The 1909 strike at the Pressed Steel Car Company in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, was one of the first IWW struggles to win national attention. Some 8,000 workers — many of them immigrants from a dozen countries, laboring under a brutal piece-rate and pay-withholding system — walked out in July 1909 against wage cuts and the company’s exploitative "pooling" scheme.
The strike was marked by extraordinary violence: the state constabulary, known to the strikers as the "Cossacks," clashed with workers in confrontations that left men dead on both sides. IWW organizers helped the polyglot workforce hold together across national lines, and after some six weeks the company conceded wage increases. The dramatic victory at McKees Rocks announced the IWW as a national force in mass-production industry.