WORKERS, BLACK AND WHITE DRUMBEATS IN Detroit
Brooks, Thomas R.
DODGE MAIN, an ungainly collection of four- and six-story, 1920s-genre factory buildings, occupies roughly a square mile of Hamtramck just across the Detroit City line. The front-office...
...A surprising portion of UAW membership is under 30...
...So the question is: can it be sustained...
...At the same time, more black workers have the seniority entitling them to union-won benefits— both as cushions against lay-offs and as guarantees of jobs...
...At Chrysler Local 7, roughly 65 to 70 percent of 7,638 members are black...
...They point out that one of the discharged white women had been disciplined twice for wildcat activity, yet was taken back...
...that "every time a black worker is removed from plant premises he be led by a black brother...
...Generally, one of several things: workers refuse to go back—"take all or none...
...Perhaps the question is moot, for DRUM may foresake electoral, "reformist" activity altogether...
...England estimates that 60 percent of his Local membership is under 35...
...The three-day demonstration crippled Dodge by a production loss of some 1,900 cars...
...William Gilbert, newly elected president of Chrysler Local 7, put it as well as anyone I talked with...
...In early July, DRUM, backed by "militant community elements," picketed Dodge Main, halting only black workers...
...Watson did say, "We're moving on a lot of fronts, man...
...More than 51 percent of Chrysler workers have less than five years' seniority...
...There isn't a more likely place in Detroit for the DRUM phenomenon," I was told by an auto union official, who readily conceded that this surfacing of black militancy in the Detroit-area auto plants had "somewhat surprised Solidarity House," Detroit shorthand for the top leadership of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America...
...Their youthfulness may, in part, explain DRUM's shrugging off the importance of local union elections...
...The Guardian hailed it as "a new stage of organization, activity and unitythere...
...In sum, Watson told me: "My thing is, we're not concerned with institutions...
...orthey go back with the understanding that the punishment will be moderate...
...For example, back in 1957, employment at four Chrysler Detroit plants was 45,584, including 9,242 blacks, or 20.3 percent...
...Brendon Sexton, the UAW leadership training program director, is not far off the mark when he asserts, "I don't claim that black workers are equally represented at all levels in the union, but blacks have done better in the UAW than in any non-black national organization...
...Not surprisingly, there have been meetings between the DRUM people and the Panthers...
...League functionaries John Watson, 26 and the father of two, and Mike Hamlin, 28 and currently a school bus driver, both worked on the Detroit News loading dock several years ago...
...Still, it is a factor, especially in Detroit politics, and significantly ayoung black activist, anti-DRUM and anti -UAWAdministration, did tell me that "some of the younger guys are getting interested in the TULC...
...We're drivingto organize masses of black workers into independent labor organizations, which are political...
...The assembly line is why auto workers retain the right to strike over work standards...
...Employment, at roughly 11,000 in early November, was down from a peak of about 13,500 a year...
...In 1946, 17 percent of Chrysler's 71,000 employees were black...
...They are gaining majorities or developing significant minority blocs within certain plants, local unions, industries and international unions...
...that all plant protection guards be black...
...A UAW spokesman thought the "original nucleus" came out of a group of Trotskyites and their followers, who, as he put it, "tried to sabotage ratification of the 1967 agreement in the plant...
...The United Black Brotherhood worked up a wildcat at the Mahwah, New Jersey, Ford assembly plant in late April, 1969.$ New 4 This does not exhaust the list...
...They take away one task, and put two back...
...Back in 1963," England told me, "we recognized that if black workers don't move, the labor movement doesn't move...
...6 The Trade Union Leadership Conference, led byHorace Sheffield, still remains the largest and mostpowerful Detroit-wide black trade union group...
...Detroit is a high-octane town...
...or they go back andcontinue to agitate and fight in various ways for the reinstatement of their fallen comrades...
...And, so far as I can tell, they go to the union...
...Watson, Hamlin, and others in the League have this in large measure...
