A Daughter of the Mon Valley Fights for a New System

For the purpose of meeting human needs

The August 11, 2025 explosion at U.S. Steel’s Clairton (Pennsylvania) Coke Works comes 118 years after journalist William Hard wrote “Making Steel and Killing Men,” a groundbreaking report on U.S. Steel’s South (Chicago) Works where 46 men were killed in a single year.

This article is part of the series, “Three Organizers Speak on the Clairton Coke Works Disaster.” Read the pieces by Anthony D. Prince and Larry Regan.

By Nijmie Zakkiyyah Dzurinko

I grew up in Monessen, a steel town in Westmoreland County about 30 miles South of Pittsburgh. My grandfather worked for Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel. When I was 7, I wrote an essay about the necessity and importance of labor unions. In what was one of the highlights of my childhood, I won a $50 prize for the essay and attended an award ceremony in a nearby state park.

My grandfather never talked about his work but his labor instilled in me a work ethic that lives on to this day — in positive and negative ways. The kind of belief system that accepts difficult labor as a given and a necessity. The kind that assesses people by their ability to sacrifice for the sake of work.

My experience of my grandfather also contributed to the commitment I would eventually develop to a fundamental transformation of this society. Not because he and I were close, but because I saw in him someone whose labor dominated his whole life. My grandfather’s independent thoughts, goals, ideas, and dreams, if he had them, dissolved under the pressure of decades of crushing physical labor. I grew up understanding that the mill could take everything, including one’s life, as it did to my grandmother’s brother who years before was knocked into a vat of molten metal.

In 1985, Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel filed for bankruptcy. In 1986 the Monessen mill closed. One year later, my uncle moved me and my grandparents out of Monessen 4 hours away to Southeastern PA.

Like Monessen, Clairton also sits along the Monongahela River. Like Monessen, Clairton grew up as a steel town, and both hit their peak of population in the 1940s and 1950s. Now both hover around 6,000 residents. Clairton has a 30% “official” poverty rate, which means that if we use the more comprehensive measure of the Poor People’s Campaign the rate would double to 60%. Clairton is racially mixed, with about half white and half Black residents. Although I never heard of Clairton Coke Works growing up, my grandfather’s mill used its coke to make steel.

Since founding Put People First! PA in 2012, and developing a regional Healthcare Rights Committee in Southwestern PA, I’ve come to know more about Clairton, and to understand the role of Clairton Coke Works in poisoning the surrounding community. Its residents, like Ms. Pamela Lee, have joined our ranks of fighters for healthcare justice. Coke production leads to chemicals like benzene, mercury and lead in the air residents breathe. According to ProPublica, Clairton residents have 2.3 times more than the EPA’s “acceptable limit” for lifetime cancer risk, which can be attributed to the Coke works. And fully ¼ of children living near the plant have been diagnosed with asthma, which does not account for all of the undiagnosed cases.

The Poor People’s Campaign names systemic racism, poverty, environmental devastation and the war economy as the four evils of our time. All of these evils flourish in Clairton, because of a system that puts profit over our lives. The tragic explosion in which two workers were killed and 10 were injured is only the most recent example of the system’s fruit. This Labor Day, we must understand that the working-class fight is bigger than a new contract. It is for a new system where workers control the production process; what they produce is for the purpose of meeting human needs and not for Wall Street; and we use the technological means at hand to heal, not poison the earth and our bodies.