Progress The U.A.W. and the Automobile

I was born on May 13, 1932 in Balkan, a small town in the hills of Kentucky, where my father slaved away as a coal miner and my mother did the best she could to stretch the ten cents an hour Daddy made in order to feed and clothe me and my two younger sisters. We were smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt was about to take office as this country’s President, and 550 miles north, in Michigan, in the cities of Flint and Detroit, the automobile industry was entering a time that would forever change the status and the life of the American working man.

Prior to the Great Depression, unionism was not an important issue within the automobile industry. The auto boom of the 1920’s resulted in the recruiting of thousands and thousands of laborers, most of whom were white dirt farmers, southern blacks, or immigrants. These workers were completely naive to trade-union experience, and any grievances were dissuaded by the higher pay scales the auto industry had over almost all other industries. Grievances were also defused by a system pioneered by General Motors called “welfare capitalism” in which workers were provided with savings programs, group insurance, and recreational facilities, among other things.

The largest union in the country, at the time, was the American Federation of Labor. The AFL had decided at a 1926 convention that it would initiate an organizing campaign in the auto industry. However, according to the Report of Proceedings of the Fifty-fifth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor in 1935, this effort “failed to get beyond the verbal stage.”  The industry, namely open shop Detroit, already had little reason to fear the AFL since the AFL had dedicated itself to “horizontal unionism”  in which, for example, all electricians or all machinists were organized, regardless of their industry. The AFL ignored industrial unionism, the “vertical” organization of unskilled or semi-skilled workers within a specific industry. This failure to unionize was blatantly obvious within the auto industry where unskilled or semi-skilled production workers made up the vast majority of the labor force in plants where automobiles were manufactured and assembled.

Then came the Depression. Auto workers found themselves powerless within an industry that was collapsing. Job security received no mention or attention in the system of welfare capitalism. Work time was slashed. Wages were cut. Layoffs mounted. Workers with years and years of experience quickly discovered that their seniority counted for absolutely nothing. This realization  was further affirmed in the call-backs coinciding with an upturn of auto sales in 1933.

At this time, auto workers were basically slaves. A man is always in need of a reliable, decent paying job to care for his family, not to mention himself, but during the Depression there was not such a thing, especially for the unskilled and poor. In the early 1930’s, there weren’t multiple class divisions like there are today. There were rich and there were poor, and everyone lost money during the Depression. So the poor were dirt poor. They were desperate. They were sick. They were hungry and they were dying. And this was obviously not a secret to owners and management within the automobile industry. So if you were “fortunate” enough to receive or retain a job as an auto worker, the treatment and labor tasks, as well as a simple lack of compassion for fellow man, you would have to face was to be hideous and cruel.

Mercilessly, assembly lines were speeded up to increase productivity in order to restore profit margins. Workers were forced to work at speeds that were literally exceeding human endurance. Management ignored seniority in deciding the order of layoffs and rehiring. Workers over forty faced great difficulty in keeping their jobs and securing employment. The methods of compensation used in the industry were extremely complicated, and workers were rarely fully compensated for the time they put in. Female labor was being substituted for male labor. And the health and safety conditions in the automobile plants were absolutely horrible, to say the least. So, auto workers had a lot to complain about, and complain they did.