...Black auto workers were elected as presidents of Local 900 (Ford's Wayne plant), Local 47 (Chrysler Detroit Forge), Local 961 (Chrysler Eldon Gear), Local 7 (Chrysler), Local 51 (Plymouth), and at Local 1248 (Chrysler Mopar) where 80 percent of the plant's 989 workers are white...
...DODGE MAIN, an ungainly collection of four- and six-story, 1920s-genre factory buildings, occupies roughly a square mile of Hamtramck just across the Detroit City line...
...Standing before the hall, one's view of the plant is partially blocked by a railroad bridge and the lineup of piggybacked cars waiting shipment...
...The rise and fall of Chrysler employment, therefore, is fairly crucial to Detroit's black community...
...The black workers I talked with at Dodge feel that Baker was "had" for his outside activities in the black community...
...An auto worker, young, white, and radical, who showed me around Detroit in early November, put it this way: "At Dodge Main, there's a young black work-force being supervised by reactionary Polacks...
...8 There Watson argued that white racism both in the companies and the unions necessitates "a strong, independent organization among black workers...
...Because they're young, they're restless...
...The New York Guardian ran a special supplement on "black worker insurgency in Detroit," featuring DRUM...
...But young workers who want to know how grievances can be fought and won, for example, are going to go where those lessons are taught...
...Prodded a little, he added, "Tactically, it dependson the situation whether you move to take over a union, or whether you move organizationallyoutside or around it...
...He [the black foreman] would have to be accountable to us," Hamlin told me, in discussing this point...
...Last but not least, the UAW should call a general strike to end the Vietnam War, to end all taxes imposed on workers, to boost taxes on industrial profits to make up the difference, and to force the reallocation of all federal monies spent on defense "to meet the pressing needs of the black and poor populations of America...
...The front-office windows are wiremeshed against some feared assault, or perhaps just against small boys throwing rocks, and the factory windows are begrimed beyond recognition...
...At Dodge, after pointing out that 90 percent of all the foremen, 99 percent of the general foremen, and 100 percent of all plant superintendents were white, DRUM demanded 50 black foremen, 10 black general foremen, and 3 black superintendents...
...With four big plants in the Detroit area, Chrysler is a major inner-city employer...
...Incidentally, the Village Voice refused to print a letter from the UAW's assistant regional director, Ed Grey, correcting errors of fact in Jonathan Black's account, and did so only after being picketed by members of Local 906...
...Some among the newly-elected blacks, however, are not at all happy about being touted as the UAW answer to black extremism...
...How this will ultimately affect the kinds of agitation the League can carry on is a question...
...THOMAS R. BROOKS wall and then we can proceed to move against the corporation with the might of the union behind us—and not in front of us...
...and even CRUM (Chrysler Revolutionary Union Movement) . 4 Watson, then at Wayne University, was elected editor of the student paper, the south end...
...T T HE LEAGUE of Revolutionary Black Workers, in fact, figured as an organized caucus in only two elections—at Eldon Gear and Axle Local 961, and at Dodge Local 3. ELRUM endorsed three of the eight black winners in the election for the ten top Local 961 offices...
...And, in this instance, Hamlin quickly added, "We participated [in elections] as an organizational technique, and as a possible way of having some impact because there are things stewards can do that benefit workers on the line...
...We can't at this time, combat the corporation because the union leadership is Iike a brick wall between the workers and the corporation...
...It could be useful to us...
...These surfaced, according to reports carried in the Guardian (April 26, 1969) and the People's World (same date), at a meeting held in Oakland on April 19, 1969...
...There are a great many pulls—to other forms of black militancy, to Milton Henry's black Republic of New Africa, and to the Black Panthers...
...It doesn't seem likely that they are going to jettison existing ways—collective bargaining, for one –ter existing institutions—unions, for another— just in order to satisfy an abstract ideology of black expressionism...
...Some of those hard-core unemployed so eagerly sought by the auto companies over the last year have been let go...
...Some quit "cause the work is too hard," or on account of the "speedup," as older workers put it...
