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the rocks along Lake Michigan, where they’d talk through the night—about baseball, about family, and about the union.
    The younger Sadlowski’s first job at the South Works plant was in the machine shop. The men called it “Happy Valley” because compared to places like the blast furnace, where temperatures topped one hundred fifty degrees, it was a fairly reasonable place to work. There Sadlowski oiled the prehistoric-looking machines—the lathes, the drill presses, and the hulking overhead cranes—and so earned the moniker “Oil Can Eddie.”
    â€œThere was guys in the shop who done a lot of reading on the job,” he says. “They’d be running a lathe, and it’s gonna take an hour to go from here to there with the cutting tool, and they’d read a book. Management frowned on that, but guys did it. I’d read a book every couple of days. I’d go into the oil shanty away from the shop or into the locker room and sit in the toilet and read a book.” Sadlowski read John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell, Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos; in these novels he recognized himself and his fellow steelworkers, and the world began to make sense to him.
    In 1959, Sadlowski married Marlene, who was at that time working as a dental assistant, and in four years they had four children. In 1962, he became a griever for the union. A griever is the union representative who takes workers’ complaints to the boss, and for Sadlowski, there was never much of a gray area. “The company was the devil,” he said. “Anyone who worked in the steel industry knew that—that the company wasn’t no good.” He learned the importance of good theater early on, and so made it a point to confront the foreman in his all-glass office where his coworkers could witness the exchange: the foreman sitting behind his desk with Sadlowski towering over him, gesticulating wildly, his hands slashing the air as if he were about to impart physical damage. “When they see that and they see that you produce, they’ll follow you to hell,” he told me.
    Sadlowski rose fast in the union. First, he became president of his local, then he ran for the directorship of District 31, a consortium of the locals in the mills along the Chicago–Indiana corridor. The incumbent union machine, which called itself “the Official Family,” had been in power for thirty years and wasn’t about to relinquish its position easily. They refused, for instance, to give Sadlowski the location of all 285 locals, and so he, as well as family members and friends, dispersed throughout the city, looking for factories and then sneaking in to talk with the union members there. He lost the election, but it soon became clear that the Official Family engaged in massive voter fraud, filling out blank ballots—for their own family, of course. In a new election, which was monitored by four hundred federal observers, Sadlowski won by twenty thousand votes.
    In 1976, at the age of thirty-seven, Sadlowski took on sixty-year-old Lloyd McBride for the presidency of the international union. The old guard, of which McBride was a part, had recently entered into a more cooperative arrangement with management. They had signed a contract that called for all disputes to be settled by arbitration. The union had promised not to strike, and I. W. Abel, who was stepping down as president of the union, had signed and let his picture be used in an industry newspaper ad pleading for higher productivity. Sadlowski saw things differently. His perspective harked back to labor’s more militant days. He believed that there was a point at which the interests of management and that of the workers diverged. He believed it was a mistake for the union to give up its most powerful weapon. He believed that the members of the union should be allowed to vote on this new experimental contract. His campaign gathered