Former Steelworker President George Becker Dies

Pittsburgh -- George Becker, a second-generation steelworker who became the sixth international president of the United Steelworkers (USW), died Saturday at his home in Gibsonia, Pa., surrounded by his family, following a long battle with prostate cancer. He was 78.

Mr. Becker, who served seven years as the union’s international president, was a respected union organizer and strategist and an internationally-known spokesman for industrial safety, workers’ rights on the job and fair global trade. He was elected president in 1993 and again in 1997.

“George did as much as any president in our history to strengthen our union,’’ said USW President Leo W. Gerard, who served as international secretary-treasurer under Becker and succeeded him as president in 2001. “He was a powerful voice for the interests of our members. He had a unique ability to give voice to the frustrations and concerns of workers, their right to be treated with dignity and decency – values he believed in deeply.”

Internally, Mr. Becker convinced the Union’s Executive Board to take an historic step in consolidating the USW’s administrative districts in the U.S. from 18 to nine and the size of the Executive Board correspondingly. The move increased the efficiency and political strength of the Union. He also persuaded hundreds of smaller local unions to join forces by amalgamating for the same reasons.

He also orchestrated mergers with the United Rubber Workers and the Aluminum, Brick and Glass Workers Union, bringing 140,000 new members to the USW.

Whether it was a local strike or an international trade battle, Mr. Becker sought to involve the USW membership through education and mobilization. He launched the union’s pioneering Rapid Response program, which activates workers and their local unions to lobby Congress and state legislatures on issues crucial to them, and the Legislative Leadership Program in Washington, D.C., which provides member-activists with training in lobbying and political action.

Rapid Response was created by Mr. Becker to influence legislative decision making after he cut off “soft money” contributions to political parties because they were not sufficiently effective in supporting the USW members’ interests.

“George’s legacy within the union is that he put a lot of attention into what we call empowerment today. He believed there is tremendous power in the union and that we have to harness it,” said international Secretary-Treasurer James English, who served as Mr. Becker’s executive assistant for seven years.

Prior to his election as president, Mr. Becker served two terms as the union’s international vice president for administration starting in 1985. He chaired the union’s Aluminum Industry Conference and led its collective bargaining in that industry.

In 1986, a year after he became vice president, Mr. Becker was put in charge of mobilizing members for what became a long lockout by USX Corp., the first labor dispute since 1959 against what is now U.S. Steel.

Mr. Becker also led the union’s organizing program as vice president and organized several major corporate campaigns, the best known of which targeted Ravenswood Aluminum, a West Virginia company that in 1990 locked out 1,700 USW employees and hired permanent replacements. The conduct of the campaign is chronicled in Ravenswood, The Steelworkers’ Victory and the Revival of American Labor, by Kate Bronfenbrenner and Tom Juravich.

The fight at Ravenswood, led by fugitive international financier Marc Rich of Switzerland, took the union across international borders in Europe and South America as it appealed for support from companies, customers and financial backers.

In 1992, the permanent replacements were fired and Steelworkers returned to their jobs at Ravenswood. It was a victory both for workers in the small town of Ravenswood and for the entire labor movement, proving that unions could still win, and win big against a large corporation.

Immediately following the merger with the Rubberworkers Union, Mr. Becker led a similar 28-month worldwide campaign against Bridgestone/Firestone, which had fired 6,000 workers. That campaign also resulted in a new contract and the return to work of the thousands of union’s members.

Mr. Becker shifted more of the union’s resources into organizing and played a leading role in promoting the 1995 election of John J. Sweeney as president of the AFL-CIO, who ran on a campaign to revitalize the labor movement.

Nowhere was Mr. Becker’s voice more powerful, though, than in the struggles against unfair trade, an issue that held his interest into retirement as an appointed member of the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission. Mr. Becker also served on the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission and during the Clinton Administration was a member of the President’s Export Council and the U.S. Trade and Environmental Policy Advisory Committee.

In the continuing fight for the survival of the steel industry, Mr. Becker was instrumental in establishing Stand Up For Steel, an alliance of the union and steel producers that fights unfair trade practices, including the illegal dumping of foreign steel on U.S. markets.