...Although I've been told that the auto companies find it more economical, even efficient, to add an hour or two of overtime rather than constantly fiddle with the speed of the line to get out the production, the assembly line remains the chief irritant in auto labor relations...
...Baker and Tate were left out . 3 No one was fired for the July "disturbances...
...But, in fact, the one Trotskyite at Dodge's Main appears to be as isolated from DRUM as any other white, radical or not...
...The Panther-Communist party alliance, in the places where old-time Communist workers are still to be found, might provide certain kinds of know-how...
...Turnover is very high, especially among the young unmarried workers...
...Grievances pile up, and often a group of workers will take matters into their own hands by simply walking out when conditions have become intolerable and the settlement machinery seems to move too slowly...
...It has some 3,000 members, who come from allunions but mostly the UAW...
...As Kenny Horsten, Director of the Black Panther caucus at the Fremont GM plant, 7 put it, We've got 2 enemies...
...There are several black department heads...
...After a layoff, these plants employed in 1958 some 22,776 workers of whom 3,345 or 14.7 percent were black...
...The labor market has been tight, but there are signs that President Nixon's war-on-inflation is having an impact...
...Of these, according to Watson, four had at least 20 years of seniority...
...The workers were in a feisty mood, and the Local leadership was off at the UAW convention in Atlantic City when there was some trouble in the bumper room on May 2, 1968...
...DRUM's origins are somewhat obscure...
...He reportedly also played a role in Uhura, a quasi-Maoist black group in Detroit...
...The League of Revolutionary Black Workers has enlarged DRUM demands to urge the firing of Walter P. Reuther and for the election of a black UAW president, a 50 percent black executive board and staff...
...It was, as Watson told me, "more or less spontaneous...
...Conditions at Dodge were affected by economic developments within Chrysler and the auto industry as a whole...
...Within the hall itself, some forty-odd black workers and a handful of white workers hold a district meeting...
...Horston apparently is pushing for an alliance with the League, and it may come about...
...Dodge Main is the home of DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement), the founding contingent of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers...
...WORKERS, BLACK AND WHITE their essential demand—recognition...
...As spokesman for a hard line, UAW SecretaryTreasurer Emil Mazey blasted DRUM as "a handful of fanatics, who are nothing but black fascists...
...tancy, revolutionary adventurism, and workingclass politics...
...The subsequent auto sales boom and the skills of Lynn Townsend, now chief executive of the corporation saved Chrysler, and the company raised its share of the market from 10 percent in 1962 to 18 percent last year...
...But in fact DRUM, the weekly distributed at Dodge Main, has ceased publication...
...As Hamlin told me, "Our thrust is not getting workers to vote in union elections, per se...
...Significantly, DRUM's setbacks in this last period came, in the main, from the older and more stable groups of black workers...
...As forthe workers' real grievances, the walkout was a total loss...
...It's a hard question to answer, when a young man says, `You've been here 30 years and a white guy's here four and he's down at Solidarity House.' What kind of answer can I give that youngster...
...It is a tribute to these workers—and one should remember black and white workers did build together—that their institutions are now absorbing, not without conflict or pain, aggressively militant black caucuses...
...The office of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers is "temporarily" closed "for paint THOMAS R. BROOKS ing and redecoration...
...Back in the plants, however the "vanguard" elements were not faring so well...
...D D RUM BEGAN AGITATION for the return of the black workers, distributing a fourpage weekly outside the plant to black workers...
...The engineers are constantly in there...
...It was his feeling that DRUM could be "a spoiler" for the militant, predominantly black anti-administration caucus in the next local elections...
...Black workers today are going through a development somewhat analogous to that experienced by many workers in the 1930s...
...WORKERS, BLACK AND WHITE A leader of a predominantly black caucus, the Concerned Members for Better Unionism, told me that "DRUM guys came to our meetings and argued that if we included white people in our thing, we were going to fail...
...at GM, 33 percent, and at Ford, nearly 30 percent...
...One League-summoned "mass meeting" drew seven people...
