

they heated the bars… the flames were just shooting out. All the gas, just

coming out, and crazy cranemen would take the racks right over your head.”

He was relieved to hire in at Inland, where he went into the Tin Mill. Joe’s

first job was “packing tin.”

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Before his first month was over, Joe was wearing the November union

button of the Steelworkers’ Lodge 1010. “I wasn’t even in the mill 30 days.”

“You paid your dues every month and you got a different color button,” Joe

explained in an interview. “I think that one was orange and black.” From

1939 on, Joe held union positions, from dues steward to griever to chairman

of the Grievance Committee, in many ways the most important job in the

union local. As a retiree he served as president of his local’s SOAR chapter.

Joe’s wife Mary Obradovich was a woman union activist as well. Mary was

one of a small group of women WWII workers who took an active lead in

the union. She was the 1st woman to hold office in Local 1010. They were

married for 53 yrs

Joe Gyurko moved around the mill for a while, but then spent most of his

shop-floor days in the Open Hearth as an electrician and a union

representative. Joe led and participated in a number of wildcat strikes in the

1940’s. Joe was a union man every minute of his life; he fought Inland to

win seniority rights for every worker, and forced the company to abide by

the contract. During the forties his efforts opened decent jobs for minorities

in the open hearth, especially Mexican and Puerto Rican workers. He even

took on his union brothers in the fight for equality; he challenged established

sequences set up to exclude minority workers.

Due to his persistence, the jobs became integrated. Gyurko was one of the

first rank and file steelworkers to support plantwide seniority. As a result of

his support for minorities, the white workers in his department un-elected

Joe, but integrity and equality were more important to him than looking out

for himself. When Inland bought the Lincoln Hotel in the late forties to

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house Puerto Rican workers brought in under “Operation Bootstraps,” Joe

found out that the Company was deducting room, board and more from their

paychecks. He would take the workers with their pay stubs and deductions to

demand their pay. “They were padding all the bills, putting bricks and stuff

on there, and charging them triple what anything cost. I got them their

money back.” Joe was a 24-hour union rep. “I remember one day the walls

were shaking, I was hollering so much. When I came out of there, the

company agreed with me on everything,” he remembered.

When the new Open Hearth opened in the early fifties, Joe Gyurko

transferred there and had to fight the battle all over again to get minorities

into the cranes and out of the pits. In Joe’s words, “the shovel in the open

hearth didn’t know the difference between English and Spanish.” In the end,

Inland workers recognized that Joe could not be bought or turned against his

union values and ideals, and they re-elected him repeatedly.

Joe Gyurko was proud of his local’s reputation. It was known in the past as

“the red local” for its militancy. “We were, I think, the most outspoken local

in the whole industry,” noted Gyurko. “Everybody looked to us for what we

were doing, and then they followed.” Joe campaigned door to door for

Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948, as he did

for many progressives. To the end, Joe walked the walk. Joe also recalled

the House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings in Gary in the late

fifties. Activists from the local were being harassed during the McCarthy

period. “They were public hearings,” Joe said. “I know I was there.” Right

after the Hearings Joe was un-elected again, but then workers put him back

in office.

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During the fifties, according to Joe, the union leadership changed, and after

financial misappropriations, it went into administratorship. “The main issue

was fighting the company, not putting more restrictions on the membership,”

explained Joe. During this period, the union was discouraging rank and file

activism.

Joe’s caucus, the “Rank and File,” never stopped mobilizing the members,

however, and by the sixties, Joe and others were back in office.

Joe was a member of the Rank & File Caucus of Local 1010 until his

retirement, serving on its steering committee and as Treasurer for many

years.

Joe felt that the union really changed once it started paying people to do

union work. “If you’re doing it for nothing,” he pointed out, “you’re doing it

because you know it’s the right thing to do, and you want to do it because

it’s helping the membership. You start paying for the work, then that’s a

question, ‘are you doin’ it for the money?’ It used to burn me up, when the

first thing you hear from somebody who wants to run for office, ‘how much

does it pay?’ Then you know, scratch that one off!”

Joe expressed concern for the future of the union, as the company got more

sophisticated. “You know as the unions got stronger, the company did too.

They started putting on more people in more departments. I’ve heard it said,

throw the damn contract out and settle things on a day-to-day basis right on

the shop floor! You’d be better off. When we had a gripe, we got the gang

together and went up and saw the superintendent.… Today you get a bunch

of letters. ..When I was griever in #1 open hearth, I’d put the word out—I

got a meeting with the superintendent, all you guys gotta be there.”

