Emil Badornac oral history interview

Emil Badornac was a crane operator at Republic Steel and a secretary of the steelworkers’union Local 1033. He was the son of Croatian immigrants. His father had also been a steelworker. Emil Badornac, along with others like Gus Yuratovic, helped found Local 1033. In the 1930s, Little Steel companies like Republic refused to recognize independent unions, leading to the Little Steel Strike of 1937. During this strike, Chicago city police fired on strikers at Republic and others, killing ten and wounding nearly 100. This landmark event in U.S. labor history came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre. This oral history, about the Massacre and Local 1033, was conducted in 1974 by William Bork for a masters thesis on the Memorial Day Massacre. Bork himself grew up in Southeast Chicago and was the son of a steelworker.