...DRUM was a panic button, and both the union and the company reacted...
...When you are seeking representation within existing institutions, it is sometimes useful to threaten the building of a separate, new institution— especially if someone else raises that specter for you, so that if convenient you can repudiate it later...
...One youth fired for absenteeism complained, "How could they miss me in a plant with 6,000 guys workin' in there...
...The People's World played up unity and made a pointof "the predominantly white audience" that cameto hear Watson, Panther theorist Masai, Hilliard, and Bobby Seale...
...So we have to form more caucuses and a revolutionary movement, so that we can break down this 7 There are about 5,000 workers in the FremontGM plant, of whom 30 to 35 percent are blackand Mexican-American in equal proportions...
...For a radical sect to counter this takes some doing, not to mention dedicated passion...
...Within the UAW, too, they learn how to caucus, to be political...
...They readily concede the necessity of obtaining "relief" for black workers...
...And it has not been easy...
...When asked if he were advocating separate unions for black workers, Watson answered yes.' Masai asserted the primacy of the 8 The differences in reporting were interesting...
...It was their contention that the unions are inherently undemocratic, and that even with the overwhelming support of the workers, the union bureaucracy cannot be broken through peaceful, democratic methods...
...Militancy obviously has its uses...
...At shift break, workers erupt out of the main gate, quite as the masses poured out of the mine-pits and factory maws of Art Young's cartoons...
...that black workers "fired on trumped-up racist charges" be rehired with back pay...
...The second "D" and first "L" are missing from the onceproud blue letters over the doorway, "DO GE OCAL 3." A picture of FrankThis article was written under the auspices of the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, Inc., with the assistance of a grant from the Ford Foundation...
...Nonetheless, when everybody went back to work, Dodge fired two white women and five black men, including Baker and a colleague, Bernie Tate...
...Numerically, my estimate is that the League's hardcore hovers around a hundred young blacks, the majority of whom are either community people or students at Wayne...
...Aggrieved workers must request permission from the local union for strike action on unresolved grievances, and the strike vote must be carried by a two-thirds majority...
...According to Solidarity, the UAW monthly, nearly 36 percent of UAW members at Chrysler are under 30...
...There is GRUM (General Motors Revolutionary Movement) and HRUM, in Chicago, is for Harvester...
...Douglas A. Fraser, head of the UAW Chrysler Department, and Paul Schrade, Director of West Coast Region 6, among others, however, believe in keeping lines open, and acknowledge that blacks in the union have suffered inequities and indignities...
...In what amounts to an almost full-employment economy, some bluecollar youths are dropping in and out of industry pretty much the way their middleclass peers do at college—in response to mood, the need for bread, and parental push...
...This may have amounted to a demand that all white supervision must go but it also reflected DRUM's immediate goals—"relief" for black workers —and related to their ultimate revolutionary aim of a workers' state...
...Presumably, since demands are also "educational," such DRUM demands as the appointment of "a black brother as head of the board of directors of Chrysler Corporation" are related to its view of what ought to be...
...If the mixture is right, it doesn't take much to spark a wildcat walkout at its auto or supply parts plants...
...Especially, since it now appears that they are now making their own mark within the unions...
...At another point, he said, class struggle, saying that "a degree of selfdetermination" was necessary for black workers as the most oppressed section of the working class, but also asserting Panther opposition to splitting the international proletariat...
...Meanwhile, the union had secured the reinstatement of five of the seven discharged in May...
...Most of the original demands, naturally, relate to the Dodge situation—for "all black doctors WORKERS, BLACK AND WHITE and 50 percent black nurses" in the medical center...
...To recruit a cadre, or to begin building a base, however, one expects to see some educational apparatus...
...Workers there decided not to return to work after lunch...
...5 The Mahwah walkout offers an interesting exercise in New Left fantasy...
...Realistically, I know he wouldn't, but at least the verbal racist shit would stop...
...The Guardian did not mention the color of the audience, but did bring out thepolitical differences between the League and thePanthers...
