Chapter 4
The Long Turn: Steel Workers' Brutal Battle Against Sleep
At the turn of the twentieth century, American steelworkers endured a brutal system of long hours that guaranteed sleep deprivation. In mills operating 24/7/365, workers faced twelve-hour days and seven-day weeks, totaling 84 hours weekly. Most punishing was the "long turn" - a 24-hour double shift workers endured every other weekend when rotating from day to night shifts. This schedule, combined with uncomfortable sleeping quarters, produced widespread shift work sleep disorder and workplace injuries.
The system emerged from dramatic power imbalances between labor and capital. Technological advances like the Bessemer process and open-hearth technology had devalued traditional ironworking skills, creating numerous unskilled positions filled largely by Eastern European immigrants. Andrew Carnegie's crushing defeat of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers at Homestead in 1892 eliminated the only real countervailing power in the industry.
Before 1892, eight-hour shifts had existed in some plants. Carnegie himself had once advocated three eight-hour shifts for continuous operations, and his superintendent Bill Jones had praised shorter hours for allowing workers "sixteen hours to rest." But Carnegie reversed course in 1887, locking out employees at the Edgar Thomson Works and imposing twelve-hour shifts. After Homestead, the twelve-hour day became standard across the industry.
The seven-day schedule, once limited to blast furnaces where shutdowns would damage equipment, expanded after 1892 to roughly a quarter of all production workers by 1910. Despite U.S. Steel's 1907 declaration of intent to abolish seven-day schedules, implementation remained inconsistent, especially during World War I's labor shortages.
Most devastating was the weekly rotation between day and night shifts. Rather than allowing workers to adjust over longer periods, most mills flipped shifts every week, with some using biweekly changes. The transition from days to nights required the infamous "long turn" - a twenty-four hour shift beginning Sunday morning. After twelve hours off Monday, workers returned at 6 PM for a week of night work. The novelist Thomas Bell described the second twelve hours of a long turn as a state where "exhaustion slowly numbed his body, mercifully fogged his mind; he ceased to be a human being."
Steel executives refused to acknowledge sleep deprivation as a problem, instead boasting of their own supposed stamina. Andrew Carnegie spoke of "problems which tax the minds of business men during the dark hours of the night, when their employees are asleep." William Field, a U.S. Steel superintendent, claimed he once worked seventy-two sleepless hours troubleshooting a problem. Chairman Elbert Gary "could not comprehend why any other man should be unwilling to work as long and as hard as he had."
The sleep deprivation was severe. Workers on night shifts often managed only three to five hours of sleep per day. Even this meager rest was frequently interrupted - what researcher Margaret Byington called "broken sleep." Daytime sleepers contended with crying babies, playing children, and household noise. In Thomas Bell's novel, an exhausted laborer tried to sleep during an August day but "sprawled on a bed that grew sticky with his sweat, gasped for air and in wakeful sleep kept confusing the buzzing of flies with sounds from the mill" while his baby "whimpered endlessly in the kitchen."
Housing conditions exacerbated sleep problems. Low pay and housing shortages forced many workers to share beds with multiple people, exposing them to snoring, coughing, and restless movements. Some workers combined simultaneous and sequential bed-sharing, with four men using one bed in rotation. Overcrowding was extreme - Pittsburgh's South Side had eighty-four residents per acre by 1890, with buildings subdivided into tiny rooms. Half of Slavic immigrant families had someone sleeping in the kitchen.
The worst overcrowding occurred in boarding houses run by immigrant families who took in single laborers. Margaret Byington discovered one Bulgarian family of four sharing their modest Homestead home with twenty boarders, fitting twenty-four people into just two rooms. During winter, everyone slept in the kitchen - the only warm place.
Workers developed coping strategies to minimize sleep deprivation. Many simply collapsed from exhaustion after shifts, falling asleep on streetcars while commuting home. As one worker recalled, "When I got home in the evening all I would do is go to sleep. I couldn't even pick up a piece of bread, my fingers were so racked up." Some workers became "slumber camels," storing up sleep before long turns. Many sacrificed rare free Sundays to catch up on lost sleep rather than socialize or attend church.
Some workers managed to nap during shifts. Engine operators dozed in their cabs between trips, and blast furnace workers napped during downtime. Night shifts offered the best opportunities for on-site slumber, with one open-hearth laborer noting that at 4 AM, "sleeping [was] pretty general, including boss." Some foremen explicitly permitted napping, announcing at shift start that everyone would get at least an hour to sleep.
Many workers turned to alcohol to secure sleep at home. The "whiskey-beer" ritual - downing a shot of whiskey followed by a beer - was common practice after shifts. Workers drank "for the purpose of making sure that they would get a better day's sleep through all the day-time noises," and to counteract the coffee they consumed to stay awake during shifts.
The toll of sleeplessness manifested in workplace injuries. Crystal Eastman's study of occupational accidents in Allegheny County documented two fatalities involving sleeping workers - a 15-year-old who dozed in a wheelbarrow during his 13-hour night shift and was struck by a ladle arm, and an 18-year-old who fell asleep in a buggy and was crushed by an iron bucket.
Reform efforts began in earnest with the Pittsburgh Survey of 1907-8, a monumental investigation funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and led by Paul Kellogg. Their findings highlighted the unrested predicament of mill workers. After completing his work on the Pittsburgh Survey, John Fitch made steel hours his personal crusade, publishing his findings in the Survey magazine and testifying in congressional hearings.
The end of World War I brought no reduction in working time. In 1919, about half of U.S. Steel's workforce still worked twelve-hour shifts, and industry-wide hours were longer than in 1910. This frustration fueled a massive organizing drive launched in fall 1918. On July 20, 1919, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers and its partners issued twelve demands, prominently featuring the eight-hour day, weekly rest, double pay for overtime and holidays, and abolition of the twenty-four-hour long turn.
After failed federal mediation, the National Committee called an industry-wide strike for September 22, 1919, declaring "now is the time to insist upon our rights as human beings." Initially, about half the industry's 500,000 workers joined the strike. However, the well-prepared employers unleashed a devastating counterattack using private security forces, loyal employees, imported strikebreakers, and sympathetic media. On January 8, 1920, the National Committee conceded defeat, winning no concessions.
Despite this defeat, the strike advanced hours reform by drawing attention to workers' plight. The Interchurch World Movement of North America's July 1920 report received extensive publicity, redirecting conversation from alleged immigrant radicalism to substantive issues like working hours. The report condemned the long turn as "inhuman" and called for abolishing both the twelve-hour day and seven-day week.
President Warren Harding, a conservative Republican, urged steelmakers to abandon the exceptionally long day. In 1922, the Federated American Engineering Societies published a lengthy assessment from economic and technical perspectives. Harding's foreword emphatically portrayed long hours as archaic: "The old order of the twelve-hour day must give way to a better and wiser form of organization of the productive forces of the nation."
After continued pressure, steel industry leader Elbert Gary and his colleagues finally agreed to discontinue the twelve-hour day in mid-1923. Beyond external pressure, the industrialists had seen evidence that shorter hours were economically feasible and could increase efficiency and productivity.
The end of the twelve-hour day and twenty-four-hour long turn substantially improved steelworkers' chances for adequate sleep. Average weekly hours for blast-furnace employees fell from seventy-two in 1922 to sixty in 1924, with similar declines in open-hearth departments. Unfortunately, weekly or biweekly rotation schemes remained in place, continuing to disrupt workers' circadian rhythms for decades to come.
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