Workers had tried to unionize large-scale industry before the 1930s, but repeatedly they had been repulsed, unable to overcome the physical fortresses and financial resources of the giant manufacturing concerns. But by the mid-1930s conditions had changed. The Great Depression robbed big business and its allies of political legitimacy and popular support. Financially pressed, companies eliminated many of the welfare programs they had introduced in the early twentieth century. Wage cuts, speedup, and layoffs further angered workers. Various left-wing groups, though small, provided ideas and leaders to disaffected workers, by this time less divided by ethnicity and language as a result of the restrictions on immigration that came during and after World War I. And crucially, the New Deal and its state-level equivalents provided symbolic and practical support for workers trying to unionize. In 1935, a group of veteran unionists, seeking to capitalize on the new circumstances, founded the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), dedicated to organizing the mass-production industries across the board, bringing skilled and unskilled workers into the same organizations.67
The largest industrial facilities, like the U.S. Steel plant in Gary and the main plants of the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—initially remained impervious to significant union gains. Instead, industrial workers generally first made organizational advances in smaller or peripheral plants. In the automobile industry, unions progressed among skilled tool- and die-makers; in parts plants, like Electric Auto-Lite in Toledo, Ohio, struck in 1934; and at smaller firms outside of the industry’s Michigan heartland, like White Motors in Cleveland and Studebaker in South Bend, Indiana. In the electrical-equipment industry, early labor success largely came at smaller companies, like Philco Radio in Philadelphia and Magnavox-Capehart in Fort Wayne, Indiana. At the number-two company, Westinghouse, unionists established a toehold at the East Springfield, Massachusetts, plant, but at the company’s giant East Pittsburgh facility, scene of bitter battles in earlier years, management maintained firm control. General Electric, the industry giant, had a more liberal labor policy, allowing small unions to start up at its giant complexes in Schenectady, New York, and Lynn, Massachusetts, but they had little real power.
By 1936, with an economic recovery under way and the CIO providing support, industrial unions began making progress even in some factory goliaths. In Akron, where the nation’s tire-making capacity was highly concentrated in a few large factories, a prolonged strike at Goodyear followed the Firestone sit-down. In the auto industry, the CIO-affiliated United Automobile Workers (UAW) began building a base in the General Motors empire.68
The UAW picked General Motors—which operated 110 factories and had more employees than any other manufacturing enterprise in the world—as its primary target in its effort to break into the Big Three. The contest between the infant union and what by some measures was the largest corporation anywhere seemed absurdly lopsided. But UAW organizers understood that a high degree of centralization and the tight integration of the company production processes left it vulnerable to a militant minority. In particular, only two sets of dies for making the bodies for the newest GM model existed, one in Cleveland and the other in Flint. Stopping those factories would shut down most of the company’s domestic car-making.
Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in November 1936, in a campaign marked by sharp class rhetoric and massive labor support for the president, gave a boost to organizing efforts. UAW leaders hoped to launch a national strike against GM in early 1937, but outbreaks of worker militancy forced their hand sooner. In mid-November, workers at the GM plant in Atlanta began a sit-down strike. A month later, so did GM workers in Kansas City. Then, on December 28, workers in the GM plant in Cleveland sat down, too.
In Flint, the heart of the GM production system, after several years of effort the union still had signed up only a small minority of the forty thousand workers. But when on December 30 a union activist saw body dies being loaded to ship out, apparently to factories in areas with less union strength, the workers sat down in the small Fisher Body Plant No. 2 and the seven-thousand-worker Fisher Body No. 1, blocking the removal of the equipment. In the days that followed, workers at more GM plants in Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin followed suit. With the production of car bodies and other key components halted, within a week the whole GM national operation began grinding to a halt, with roughly half the workforce idled. The efficiencies and strategic advantages of the giant factory had come back to haunt the company, as a minority of workers, by seizing key choke points, leveraged power far beyond what one might expect from their modest numbers (which the sit-down tactic help disguise).