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In those days, Joe added, “the people were more involved. They felt they did

something toward their own end. It was a victory for them as well as the

griever, because they got to go into the office and confront the

superintendent. I did that in the mold foundry. I called for a meeting on

safety. I says I want all you guys up in the office. Close to 100 came up… A

group of people carries more weight than the best union representatives.”

Joe resented how bureaucratic the grievance procedure became because it

left out the workers on the shop floor. “I kept preaching at negotiations,” Joe

remembered, “settle the damn grievances on the ground floor…You get a

group of workers in there, and that’s what they’re scared of.”

To anybody active in the labor movement today I’d say, try to be like Joe

Gyurko, and you’ll be among the truly great.

Joe helped elect the first African American president of Local 1010 USWA,

William Bill Andrews who served 3 terms.

He supported and worked for the campaigns of Ed Sadlowski for USWA

president and Jim Balanoff, USWA District 31 Director.

Joe was a founder of the first Environmental Committee in the USWA at

local 1010 in 1972. He worked tirelessly for environmental and safe-energy

causes.

Joe Gyurko made a big difference for workers in his lifetime. He improved

working conditions, raised wages and forced the company to provide equal

treatment and some justice in the workplace. Most of all, he emphasized, “I

knew who the enemy was. I instilled in the people…you got to always fight

them. The company tries to lull you to sleep.” Long after retirement, Joe

recounted that he’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking if he should

have done anything differently. “Sometimes I think of things that should

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have been addressed and never got addressed, time you kept your mouth

shut and you shouldn’t have.” What counted were principles. “You got your

principles, and you think you’re right, stick to them. Win or lose.” One

question he had as he watched the layoffs and downsizing in the 1980s, “I

could never figure out why the hell didn’t they do what they did in the

thirties?” His remedy for the situation was simple: “Massive education

program. It has start all the way from the bottom to the top. You got to get

them when they’re kids, in high school.”

“There’s not enough emphasis on where we’ve been, what it took to get to

where we are today, and how we’d get it.” Joe Gyurko walked that tough

path from the union’s beginning. He never stopped fighting, never shut his

mouth, and always brought all the rank and file workers along with him. He

was the best union man I ever knew.

We miss him.

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Personal Tribute to JoeRuth Needleman

I had only been in NW Indiana 2 months when I met Joe. I sat down next to

him on a USW 1010 bus headed to DC for Solidarity Day, 1981. The more

he talked, and Joe could talk, the more I felt I had landed in the right place,

coming here. What an outspoken, down-to-earth, dedicated grass-roots

unionist! It didn’t take long for me to realize he was one of kind.

Joe believed in a union run by the rank and file. He wanted to settle every

grievance by calling a hundred guys into the superintendent’s office, using

power where the union had it, right there on the shop floor. He stood for the

principles that made unions strong: solidarity, equality and fairness, and he

made his choices based on his principles, not his own self-interest. He

fought discrimination in the mill and the community, integrating jobs,

sequences, departments, restaurants and movie theaters, at the expense, mind

you, of being re-elected. “Win or lose,” he told me, “you got to do what’s

best for the workers.” He lost a number of elections because of stands he

took, but he won even more because of his principles.

Joe used to come to my labor studies classes to talk with the younger

generation of workers. He always had time to mentor those coming up

behind him. He wanted everyone to love the union the way he did,

unconditionally with passion, despite all its shortcomings or even betrayals.

His stories about the early days as a dues steward, catching the guys trying

to climb over the fence without paying, and as a union negotiator “hollering

‘til the walls shook.” He painted a vision of what the union had been and

what it should be. Democracy didn’t scare him. Education didn’t scare him.

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He never coveted his union position; he took it as a 24-7 responsibility to

bring justice into the workplace.

I remember all those freezing cold Saturday mornings down on rt. 30,

leafleting for Bridgestone-Firestone workers. Joe, in his late seventies, was

always there, with Johnnie Mayerik, first president of 1014, who was in his

late eighties. All kinds of leaders had excuses for not showing up, or leaving

early. Not Joe. He was Mr. Reliable.

I told my classes this week about Joe Gyurko, because the newer generation

never knew him nor the other pioneers whose lives were given to build

democratic and militant unionism in NW Indiana. We need Joe today; we

need his clarity and commitment. His passion, and his persistence. As he

told me in one of the interviews I did with him back in the eighties, “these

guys today,” he said shaking his head, “are so busy fighting each other, they

don’t even know any more who the enemy is.” Joe knew which side he was

on, and he knew what would make the union strong. Long live Joe’s kind of

unionism! Thank you, Joe, for everything.

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