Mill Crew

By the 1880s, the millworking population of Pittsburgh had become a mixture of different ethnicities, religions, languages. At the top of the hierarchy were those groups who had come to Pittsburgh the earliest and who had brought with them metal working knowledge from Europe. British, Welsh, Irish, German, and other Anglo workers held the highest paying and most skilled positions in the mill, and were as a result also the top of the union’s power structure. With the introduction of new technologies like Bessemer Converters in the late 1800s that allowed both for mass production and standardization of methodology, Eastern Europeans, Italians, and other new immigrants with less of a background in metalworking found jobs in the mills as well.