No company, even giants like General Motors with huge financial resources, could quickly build factories to duplicate all the production of their most centralized facilities—plants like the Rouge or Dodge Main or the Chevy and Buick complexes in Flint. But World War II provided an opportunity to begin or further the process. As in the Soviet Union, national security dictated the siting of defense plants in the interior of the country, safe from bombardment. Warm weather and vast empty expanses made the Southwest especially attractive to military planners. With government financing, the rubber companies built new tire plants to meet war needs in Iowa, Texas, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Kansas. After the war, Washington sold off the plants at bargain prices to the corporations that operated them. Other big wartime defense factories were sold, too, and converted to civilian production, like the North American Aviation bomber plant in Kansas City, Kansas (which had twenty-six thousand workers), taken over by General Motors to assemble cars and, briefly, jet fighters, and the Louisville, Kentucky, war plant that became the nucleus for General Electric’s “Appliance Park.”14
The postwar strike wave provided further impetus for industrial relocation and more but smaller plants. The country had never seen anything like it before. Not only were the strikes huge, they were highly disciplined, with very few workers breaking ranks, even as some of the walkouts dragged on and on, GM for 113 days, textile workers for 133 days, glass workers for 102 days. Corporate leaders found deeply disturbing the support the strikers won in industrial centers. In steel towns, where for a century local officials, newspapers, and businesses had backed the companies in their clashes with labor, now they stayed neutral or supported the strikers. Striking electrical workers won support from college students, the mayors of Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and fifty-five members of Congress. Veterans played a conspicuous role in many of the postwar walkouts, lending them moral capital earned on the battlefields. In Bloomfield, New Jersey, which housed both GE and Westinghouse factories, the local branch of the American Legion, a notoriously conservative group with a history of antiunionism, backed the strikers, even though leftists led their union. In Chicago, pharmacies and grocery stores extended credit to striking packinghouse workers, while priests joined their picket lines. The Truman administration vacillated in its handling of the walkouts, but it took the legitimacy of unionism for granted and ultimately used federal power to force the major corporations to grant large wage hikes.15
Figure 6.2 Pittsburgh Mayor David L. Lawrence addressing a crowd of Westinghouse strikers in April 1946.
The strikes made painfully clear to manufacturing companies that they no longer controlled the physical, social, and political environments in which their largest factories operated. GE president Charles Wilson bitterly complained in congressional testimony that strikers had kept even nonunionists—managers, scientists, and office workers—from entering struck facilities. “I don’t think a corporation should have to go with its hat in hand to a union and ask permission to bring its engineers and so on into a plant.” Politics and daily life in industrial communities changed as prounion politicians got elected to local and state office, small businesses allied themselves with their working-class customers, and unions injected themselves into all aspects of civil life, from the Community Chest to recreational sports to cultural activities. In Yonkers, New York, manufacturing companies like Otis Elevator and Alexander Smith, which, with a peak workforce of seven thousand workers at its massive mill, was the premier carpet manufacturer in the United States, had effectively controlled the town. But after the war, decisions about taxes and public policies became subjects for debate, with a well-organized, ambitious local labor movement throwing around its weight. Giant industrial complexes, once fortresses of corporate power, had become hostages to communities of workers in dense urban centers, where working-class solidarity developed in ethnic organizations, veterans groups, churches, bars, bowling alleys, and social venues, as well as within factory gates.16
GE had the most multifaceted response to the upsurge of union power in and around its leading factories. After the 1946 strike, the company named a public relations expert, Lemuel R. Boulware, as vice president of employee and community relations. Boulware took a hard line toward unions, in negotiations presenting the company’s offer as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, while arguing its reasonableness through newspaper advertisements and other media to employees and residents in the towns where GE plants were located. In addition to promoting the virtues of the company, Boulware worked to educate GE workers and the general public about the merits of free-market capitalism, hiring Ronald Reagan to be a spokesperson for the firm in its ideological offensive. GE’s efforts, though unusually extensive, were part of a broad corporate campaign to reshape public thinking about the economy, an extended drive to counter the ideological and political impact of the New Deal.17