...A black worker at Dodge views the plant as a place where, "when white people were on those lines, they didn't use the watch...
...Men, women, many of them young and a large number black, hurry away as fast as their second-hand cars will take them...
...1 The 1960s were boom years for the industry...
...Chrysler emerged from World War II with the largest percentage of black employees in the industry, a lead it still holds...
...will not protect workers who resort to violence and intimidation with the conscious purpose of dividing our Union along racial lines...
...He is working, however, in a community program...
...What role DRUM played is not exactly clear...
...But there just doesn't seem to be any—no paper, no pamphlets, no classes...
...DRUM, of course, blasts the TULC as "a bunch of Uncle Toms," and TULC hasn't been noticeably successful among young blackworkers...
...predominantly black districts, or departments, tend to elect black committeemen and black shop stewards...
...According to industry estimates, some 46,000 new hires passed in and out of Detroit-area auto plants in 1968...
...After such a vote, the international sends to the company "a five-day letter," giving the company five days to settle the grievance or else face a strike...
...Now black people are on the line, the watch thing is here...
...Managerially incompetent and scandal-ridden, Chrysler seemed headed for the junkyards by 1960 61...
...the union and the corporation, in that order, and only when we recognize that the enemy is within can we effectively combat the corporation, the power structure...
...Still, it won't do to write off the League, as some in Solidarity House are inclined to do...
...They aren't likely to take attacks on their union lightly...
...The line may move at 65 jobs an hour, he explained, "but a guy gets different work assignments two or three times a model...
...At a time when black workers are going through an awakening of ethnic class-consciousness, it is unreasonable to expect the emergence of only moderate expressions of "just because we don't see unions as the only salvation of workers doesn't mean we're going to ignore them and what they mean...
...The most potent argument you can use against extremists is that the system works," said Fraser, in talking about the recent local elections...
...The line was edged up from 49 units to 58 units an hour...
...No less than white, black workers want what Samuel Gompers so tersely described as "more...
...the union stepped in and theerring foreman was removed from his job...
...that a rank-and-file committee investigate grievances, etc...
...The last Detroitwide Revolutionary Black Workers demonstration aimed at the UAW, on November 9, 1969, drew roughly a hundred persons, some from the plants, some from Wayne University, and some from the black community...
...At the present writing, however, I doubt that DRUM, et al., could shut down any plant in Detroit...
...No doubt...
...This was in line with a League demand: "Recognition of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and its affiliates as the official spokesman for black workers on the local and national level with the power to negotiate black demands on the company and the union and their power to call officially sanctioned strikes...
...TULC is not a caucus, and this may havehurt it among those now engaged in building blackcaucuses within local unions...
...At its peak, TULChad over 7,000 members and helped elect MayorJerome Cavanaugh, despite opposition from Solidarity House...
...At the same time, the UAW "must" fight against speed-up, for a five-hour day and four-day week, and for a doubling of the wages of all production workers...
...Could it be that the black workers discovered that they had been had by the UBB, losing pay for no good reason...
...At least within the UAW, black caucuses did much better in a series of local elections held since DRUM appeared on the scene...
...In Local 7, as I found out later and as Leon England, another black officer of the Local, put it, "It took seven years to get what we got...
...Despite automation, the assembly line has not changed its essential character as an engineered, mechanical pacer of man...
...At Dodge Main, I was repeatedly told, DRUM's unqualified attack on all the black stewards and committeemen as "Uncle Toms" put off a considerable number of workers who might otherwise have been more receptive to its message...
...Only in the last four to five years has the speed-up come on the scene...
...Not one ever looks back...
...Record earnings in 1968 amounted to $290.7 million, or $6.23 a share on sales of $7.4 billion...
...Others point a direction— that "all black workers immediately stop paying union dues," and that "the two hours' pay that goes into union dues be levied to the black community to aid in selfdetermination for black people...
...At conventions, blacks are probably proportionately represented, and perhaps even more so among officers in most locals where black workers exist in any number...
