More Than a Union Hall
For nearly seven decades, the United Steelworkers Hall Local 1190 on South Third Street in Steubenville, Ohio, was more than just a place to file grievances and vote on contracts. The two-story brick building was central to the communal life of generations of steelworkers and their families. It was where they held wedding receptions; where their kids got Christmas gift bags; and where, sometimes, families first learned that their husband or son was not coming home from the mill. The union hall was also one of the only public venues in town where second- and third-generation immigrants, as well as black steelworkers, could mingle as part of one union family.
Today, it stands—like many former businesses, homes, and churches in Steubenville—empty. The union hall is a victim of both the collapse of America’s steel industry and the decimation of organized labor. Steubenville, which lies on the Ohio River bordering West Virginia, is the prototypical Rust Belt town. So much so that it was one of the locations for the 1978 film The Deerhunter, which follows a group of steelworker friends serving in the Vietnam War. At one point, Steubenville was home to some 30,000 steelworkers and an equally strong labor movement. But that was decades ago. With the local manufacturing economy destroyed, the steelworker hall is largely an artifact of the past, just another empty building on another empty block.
Too often, analysts describe the decline of unions solely in terms of political economy. As important as that is, America lost something else when we lost strong local unions. Local 1190 was just one of thousands of now-shuttered union halls across the industrial heartland that served as critical community institutions, a flourishing civil society that stood between the individual worker and the forces of concentrated corporate power.
Rebuilding associational life in the United States in the age of TikTok, hostile partisanship, and collapsing social capital is an enormous challenge. Still, it is hard to think of any institution that would be a better place to start than the labor movement.