GE and other electrical equipment manufacturers also started transferring operations out of their large factories to smaller plants located in the South, the border states, the West Coast, rural New England, the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic region, and Puerto Rico. The resulting drop in employment in older factories could be very substantial. When GE transferred some of the production of small home appliances from its Bridgeport, Connecticut, plant to new factories in Brockport and Syracuse, New York; Allentown, Pennsylvania; and Asheboro, North Carolina; the workforce shrank from 6,500 to less than 3,000. At the historic GE Schenectady factory, which produced heavy-current products and at its height during World War II employed 40,000 men and women, the workforce plummeted from 20,000 in 1954 to 8,500 in 1965, as the company shifted work to plants in Virginia, Indiana, Maryland, New York, Vermont, and California.18
Multiple reasons figured in the dispersals. In the case of GE, building geographically distributed plants was linked to a corporate reorganization, which created decentralized product divisions. As had begun before the war, many companies built plants to be near growing markets, especially in the South and West, facilitated by improvements in transportation, communication, and air conditioning. Modernization sometimes necessitated relocation. In cities like Detroit, few large empty tracts of land with good railroad connections (necessary for producers of large products, like automobiles) remained. As manufacturers sought to replace old, multistory plants with single-story facilities, with room for truck-loading docks and employee parking, they often turned to suburban sites, small or medium-size cities, or even rural areas, where large tracts were readily available. Government incentives also came into play, including tax breaks, tax-free industrial development bonds, and labor training programs, all widely used by Southern states to attract Northern industry.19
In the large, theoretical literature on industrial location, labor rarely gets much attention. Differential wage rates are sometimes considered, but the presence or absence of militant workers and unions almost always is ignored.20 However, in practice, labor often was a key factor in corporate decision-making. One guidebook “for executives charged with evaluating the placement of a company’s productive capacity” frankly and matter-of-factly noted an “informal decision rule that some corporations follow is no plant which is unionized will be expanded on-site,” a dictum “grounded in management’s concern for maintaining productivity and flexibility at its facilities.” When companies embarked on major expansions, rather than enlarging unionized plants they generally built new ones, “often new locations in right-to-work states.” GE publicly justified its downsizing of older plants and job relocations as an effort to remain competitive with companies using low-wage Southern labor, but privately Boulware discussed it, along with speedup, as a way to discipline the workforce.21
Some large corporations with national union contracts faced opposition when they began moving production to areas hostile to organized labor. In 1960, striking workers sought a contractual measure limiting the ability of GE to shift work from Northern plants to the South, but the company rejected the idea and the walkout
proved a dismal failure. A decade later, the UAW took on the same issue when it accused GM of a “southern strategy” in building parts plants in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi and an assembly plant in Oklahoma City. Ultimately, all the GM plants were unionized, but many companies, like RCA, found that in moving out of established factories to new communities they might end up with unions, but weaker and less militant unions than they were leaving behind.22
Not all new plants were smaller than the ones they replaced or partially supplanted, but most were. Sometimes this reflected a desire to multisource intermediate or final products, building plants for just some of the production previously done at a larger factory. Automation also led to downsizing. Many manufacturers embraced new technologies after World War II that allowed machines to be self-regulating and perform tasks that previously required human labor. Motives included greater precision and speed and the elimination of physically onerous tasks. But a desire to lower labor costs and reduce the power of workers contributed significantly to the automation drive.
