Torn Apart and Driven Together: Portrait of a Uaw Local in Chicago
Rosenberg, Bernard
The split-level house of American labor is divided into 190 national and international unions, with over 70,000 affiliated locals. Given the heterogeneity of American workers, any...
...Every zone has seven or eight departments, each manned by stewards who are expected to handle small issues and do so with unequal finesse and success...
...Grievances, pile up, by the carload...
...Naturally, they do not admit to discriminatory practices...
...The ho-ho radical view of black men who move up is that they have joined the union establishment, turning themselves into instruments of the suburban plantation...
...Dances, Christmas parties, camps—one in Ottawa, Illinois, more or less preempted by officials and another at Black Lake which is no more successful for the rank and file— all these efforts come to very little when you are confronted with the oft-repeated truth that "friendship stops at the gate...
...Blacks believe that their work records, but not those of whites, are exhaustively checked...
...occupational deformation takes BERNARD ROSENBERG place for workers as for the rest of us...
...As a result, many of them look for overtime assignments, and the grievance machinery is flooded with debates about who should work on a given Saturday...
...Dead-end jobs, even those that pay well, stoke militant fervor...
...The usual number of activists was expected...
...If the figure is an exaggeration, it could reach overfulfillment as unemployed college graduates look increasingly for any kind of work...
...Stack, Shier, Steve Culen, Willie Black, Egan and a whole string of other men are worthy of that spirit...
...If the crankcase department is hit by mechanization, as it recently was, white and black suffer alike from a shrinkage of semiskilled jobs...
...Horace Sheffield, a national officer of the UAW, who has fought so hard for the rights of fellow-blacks only to be called an Uncle Tom, defined that term for me last year...
...Karsh, you will recall, called his essay on the local a study in factionalism and conflict...
...Fortunately or not, competence is only one and perhaps the least decisive criterion for electing stewards, who if they lack expertise are less than useless to their men...
...To the swinger, superficially contemptuous of bread-and-butter unionism, nothing negotiable matters so much as money...
...Today the steward who fully understands a single facet of the overall agreement is much sought after for knowledgeable advice—and here one detects the nucleus for yet another technical division of labor...
...What one hand grasps, the other yields...
...The most mediocre academics get lifetime tenure...
...At issue was the right of a Negro bus driver and his family to live in Cicero...
...They may be able to ameliorate—no one can overcome—the structural problem, which consists in the simple fact that leaders are few and the led, if and when they choose to be led, are many...
...It squelches the outsider by subtle but active collusion with executive bias...
...Nationalities still cluster together...
...Nonetheless, fringe benefits (for example, medical coverage with hospitalization for an entire family, which after one year on the job provides a man with up to 95 percent of his earnings, almost up to $200 a week) keep self-styled malcontents in an "establishment" they outwardly repudiate...
...Hence in-shop justice often parallels out-of-shop bigotry...
...Quite a few black shop stewards function in the plant, black foremen are coming along—even some general foremen—and one superintendent...
...It figures...
...Says Stack, "The next day at 6:00 A.M...
...The president is praised or reviled out of all proportion to his importance, which lies more outside than inside the shop...
...In any TORN APART AND DRIVEN TOGETHER event, ambitious blacks held in contempt by other blacks are in a double bind...
...Why, the promotion of a Negro...
...All this time Local 6 was a major arena for the battle that raged in UAW circles between R. J. Thomas, a bumbling president with CP support, and the Reuther caucus...
...Superimposed on the old alignment of Stalinists, Socialists, and Trotskyists, who have not ceased to make their presence felt, are Maoists, black-power people, and an assortment of other New Leftists...
...Neither Karl Marx nor much of the American proletariat would be inclined to demur from that judgment...
...Seniority rights may have been violated, and some men from Local 1301 contend that the International would not support them...
...Is that something 64 to care about...
...Reference to the provision is likely to occur only as a ritual BERNARD ROSENBERG during negotiations or, more earnestly, if raised by such old Socialists as International UAW Representative Carl Shier, who has been heard to exclaim: "We are part of the second largest piece work organization in the world...
...And only the 400 or 500 craftsmen who hold themselves above semiskilled and menial laborers put much stock in an archaic kind of training that any healthy youth can master...
...That articulate Black Panther, who was apparently assassinated in a police raid, used to work—and refuse to work—at Harvester...
...it was one of many built by a U.S...
...An "objective," i.e., fully manipulable, point system shuts the door to certain candidates...
...Until now, and no matter what its ideological vagaries, Local 6 has had able leadership...