During the forty-four days strikers stayed inside the Flint plants, the giant factory turned from a site of managerial control to an arena of worker self-expression. The strikers organized themselves into committees in charge of overall leadership, security (including making sure no machinery was damaged), sanitation, and food. Makeshift sleeping quarters were built in car bodies and on factory floors, using car cushion stuffing to provide a touch of comfort. Cards, games, radio, Ping-Pong, and classes on labor history and parliamentary procedure helped ease the boredom and fear. So did dancers, theater troupes, and other sympathetic outsiders who entered the plants to provide entertainment.
The GM strike captured national attention, closely reported by newspapers, radio, and newsreels. The tense confrontation included an effort by company guards and Flint police to evict the occupiers of Fisher No. 2, repulsed by workers heaving heavy door hinges out second-story windows and training high-pressure water hoses on the police (who during their retreat opened fire on union backers); the mobilization of strikers’ wives and other family members to physically defend the occupied plants and provide the sit-downers with food and supplies; the seizure of an additional Flint plant, the gigantic Chevy No. 4 factory, which made every engine used in a Chevrolet; the mobilization of the Michigan National Guard, which surrounded the occupied factories; and, ultimately, negotiations involving GM officials, CIO President John L. Lewis, Michigan governor Frank Murphy, and federal officials, all the way up to President Roosevelt. The agreement that ended the strike, in itself, constituted but a modest union gain, a written company pledge that for six months it would recognize the UAW as the representative of its members in the struck plants. But as huge crowds cheered the haggard, bearded, smiling men who marched out of the occupied Flint plants, everyone knew that the world had changed; workers had shown that they could bring one of the most powerful corporations in the world to its knees by shutting down the giant factories in which they labored.69
The UAW victory set off a wave of strikes and union organization everywhere from giant factories to local retail stores. Nearly five million workers took part in walkouts during 1937, including four hundred thousand sit-downers. For its part, General Motors gave its workers a 5 percent pay hike and agreed with the UAW to a shop-steward system and the use of seniority in layoffs. Meanwhile, the auto union won agreements with smaller car companies, with parts makers, and, after a month-long sit-down in Dodge Main and six other factories, with Chrysler. In the electrical-equipment industry, the United Electrical Workers signed a contract with RCA covering the nearly ten thousand workers (three-quarters female) at its Camden, New Jersey, plant while General Electric agreed to a national contract that covered most of its largest plants, including its sprawling complex in Schenectady.70
The most remarkable breakthrough came in the steel industry, what Lewis called “the Hindenburg line of [American] industry.” Less than a week after the end of the General Motors strike, Lewis signed an agreement with Myron Taylor, the chairman of U.S. Steel, which granted workers a wage increase, the forty-hour week, time-and-a-half for overtime, and a grievance procedure. The CIO had created the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) to try to unionize the industry, but the going had been slow. Nonetheless, Taylor apparently decided that, given the union victory over GM and the pro-labor sentiment in Washingto
n and in the statehouses of key steelmaking states, unionization was inevitable. Rather than allowing a prolonged battle that would mobilize the rank and file and perhaps interrupt production, Taylor cut a deal with Lewis, with no involvement of local activists or even SWOC leaders.71
As impressive as it was, the CIO offensive failed to sweep the field, as a number of key operators of very large industrial facilities successfully resisted unionization. The worst setback came in steel, as the so-called “Little Steel” companies, giants except in comparison with U.S. Steel, refused to recognize SWOC. In response, their workers walked out in late May 1937, but the strike ended in defeat; as in the past, the companies mobilized local governments, police, and the press against the strikers. Eighteen workers died during the battle, including ten shot by police during a peaceful protest in front of Republic Steel’s South Chicago mill. Just days earlier, when the UAW sent organizers to pass out leaflets outside the Rouge, they were set upon by Ford thugs and beaten mercilessly. Westinghouse, Goodyear, International Harvester, and, most importantly, Ford all dug in their heels and refused to sign contracts with the CIO, weakened as it was by the Little Steel defeat and a downward plunge of the economy that began in mid-1937. The victory of industrial unionism was not yet assured.72