...Scarcely heeding the traffic lights recently installed at their demand and for their protection, they rush across Joseph Campau to the bars on the opposite side of the street or to their cars parked nose-to-nose in giant parking lots...
...Others are fired because they haven't caught on for a variety of reasons...
...Why...
...Just seven years ago a worker had to have twenty years' seniority to work at Chrysler...
...A black was elected vice-president of Briggs Local 212, the first time a black has held a top-level office in that local union...
...All this, of course, may be an Old Left hangup, or it may be going on out of sight, away from prying white eyes...
...20 years later, 23.1 percent of its 133,114 employees were black...
...Horston, who has worked in the plant six years andformed his caucus in late 1968, ran for boardmemberat-large in recent local elections, gettingabout 500 votes where he needed 800-900 to win...
...lin D. Roosevelt looms darkly in the back corner of one fair-sized meeting hall...
...gear and axle plant...
...It makes 'em powerful when you realize that 2,000 votes can win the Presidency...
...All that shit—organizing meetings, developing education classes, and raising funds—got to be done...
...While the last recession did not exactly produce a revolutionary mood in Detroit or the country-at-large, it is true that the temper of the black community is radically different, edgier and more political...
...The League is, at best, a ginger for other black caucuses, and at worst a disruptive minority among black workers...
...Emblazoned with the slogan, "One Class-Conscious Worker is Worth 100 Students," the paper was enlisted in the revolutionary struggle of black workers as embodied in DRUM...
...They want representation, and as Leon England told me, "We intend to use everything we have to further the rights of the black man in this union...
...There are two blacks on the 27-man executive board, and 80 black international representatives on a staff of 1,050...
...MARUM (Mack Avenue...
...Last March the union executive board in a four-page leaders are fired...
...today roughly 65 percent at Dodge Main have less than six years' seniority...
...C C URRENTLY,U according to Watson, the League is concentrating on "developing a more comprehensive, analytical program and a more disciplined organization...
...65 percent of the 4,012 UAW members at the Chrysler Eldon Gear and Axle plant are black...
...The League, as he said, "is a fulltime operation...
...The black worker involved was not fired...
...This right is hedged in, a necessary precaution against constant disruption...
...The union hall is already a 1940s relic, located a block or so up Joseph Campau from Dodge Main...
...and roughly 60 percent of the production workers at Dodge Main are black...
...Now, what happens when a wildcat has the genuine backing of the workers in a plant and its THOMAS R. BROOKS Left publications took up the beat, and hailed the onward march of the "Vanguard of the Black Revolution...
...ELRUM (Eldon, Chrysler's only 3 Baker, as they say, is still out of the industry...
...letter to Detroit-area members warned: "The UAW...
...None of these things took place at Mahwah...
...Chrysler was out to make 1968 a big year and the pressures at Dodge Main had in WORKERS, BLACK AND WHITE tensified to near-breaking by spring...
...Both Watson and Hamlin, however, possess a pragmatic as well as a chiliastic bent...
...Conceivably, the League might develop a program and a thrust that would appeal to these workers...
...The agitation at Dodge got attention elsewhere...
...Other black workers began forming similar groups in auto plants around Detroit, each demonstrating, if nothing else, the American fascination for alphabetizingFRUM (Ford Revolutionary Union Movement...
...General Baker, one of the nine Dodge founders of DRUM was described to me (by a young white radical) as "a working-class black in motion against the social system," and by a black worker at Dodge as "a real power, and no fool, though he can't present his thing...
...At the moment, the Panthers are for a united front, and apparently the DRUMmers haven't decided...
...Incidentally, Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard, in the April 24, 1969, Black Panther, claimed that a majority within DRUM and FRUM are Panther party members...
...JARUM (Jefferson Avenue...
...According to one UAW chief steward at Dodge, representing some 400 workers, "Two hundred guys must've passed through my department since August...
...According to the January 23, 1969, issue of the south end, The election [for trustee in Local 3] was still a significant victory for the black workers...
...Over the last six years, black employment in Detroit's auto plants has risen sharply...
