In 1932, as the Great Depression deepened, workers had no legal right to organize unions and little individual power to resist falling standards of living, though an unemployed movement had formed. Near this site, the Marseilles Dam on the Illinois River was being renovated with federal and state funds, but contractors brought in out-of-state workers and paid them below area wages. On July 18, 1932, 300 unemployed Illinois workers gathered to demand those jobs but were turned away. They returned to picket the next day and found that the company had erected a barricade and armed its workers with guns and dynamite. When union workers approached a company car, the non-union workers mistook it for an attack and opened fire, and the pro-union workers answered with rocks and clubs. In a brutal half-hour fight, dozens of union men were hit by buckshot or clubbed. One union man, "Big Steve" Sutton, a 47-year-old Croatian immigrant ironworker from Joliet, was fatally shot in the head and abdomen with dozens of buckshot pellets from a sawed-off shotgun, while none of the non-union men were injured. The company soon agreed to allow unionization and to stop undercutting local workers' wages with out-of-state workers, and the next year Laborers' International Union of North America Local 393 was founded to represent area laborers. This clash was one of many efforts by workers to raise wages and reduce the arbitrary power of management, and in 1935 Congress finally gave workers the legal right to organize.