In early April, UE Communications Director Jonathan Kissam presented these remarks at a panel at the Organization of American Historians’ 2025 Conference on American History in Chicago. The panel was about the legacy of labor historian David Montgomery, who was a rank-and-file member of UE Local 475 before he became an historian. Kissam spoke about Montgomery’s life-long connection to the labor movement and popular struggles, and how that engagement provides a model for how intellectuals can make their work relevant to the public and to workers in particular.
David Montgomery meant a lot to UE. He addressed more UE conventions as a guest speaker than anyone except Bernie Sanders. Following his remarks to the 1975 UE convention, in San Francisco, UE General President Albert Fitzgerald said to the delegates, “instead of having Dave with us only three times, we ought to make him an annual fixture” — a suggestion that was greeted with enthusiastic applause.
In my experience, and in the experience of my union, UE, which was also of course David Montgomery’s union before he became an historian, workers — at least those workers engaged in collective struggle through labor unions — have a nearly insatiable hunger for the history not only of their unions, but of their class and how it has been shaped by, and has shaped, history. And David Montgomery’s focus on exactly those questions, and his ability to explain them in plain language, helped him really connect with our members, as President Fitzgerald said.
Montgomery first addressed a UE convention in 1966, three years after he took his first teaching position at the University of Pittsburgh. It was the first UE convention held in the Steel City and Montgomery, like many of us who move there, had clearly developed a strong attachment to the ‘Burgh. In welcoming UE delegates to his new city, he said “I can guarantee you that I am not going to trace the whole history of Pittsburgh labor,” and then proceeded to do just that, beginning in 1815 with a trial of 21 shoemakers for “conspiring with force and arms to extort higher wages from their employers.” The judge in that case took it upon himself, as Montgomery put it, to explain that “the interest of the manufacturers must see to it … that never should they be interfered with by any kind of organization.”
Montgomery then proceeded to detail the ebbs and flows of unionism in Pittsburgh, from the women cotton mill workers in Allegheny City striking for the 10-hour day in the 1840s through the rise of craft unionism in the mid-19th century and the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the Homestead Strike, the 1916 strike led by the IWW at the giant Westinghouse plant in East Pittsburgh, and the eventual triumph of industrial unionism in the 1930s and 40s. Throughout his presentation, he weaved in themes that will be familiar to anyone who has read his academic work: the ways workers sought to control their own lives, the vibrant working-class culture of solidarity that they built as they did so, the ways that their agency was circumscribed by the power of the state, the role of women workers and immigrants, and the way that changes in the structure of capitalism shifted the terrain that workers were fighting upon.
In 1973, the UE convention returned to Pittsburgh, and David Montgomery was again a featured speaker. This time, instead of talking about labor history, he gave delegates an analysis of the rise of multinational corporations. Drawing on his recent experience in England, where Chrysler had just acquired the Rootes Motor Company in Coventry, close to where he was teaching at Warwick, he explained how multinationals were financing their overseas acquisitions by extracting more productivity from workers, and extracting more productivity from workers by encouraging them to “compete” against workers in other countries. He connected this to the history of scientific management, and the history of workers’ struggles against it. Referencing the convention resolution on “The Menace of the Multinational Corporations,” he hailed UE’s call to establish connections with workers in other countries, and explained the practical ways in which international solidarity could be used to curb the power of multinationals.
Finally, he gave a warning about the threat of multinational corporations to democracy, which had been demonstrated with shocking clarity just the day before by the military coup in Chile. “Precisely here where an experiment was made by one of the strongest workers’ movements in the Western Hemisphere to get control over their own lives and their own industries, away from the I.T.T. and Kennecott and the other multinationals … precisely there the Four Insurgent Generals seized control.”
Two years later, Montgomery spoke to the 40th UE Convention, held in San Francisco. At this convention, he focused specifically on the history of UE, beginning his remarks by saying that through all of his time in academia, “one thing has been very clear to me: That the basic training that I received, the touchstone I learned of what good, meaningful rank-and-file American unionism was all about is what I learned in this union.”
He focused his remarks on three important moments in the history of UE. First, the lesson, learned very early on in our union’s existence, of the necessity of organizing the employed and the unemployed together. Second, the role of UE in “mobilizing a united front of the whole labor movement” during the 1946 strike wave. And third, the fight to keep rank-and-file unionism alive in the face of Cold War attacks. He suggested that these principles, of uniting the employed and unemployed, of mobilizing the whole working class around a common program, and of developing that program based on the needs of the workers rather than dictates from Washington or the Democratic Party, would be essential to confronting the crisis of simultaneous unemployment and inflation that working people found themselves dealing with in the mid-70s.