Mr. Becker was a tireless opponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he relentlessly indicted for wiping out hundreds of thousands of family-supportive U.S. jobs. He led the union’s executive board members on trips across the border to witness Mexican workers living in abject poverty while working in state-of-the-art plants owned by U.S.-based companies in the maquilladoras.

“NAFTA was the greatest betrayal of workers in my lifetime,” Mr. Becker said while president. “NAFTA was never intended to protect workers – NAFTA was intended to protect industrialists and bankers. The only institution that protects working people is the union movement.”

He got an early look at industrial life and unionism. As a boy, Mr. Becker grew up yards from his father’s employer, Granite City Steel in Illinois, where the heat was so intense it penetrated the doorway to the family home. In 1944, at 15, he took a job on an open hearth labor gang.

His early work background also included stints of employment as a crane operator at General Steel Castings and as an assembler at the General Motors Fisher Body plant in St. Louis.

He twice served the country in its armed forces, first as a Marine toward the end of World War II and again during the Korean War, when he was drafted into the U.S. Army, owing to a critical shortage of light weapons infantry leaders.

On July 21, 1950, he married Jane Goforth, who supported him in his advocacy for workers for more than 56 years, along the way establishing herself as an accomplished political organizer.

In those early years, Mr. Becker hired on at a new Dow Chemical aluminum rolling mill in Madison, Ill. He became a shop steward for Local 4804, local treasurer and then vice president. By 1961 he was the local union’s president.

Tom Griffin, an International Staff Representative, took Mr. Becker under his wing, encouraged him and taught him to debate, to bargain and to cost out benefits. By 1965, Lloyd McBride, then director of the former District 34, appointed Mr. Becker as a staff representative in Granite City.

It was as a staff representative that Mr. Becker came into contact with the adverse effects of lead poisoning at a plant he serviced, National Lead, and his outrage over what he saw there led him to become an expert on occupational health issues.

Workers at the plant were punch drunk with lead poisoning. Mr. Becker discovered that the employer was saving money by nightly turning off the bagging system used to purify the air. Reforms were initiated, including clean changing rooms, mandatory showers before leaving work and lead testing for the plant’s neighbors. He soon was pressing for safety and health reforms throughout the District and the union.

That activism led to his appointment as a technician in the union’s health and safety department at Pittsburgh headquarters and to meet former President Lynn Williams, then Director of District 6 in Canada.

In 1969, Mr. Becker testified as an expert witness on lead poisoning before Congress as it was debating the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA).

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Becker was instrumental in proposing OSHA safety standards for exposure to lead and for the use of arsenic. As a result of his efforts, workers who are exposed to lead must be removed from exposure without loss of pay and cannot be returned to work until blood lead levels are reduced.

Near the end of I.W. Abel’s tenure as third President of USWA, Mr. Becker took a leave of absence from the headquarters staff to run the campaign of then District Director Lloyd McBride for president of the union against a dissident challenger, Edward Sadlowski, Jr. McBride won the 1977 election and named Mr. Becker an assistant to Williams, who had just been elected the union’s international secretary.

After Mr. McBride died in office in 1983, Williams ran for interim president and was elected. In 1985, Mr. Becker ran for election as vice president on the Williams slate, replacing the retiring Joe Odorcich.

Williams was another mentor to Mr. Becker. When Williams retired, he proposed that Mr. Becker lead the team that succeeded him. Mr. Becker became the first person since USW founder Phillip Murray to be elected president of the union without an election challenge or without the death of a predecessor.
Mr. Becker is survived by his wife Jane; three sons, George, Greg, and Matthew; 10 grandchildren; five great grandchildren; and a sister, Jacqueline Straus.

Visitation will be at the Slater Funeral Home, 1650 Greentree Road, Pittsburgh from 3:00 to 8:00 p.m., Monday, February 5. A memorial service will be held at the funeral home on Tuesday, February 6, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Becker will be interred at St. John’s Cemetery in his hometown of Granite, Ill. The family has asked that any donations in Mr. Becker’s name be directed to Habitat for Humanity.