But World War II allowed the American labor movement to complete the unionization of large-scale industry. Even before the United States entered the conflict, a defense buildup revived the economy, tightening labor markets and bolstering worker confidence. Also, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to join unions without reprisal and established a mechanism for their legal recognition, finally began forcing employers to change their ways. By late 1941, through a combination of legal challenges, worker mobilization, strikes, and federally supervised recognition elections, SWOC succeeded in organizing Little Steel. Westinghouse, International Harvester, Goodyear, and other holdouts fell to the CIO as well.73
The largest and symbolically most important victory came at Ford. In the fall of 1940, the UAW relaunched its stalled effort to organize the company. By the end of the year, the union had won substantial backing at the Rouge and a Lincoln plant in Detroit, filing for recognition elections. On April 1, 1941, a strike broke out at the Rouge after the company fired members of a union grievance committee in the rolling mill. As the number of strikers swelled, union leaders called a full-scale walkout at all Ford plants. To keep scabs out of the Rouge, with its immense perimeter, the strikers supplemented traditional picketing with a motorized encirclement of the plant and even aerial surveillance. In a reversal of the past pattern, Ford “servicemen” working for Harry Bennett found themselves being beat up by unionists. After ten days, the company agreed to end the strike by reinstating the fired workers and holding union recognition elections. At the Rouge, seventy-four thousand workers cast ballots in one of the largest such elections ever held, with 70 percent supporting the UAW. The union won decisive victories at Highland Park, the Lincoln plant, and other Ford factories as well. Then, in a startling and somewhat inexplicable move, the company agreed to one of the most generous contracts that any CIO union had achieved, including a provision that required all new employees to join the union, a checkoff of union dues (which the company took out of workers’ pay and gave to the union), disbanding Bennett’s Service Department, strengthened seniority and grievance systems, the rehiring, with back pay, of workers fired for union activity, and even allowing smoking in designated areas at the Highland Park and Lincoln plants, repudiating Henry Ford’s imposition of abstinence on his employees.74
The swelling of the union movement continued during the war itself. To check inflation, the federal government kept wage rates at prewar levels, but gave unions a boost by granting them “maintenance of membership,” requiring all workers at unionized plants to join unless they took advantage of a brief opt-out window. Virtually every new hire at unionized firms automatically became a union member, a flood of dues-payers as defense payrolls soared. Other new members came through organizing campaigns, which unions, aligning themselves with the war effort, often portrayed as patriotic endeavors. Union membership, which jumped from 3.6 million at the start of the Great Depression to 10.5 million in 1941, reached 14.8 million in 1945, with roughly one out of three nonagricultural workers carrying a union card. With only a few notable exceptions, the giant factory had been placed under the roof of the house of labor. Fordism had revolutionized the American economy and society; the uprising of industrial workers gave mass production a new, more democratic meaning.75
CHAPTER 5
“COMMUNISM IS SOVIET POWER PLUS THE ELECTRIFICATION OF THE WHOLE COUNTRY”
Crash Industrialization in the Soviet Union
IN DECEMBER 1929, PHILIP ADLER, A REPORTER FOR THE Detroit News, visited Stalingrad, on the Volga River in southwestern Russia (until 1925 called Tsaritsyn), where the government of the Soviet Union was erecting a huge new tractor factory on a muddy, treeless field that had been used for growing melons. The factory held special interest for Motor City readers because American companies and workers—many from Detroit—were heavily involved in its planning and operation. Albert Kahn served as the overall architect, the Frank D. Chase Company laid out the foundry, and R. Smith, Incorporated, designed the forge shop. McClintic-Marshall Products Company fabricated the beams and trusses. Most of the production equipment was made in the United States, and the Soviets hired several hundred Americans to work at the plant, in many cases as foremen or supervisors.