Montgomery not only addressed UE national conventions, he also contributed to the UE NEWS, writing a feature about the Homestead strike on its 75th anniversary in 1967, a report about British Ford workers striking against speedup in 1969, following his years in England, and a review of Them and Us, the memoir written by UE’s first Director of Organization, James Matles, when it was published in 1973.
In the 1960s and 70s, Montgomery spoke at a number of events in the Pittsburgh area with UE Local 610 Business Agent Tom Quinn, on topics ranging from “what’s ahead for labor” to the war in Vietnam. In 1974, he addressed a conference on energy prices organized by UE District 6 in Western Pennsylvania. He connected the prices people were seeing at the pump with the structure of the capitalist enterprises responsible for them, pointing out that the oil firms were really an “energy trust” which also owned coal mines and atomic energy facilities, and also explained the role of U.S. imperialism in energy production.
Shortly after he arrived in New Haven, Connecticut to teach at Yale, Montgomery showed up on the picket line at Harco Labs, a small manufacturer of electrical equipment in nearby Branford, Connecticut, where 70 workers, mostly women, had to strike their employer for 12 weeks to win a first UE contract. In 1983, he addressed a meeting of UE’s New England District 2, breaking down how Ronald Reagan’s policies aimed to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich. And although he was now teaching at an Ivy League university, he clearly knew which side he was on, joining workers from the Circuitwise factory in North Haven when they picketed a Yale class reunion in 1989 during their multi-year struggle for a first contract. (Their company’s president and vice president were both Yale class of 1964.)
As he did at the 1966 UE convention, Montgomery looked for the deep historical roots of current struggles, and in 1983 he made a presentation to the members of UE Local 243, which represents workers at the Sargent Lock company in New Haven, about a 1902 strike in their plant. Like many of the industrial strikes of that era, it was made possible because the 90 percent of workers who did not fall under an AFL craft union jurisdiction — mostly Italian immigrants, and including some 300 women — proved not only willing but eager to fight to improve their conditions. And like many of the industrial strikes of that era, it fell apart because individual craft unions made deals with the company — and within a year, the company had picked even those unions off one by one. As Montgomery pointed out to the UE members, “This was the kind of lesson in the minds of the oldtimers in the 1930s when they thought about the kind of union they wanted” and formed Local 243.
In his final address to a UE convention, in 2009 in New Haven, he returned to the 1902 Sargent strike. In telling the story twenty-five years later, in an era in which immigration had become a divisive issue within the working class, he made a point of emphasizing the key role that Italian immigrants had played in the strike. “Time and again in the history of this country,” he reminded delegates, “the American workers’ movement has received a new shot of strength, energy and ideas from recent immigrants.”
In closing, the key point I want to make about Montgomery’s engagement with the labor movement is that of course, his willingness to just show up at a picket line, and to speak to union audiences, was of huge importance. And his decade of experience as a skilled machinist naturally helped him connect to workers. But of at least equal importance was his intellectual insistence on the centrality of class, and of workers’ experience in the workplace because, at least in my experience, and the experience of the UE more broadly, that is precisely the way that you can in fact engage working people in conversations about immigration, about gender, about race and imperialism and the importance of international solidarity — all topics that Montgomery addressed in his remarks to UE members.
In this moment when the working class in the U.S. is increasingly polarized around immigration, gender, race, and a host of other issues, when we are arguably seeing working class “de-formation,” we need more historians like David Montgomery, who can speak to workers’ experiences in the workplace, explain the structural and historical roots of their conditions, and give them a sense of the lessons that workers have learned over centuries of struggle. As he said at the conclusion of his remarks to the 1973 UE convention, “The workers that rose to those occasions will do it again. We have no choice.”
See also:
- “David Montgomery’s Rank-and-File History,” a review of A David Montgomery Reader (2025)
- “David Montgomery, Prominent Labor Historian and Friend of UE, Dies at 84” (2012)
- “Collective Bargaining, Labor History, Fair Economy Top Monday Morning's Convention Agenda” (UE NEWS coverage of Montgomery’s remarks to the 2009 UE convention)