...Chrysler employment rose from roughly 75,000 in 1962 to slightly over 133,114 in 1966...
...Seale, according to the Guardian, "left open the possibility of caucuses within unions to fight racism...
...If auto production is pared back, young auto workers will be hit hardest...
...So far as I can tell from talking with a number of black UAW members, the caucuses building on this fundamental notion have been the successful ones...
...indicative of a new militancy, especially among black workers, all around the country and of new possibilities for radicals, black and white, to fight on class and race issues under workers'leadership...
...He described the Local as "rebellious anyway,"and added that working conditions had deteriorated, and "there was a lot of racism, of all kinds—discrimination in promotion, in the skilled trades, and discrimination in the form of racial slurs...
...But there are differences between the DRUMmers and the Panthers...
...The League, no doubt, suffers from those internal contradictions that plague all parties dedicated to "revolution" while agitating for "relief" from present wrongs...
...It wants a cut in union dues and an end to the check-off—"progressive in the 1930s, today it prevents workers from disciplining poor union leadership...
...Aside from the arduous, inplant political work and the plugging away at grievances and the like, there is the im WORKERS, BLACK AND WHITE patience of the young...
...In the Village Voice, Jonathan Black wrote, "Most fundamentally, 906 [the UAW Local] does not represent the workers, especially the blacks," and concluded, after a couple of hedges, "At its best, Mahwah is providing an unusual laboratory in which students and workers can learn to cooperate in their struggles...
...Watson and Hamlin are operating out of a West Side community organization store-front, and have taken up other, additional causes...
...As a party, the Panthers possess the ideology, however rudimentary, that could sustain in-plant DRUM-type agitators...
...Of the 350,000 members of the United Auto Workers in the Detroit area, which encompasses a good number of predominantly white suburbs, it is estimated 'At the time of my visit in November 1969, however, Dodge Main had begun to feel the recent pinch on Chrysler profits, a 25 percent plunge in first-quarter earnings...
...That I've just started to move this last year...
...Tate is back at work, but whether at Dodge or elsewhere I could not ascertain...
...The wildcat was sparked by the United Black Brotherhood's skillful exploitation of a rumor that flowed cut of a foreman's attempt to fire a black worker, allegedly calling him a "black mother fucker...
...During the 1930s, workers played off the CIO against the AFL, and radical parties and sects flourished at the fringes of the mainstream of the unions...
...This does not quite fit in with the claim for a black revolutionary upsurge...
...THOMAS R. BROOKS that upward of 40 percent are black.2 There are other signs of change in the auto industry...
...More blacks are now on the staffs of both institutions than before DRUM made its appearance...
...DRUM indeed exercises considerable appeal among young black workers...
...9 In an interview with me, Watson hedged on theissue of separatist, or dual, unions...
...Exactly what it might do is unclear—attack the UAW and/or the motor companies, disrupt production by mass picketing, hit at high seniority workers, march on city hall for jobs...
...A sequel to this article, concerning the rise of black groups within the unions, will appear in our next issue.—ED...
...But Watson also added that he thought black caucuses in whitecontrolled unions were largely ineffective...
...The union leadership is divided on how to best handle DRUM and like developments...
...Detroit itself, edging toward a black majority, is expected to be 50 percent black in 1970...
...Solidarity House, naturally, hailed these election results as a setback for DRUM and a victory for UAW internal democracy...
...Baker allegedly blocked someone from entering the plant...
...We consider ourselves a total revolutionary organization...
...White women led that walkout," a black shop steward at Dodge Main told me...
...Such strikes are a barometer of tensions within the industry, and significantly there have been more strikes over work standards this year than in some time...
...Today, I was told by Joe Davis, a shrewd Dodge Main black steward, "DRUM might muster 500 votes in a plant-wide election...
...Within the plants there is a noticeable trend toward black representation...
...They face much higher work standards than when we came in," he told me...
...We want to get him more solidified in it...
...Under the new line of "a united front against fascism," the Panthers, to quote their paper again, "after having concentrated previously on community affairs" are turning "toward an alliance with labor...