Before going to the factory site, a half hour out of town, Adler visited the city center, where in the market he found “the familiar figures of the tinker, the cobbler and the dealers in second hand clothing and furniture who employ the most primitive methods of manufacture and salesmanship. The ox team, the camel and the biblical ass rival the horse as mediums of transportation.” From a minaret among the church cupolas came the cry “ ‘Allah Ho Akbar!’—Allah is powerful!” But when Adler got to the construction site, the watchword everywhere was “ ‘Amerikansky Temp’ or ‘American tempo’ ” and the slogan plastered about was “To catch up with and surpass America.” The following summer, with the plant beginning to turn out its first tractors, Margaret Bourke-White arrived after an arduous journey, taking what would become one of her most iconic photographs, of three workers on a newly finished tractor coming off an assembly line.1
Figure 5.1 Margaret Bourke-White’s iconic 1931 photograph, Stalingrad Tractor Factory.
The Tractorstroi (“tractor factory”) in Stalingrad was part of a feverish drive by the Soviet Union to rapidly industrialize, boosting its standard of living and increasing its defensive capacity on the road to creating a socialist society. Most Bolshevik leaders believed that a socialist or communist society could be achieved in Russia—a poor and economically backward country—only after significant industrial development. Seizing political power was not enough. “There can be no question of . . . communism,” Vladimir Lenin declared in 1920, “unless Russia is put on a different and a higher technical basis than that has existed up to now. Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country, since industry cannot be developed without electrification.” And it was a particular type of industrialization Lenin and his comrades had in mind, “large-scale machine production.”2
It took time before the Soviet Republic could launch a major industrialization effort, but by the late 1920s a detailed plan had been adopted. In 1929, on the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolution, Joseph Stalin wrote, “We are advancing full steam ahead along the path of industrialization—to socialism, leaving behind the age-old ‘Russian’ backwardness. We are becoming a country of metal, a country of automobiles, a country of tractors.”
Industrial behemoths were key to the Soviet effort to leap from “The ox team, the camel and the biblical ass” to “a country of metal, a country of automobiles, a country of tractors.” The First Five-Year Plan, begun in 1928, centered on a series of ve
ry large scale factory and infrastructure projects, including three huge tractor factories, a big automobile plant in Nizhny Novgorod, immense steel complexes at Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, the Dnieporstroi hydroelectric dam, the Turksib railway connecting Kazakhstan with western Siberia, and the Volga-Don canal. Lacking the technical expertise and industrial resources for creating and equipping projects of such size and sophistication, the Soviets turned heavily to the West, especially the United States, for engineers, construction and production experts, and machinery, adopting the techniques of scientific management and mass production and in some cases creating virtual replicas of facilities in the United States. As Stephan Kotkin wrote in his landmark history of Magnitogorsk, for the communists, “The dizzying upheaval that was Soviet industrialization was reduced to the proposition: build as many factories as possible, as quickly as possible, all exclusively under state control.” In the Soviet Union, just as in the United States, the giant factory came to be equated with progress, civilization, and modernity.3
But the Soviet Union was a very different place than the United States. Would the factory itself be different there? Would it have a different social significance? In 1927, Egmont Arens, an editor of the left-wing journal New Masses, reviewing a play, The Belt, which demonized assembly line production, remarked, “The Belt is something that has got to be faced even by advocates of a workers’ state. Right now Russia is installing modern industrial plants of her own. Are the horrible things that The Belt does to minds and bodies of workers inevitable? Or is there a difference between high pressure production in Socialist Russia and Henry Ford’s Detroit?”4
The factory had developed largely as a means for industrialists and investors to make money for themselves. Though it was sometimes freighted with moral imperatives and claims of social good, its physical design, internal organization, technology, and labor relations were determined primarily by the desire to maximize profits.5 What did it mean to have a factory in a society where profits, in the usual sense, did not exist, where all large-scale productive entities belonged to a government that, at least in theory, served as the agent of the people, especially the working class? Could and should the capitalist factory, as a technical, social, and cultural system, simply be moved into a socialist society? Were methods like scientific management and the assembly line, designed to increase efficiency and labor productivity in order to boost profits, appropriate for a society in which the needs of workers and the well-being of the entire population were declared paramount?
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