“The first steelmaking corporations, of course, had done more than simply change individual work processes. They had brought most of them together in huge sprawling complexes that tightly linked each phase of production with the others. Individual departments and processes within departments nonetheless retained some distinctive rhythms and occupational requirements. Some processes were normally continuous, notably the coke ovens, blast furnaces, and open-hearth, while others, especially the smaller rolling mills, were based on batch production. Some, like blast furnaces and rolling mills, required steady, routinized feeding of furnaces or machinery, while others required more erratic bursts of frantic exertion, especially tapping furnaces. There was, in short, a great variety of work in a steel plant that did not necessarily lead to a common occupational experience for the industry's workers.
In many ways, the sum of all the technological innovations was greater than its parts. Besides the changes in individual stages of production, it was the thorough integration of the plants that was so remarkable. Every plant was a maze of tracks for numerous railways, cranes, and conveyers. Raw materials moved along these to coke ovens and blast furnaces; liquid pig iron was swept off to the open-hearths at the end of giant cranes; steel ingots were shunted off to the rolling mills, where cranes and conveyors carried the steel forward. In contrast to past practices, there was far less remelting and reheating of the metal as it moved through the plants. Early twentieth-century steelmaking did not involve an assembly line, but there was definitely an integrated flow-through. For the most part, moreover, the plants ran continuously throughout the year, rather than on the seasonal basis that had characterized much nineteenth-century production. In fact, several departments ran non-stop twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. Mechanization therefore brought not only greater volume of production from the new facilities, but also greater speed and intensity and, for the workers, greater pressure to keep up.
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Most contemporary reports nonetheless emphasized how the Canadian steel industry, like its American counterpart, had been transformed by the machine. The Journal of Commerce's editor, A.R.R. Jones, applied the label "gigantic automaton" to the "typical all-round Canadian steel plant" that he visited (clearly Stelco's Hamilton plant), in which "the labor in every branch of the industry consists mainly in the supervision and maintenance of machinery." What was missing from these glowing descriptions of mechanization was what the steelworkers who worked with this new technology every day had discovered. It was remarkably dangerous. The intense heat from furnaces alone could inspire fear, but the showers of sparks from ladles of molten metal could actually sear the flesh of nearby workers. Photographs of steel production from these early years indicate how little protective clothing or equipment was used. The noise could be similarly fearsome. One man described how on his first day in Algoma's plant he could not hear a train that he suddenly discovered was passing inches from his back. Not surprisingly, an American writer found that many of the steelworkers he met had hearing problems. If the men were not dodging locomotives or machines whose tracks criss-crossed the plants, they were scampering out of the way of ladles, moulds, and great hunks of glowing steel that soared through the air at the end of giant cranes. For one Stelco worker, the first day on the job was "like entering another world." For another man at Algoma, this mechanized work world seemed like "organized confusion." Stress would inevitably become a new occupational hazard in such a fearsome workplace.”
- Craig Heron, Working in Steel: The Early Years in Canada, 1883-1935 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 48-49.