...But the rest had only a year or less...
...while another shut down Dodge-Main...
...We'd been doing Inner City Voice," Watson told me in describing the genesis of DRUM, "and some of our people were working at Dodge...
...Baker didn't picket...
...Black caucuses, different in character and tendency from the foregoing, were formed in UAW locals, the United Steelworkers, the Building Service Employees International Union, and in American Federation of Teachers locals...
...Domestic employment among the big three—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—rose from 693,186 in 1961 to 953,585 in 1966...
...A Black Federation of Labor announced itself in Chicago, and black "rankandfile" groups announced their determination to form separate black unions within the Chicago and New York transit systems...
...It may yet recruit a real cadre, or even build a constituency among young black auto workers in Detroit...
...The League has backedan independent black effort to organize hospitalworkers in Detroit...
...Somebody must be feeling guilty...
...But ideologists among blacks as among whites are prone to this kind of grouping, regrouping, splintering, and resplintering...
...Mazey, who argues that no union has done more for black workers than the UAW, insists, "We can no longer tolerate the tactics of these young militants...
...They call it `advanced technology,' I call it speed-up...
...A bearish figure, the 26-year-old Baker has been tagged in the Detroit Free Press as a black nationalist and a member of the Afro-American Youth Association...
...Hamlin, at least, envisages "a workers' state [where] workers have control over management," and I gather on the Chinese rather than the Yugoslavian model...
...White SDSers and Black Panthers then joined the wildcat picket line...
...41 percent at Ford, and 40 percent at GM...
...Baker, I was told, had a poor attendance record but no bad marks for wildcatting...
...Four ELRUM candidates lost, however, and Fred Halsey, ELRUM chairman, seeking a trusteeship, was the poorest vote-getter among the candidates...
...6 When DRUM's "support cadre" picketed Chrysler's Eldon Gear and Axle plant, causing a shutdown, the company discharged 26 of the workers involved...
...The UAW has cracked down, at least verbally, on "militant violence" while in practice opening up staff jobs and political advancement to moderately militant blacks...
...Programmatically, DRUM has been criticized by some UAW people for raising so-called "middle-class demands...
...Black Panther caucuses proclaimed successes among San Francisco Muni-Railway and auto workers at the Fremont, California, General Motors Plant...
...If no coverage before, why now...
...They were active in CORE and seem to have been influenced by several of the radical splinter groups one still finds in Detroit, among them the followers of C. L. R. James...
...As a result, thousands of black workers have gained practical experience in a reform movement, they have seen that reform is impossible, and are therefore rapidly joining the revolutionary caucuses being set up by DRUM...
...Like, you've got a 63-year-old Pole bossing 25-year-old jitterbugs...
...whose actions are an attempt to destroy this union...
...At Dodge Local 3, where presently four out of six fulltime officers are black as well as 56 percent of the elected shop stewards, DRUM lost in two special elections, one for a trusteeship, won by a popular white worker, and the second for the vice-presidency, won by Andy Hardy, dubbed a "Tom" by DRUM, who defeated a white candidate in a run-off election by roughly 2,800 to 1,200...
...We are concerned with the working class and whatever ways we can get that workingclass organized, that's the way we're going tomove...
...When I asked William Gilbert, president of Local 7, if he wanted to talk about developments within his Local, he said, rather sharply, "There was no publicity given to the fact that Negroes were kept out of the movement, in part due to caucuses backed by the International...
...The consequences of this new youthfulness within worker ranks is a dash of volatility to what is a Detroit mixture—black mili 2 Of the 1.7 million UAW members, about 25 percent, or 400,000 are black...
...The victories by Negro candidates show that the democratic way allows for change...
...Now we've got 6,500...
...In the anteroom of another, larger hall, several groups of retired workers play cards and chat in Polish...
...Production is up 63 percent over '49–'53, when there were 14,500 people in the plant...
...Followers fluctuate, of course...
Vol. 17 • January 1970 • No. 1