In the automobile industry, Ford took the lead. Setting up an “Automation Department,” the company began shifting work out of the Rouge, which had one of the most militant UAW locals in the country and where wildcat strikes and slowdowns remained common. The labor savings proved considerable. In the mid-1950s, the company transferred production of Ford and Mercury engines from the Rouge to a newly automated plant in Cleveland. It also built a plant in Dearborn to make Lincoln engines. At the Rouge, it had taken 950 workers to make piston connecting rods, but at the Cleveland and Lincoln plants it required only a combined workforce of 292. During the 1950s, Ford transferred many other operations out of the Rouge to more automated plants, including stamping, machine casting, forging, steel production, and glassmaking. As a result, employment at the Rouge shrank from 85,000 in 1945 to 54,000 in 1954 to 30,000 in 1960, making it still one of the largest factories in the United States though only a shadow of what it had been in its heyday.23
Dodge Main underwent a similar metamorphosis, as the Chrysler Corporation deintegrated, decentralized, and automated production. From a peak of 40,000 workers during World War II, the plant production workforce shrank to 8,300 in 1963. With parts production moved elsewhere, the sprawling plant housed little more than assembly operations. When, in 1980, the company shuttered it completely, only 5,000 men and women remained.24
Automation and mechanization contributed to an impressive rise in productivity. During the quarter century after World War II, employment in the automobile industry plateaued at three-quarters of a million, while output roughly doubled. Between 1947 and 1967, total employment by manufacturing enterprises rose 27 percent, while value added (adjusted for inflation) jumped 157 percent. More efficient management and speedup accounted for some of the boost, but new plants and equipment figured heavily.
Large factories continued to be built; in 1967 there were 574 factories in the United States with 2,500 or more workers, compared to 504 twenty years earlier.25 But companies rarely erected the kind of giant, showcase plants that had sprung up across the manufacturing belt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. GE’s Appliance Park in Louisville—where the company manufactured refrigerators, washers, driers, electric stoves, dishwashers, disposals, and later air conditioners—was something of an exception. Begun in 1951 on a 700-acre site (eventually expanded to 920 acres), the heavily landscaped complex included six factory buildings, a research and development center, a warehouse, and its own powerhouse. It even had its own zip code. With 16,000 workers in 1955 and 23,000 at its peak in 1972 (15,000 union represented), the complex was large by any standard. But it never reached the size of the workforce at the company’s Schenectady complex during its heyday and was only a fraction of the one-time size of such giants as the Rouge and Dodge Main.26
The Disappearing Worker
With the shrinkage of the giant factory and broad social changes, the industrial worker faded in popular culture and political saliency. For a brief period after World War II, the media still paid attention. In 1946, Fortune sent Walker Evans to photograph the Rouge for a story on “The Rebirth of Ford.”27 One early television show, The Life of Riley, featured a Los Angeles airplane worker, occasionally showing the lead character, played first by Jackie Gleason and then by William Bendix, in a factory, riveting wings and complaining about work and the pretensions of the rich (though most episodes revolved around domestic doings). The show lasted until 1958. Blue-collar workers would not again appear regularly on television screens until the 1970s.28
With white-collar workers beginning to outnumber blue-collar workers in the mid-1950s, and unions increasingly integrated into established economic and political relationships, intellectuals, too, largely lost interest in the men and women working inside the biggest industrial plants, or at least no longer saw them as key to the future. Left-wing scholars like Mills and Marcuse and many of their followers in the New Left abandoned the idea that the industrial proletariat would act as an agent for progressive social change. While in 1972 there were 13.5 million manufacturing production workers in the United States (more than two million of them working in facilities with 2,500 or more workers), one-time socialist Daniel Bell, a leading sociologist, announced in a book the next year, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. For Bell and many others, “knowledge workers” or “symbolic analysts” had elbowed aside blue-collar workers to constitute the key economic group.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a brief flurry of political and cultural interest in the discontent of industrial workers—the so-called “blue-collar blues”—but an economic downturn quickly put an end to that. The next time factory workers captured public attention, they did so as a result of deindustrialization and the massive social crisis it brought to the “rust belt.” Between 1978 and 1982, employment in the automobile industry fell by a third, with more than three dozen factories shuttered in the Detroit area alone. During those same years, the steel industry shed more than 150,000 jobs. Bethlehem cut ten thousand jobs at Sparrows Point and phased out operations in Lackawanna, New York, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania. U.S. Steel eliminated twenty thousand jobs in Gary, devastating the city, and in 1986 shut down the historic Homestead mill. The worker in the giant factory, once a heroic figure, mastering volcanic forces and massive machines, at least in the United States came to be seen as an atavism, a problem, a sad relic of a passing age.29
Soviet Giantism Marches On
As American companies downsized and dispersed their factories, in much of the rest of the world giant industrial complexes continued to be built and celebrated. After World War II, the Soviet Union revived the model of the outsized production facility with an accompanying worker city. Under Soviet influence, the gigant model spread to Eastern Europe and China. On the other side of the Cold War divide, the giant factory remained alive and well, too, in parts of Western Europe and some developing countries. As before the war, very large scale industrial complexes were seen as a quick means of economic advance and an efficient investment strategy, especially in countries with centralized planning mechanisms. They also continued to serve important ideological and cultural functions, as carriers of ideas about modernity and the good life and a means of asserting national pride. While in the United States the industrial behemoth was becoming associated with the past—a receding era pictured in black and white—in much of the rest of the world the giant factory remained associated with the future.
The Soviet Union, after being devastated by World War II, initially concentrated on reconstruction. Giant factories like the Stalingrad tractor plant were rebuilt, in many cases continuing to produce military equipment while also resuming the manufacture of civilian goods. Unlike their counterparts in the United States, Soviet managers did not worry about worker militancy or the risk of workers using industrial chokepoints to assert their power.
Magnitogorsk, after playing a vital role in the war effort, doubled in size dur
ing the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1980s, it was the largest steelmaking complex in the world, with 63,000 employees, 54,000 directly connected to steel production, annually putting out almost as much steel as Great Britain. New large-scale infrastructure projects were launched as well, of the sort associated with the First Five-Year Plan—canals, dams, power stations, and irrigation systems—“the giant construction projects of communism.”30
In the late 1940s and 1950s, the U.S.S.R. also built a series of new cities, variants of the industrial gigant model, as centers for scientific research and nuclear weapons production, like Ozersk in the Urals, which housed the huge Maiak plutonium plant. The scientific and atomic cities, in many cases constructed in part by prison labor, like Magnitogorsk were self-contained settlements, with schools, cultural institutions, and housing estates linked to large employers. Many were closed cities, with no access for nonresidents and sometimes no exit for residents, secret places that literally did not exist on maps or in directories.31
When the Soviet Union sought to up the production of civilian goods, belatedly embracing the idea of consumer society, its leaders, many of whom had begun their careers with technical training and as factory managers, turned to the giant factory for that as well. For their generation, the First Five-Year Plan had been a formative experience. During his 1959 tour of the United States, Premier Nikita Khrushchev recalled—probably to blank looks from the Americans around him—“when you helped us build our first tractor plant, it took us two years to get it going properly,” an episode still vivid in his mind a quarter century later.32
In the mid-1960s, the automobile industry once again took the forefront in Soviet industrialization. Vehicle production had languished in the Soviet Union as the military and other industries ranked higher for investment. Also, some communist leaders, most notably Khrushchev, favored mass transit over private car ownership. In 1965, the country manufactured only 617,000 vehicles, mostly trucks and buses, paling before the 9.3 million cars that poured out of U.S. factories. Following Khrushchev’s ouster, Soviet leaders set out to jump-start the vehicle industry by returning to the methods of their youth, in 1966 signing an agreement with FIAT for technical assistance and training for a huge new factory to mass produce a version of a current FIAT model. It was the most important foreign commercial contract the country had signed since the deal with Ford decades earlier (which in monetary terms it surpassed).
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