...First is the Soviet Union...
...This switch significantly augmented the size, and added to the explosiveness, of Local 6. Twenty HRUM men, assumed to be ringleaders, were not rehired but the union went to bat for them, too...
...Whole departments of sociology within my own experience suffer by comparison...
...These men, likely to be Northern-born, more sophisticated and better educated than their fathers, are not going to be pacified by industrial tokenism...
...Young workers grasp this truth better than older workers...
...No wonder a veteran white leader announces that he "wouldn't want to step on their toes...
...Prolonged and bitter strikes have yet to abate...
...It is difficult to fault the Sheffields for their exasperation...
...It is not surprising that a couple of UAW stalwarts, who fought along with Walter over a period of decades, should endorse these ideals...
...That slate included three blacks, all defamed as Uncle Toms...
...As the steady older worker leaves voluntarily or involuntarily, he is replaced by a more volatile young man...
...No more...
...If racial tension mounts in the plant, a special crew goes out to dampen it, and some degree of real comradeship does prevail inside, which will not rub off outside...
...they get along, more or less, on the assembly line...
...Thanks in part to union propaganda, workers are conscious as never before of the noise and air pollution that surrounds them: "Everyone talks about the decibel level...
...The local's collective-bargaining contract has enabled these men to achieve a major breakthrough toward top production jobs...
...At that time several rebellious workers were laid off for threatening foremen...
...They convene in a spanking new headquarters adjacent to the plant...
...They are the barbecue, "Because that's what you're getting . . . BAR-B-CUED...
...The split-level house of American labor is divided into 190 national and international unions, with over 70,000 affiliated locals...
...Black and white workers are caught up in a process practically everyone refers to as polarization...
...The picture would be clear enough if it did not also go with chronic absenteeism...
...But only to some extent...
...It weighs heavily on the consciousness of black workers, including those at Melrose Park...
...Beyond that they are usually barred by skilled tradesmen who enjoy more status but not necessarily more income...
...Actually every member of HRUM believes in VIOLENCE...
...About 90 percent of the membership participates in many of the elections for stewards...
...We created union-mindedness and diffused it...
...Strife, somewhat muted at first by wartime conditions, as well as a no-strike pledge and full employment, has been present from 1940 into the 1970s...
...Scissorbills," people sometimes regarded as company stooges, feel that Local 6 just defends lazy men who are always in trouble and happen to be black...
...The foremen in the plant are piglets . . ." (a nice discrimination that makes foremen slightly finer than union types...
...But the slander wounded him and he responded jeeringly: "Sure, come see the sheet in my closet...
...Only workers know what workers need to know...
...The strikers were upset about shop ranks, and were denounced by the CPUSA as Japanese spies...
...Any president who would take on the grievance committee, which he cannot control, would be inviting defeat...
...The refrain I heard over and over went, "They want power in a hurry"—with "they" having a chronological rather than a racial reference...
...The title of Karsh's chapter, "Metal Workers: Factionalism and Conflict," still rings as true in 1971 as it did in 1941— when the federal government built a Midwest plant to turn out aircraft engines...
...Apparently some white workers do not even know or need to know English, and their presence enrages black youths who see themselves held down for lack of language skills that are palpably superfluous...
...A lot get lost in the long step-by-step shuffle...
...To take all the slack out of old-fashioned techniques, Harvester computerizes time-and-motion data...
...They're better than the whole goddamned vocational system, and far better than OJT [the federal program], which makes a pretense of giving street kids math and English...
...All but a handful of blacks are out...
...None of these frills is incompatible with devotion to the task itself, and a good supply of leaders might just be on hand...
...What about the rank and file...
...To be effective they must master one section of the contract...
...To Bob Stack, an astute and perennial officer of Local 6 who was its president during World War II, generational ebullience in a factory setting is cyclical...
...Local 6 takes as sacred its right to distribute partisan literature in the plant...
...What to do...
...Given the heterogeneity of American workers, any generalization is bound to be faulty...
...Oldtimers recall one wildcat strike after Russia entered the war...
...word went out that the blacks were taking over...
...Now 500 Tractor Workers have been pensioned off at age 55, just as others in their plant were dispersed...
...open and announced factions expand at that point—then lapse until the next round of cadres, slates, speeches, and leaflets materializes two years later...
...It would like to see the men mingle informally...
...With staying power, a black piece worker can make it to the welding department...
...Foremen are accused of showing favoritism as they interpret the contract their own way, penalizing some workers by not giving them overtime plums...
...The melange of conventional and secTORN APART AND DRIVEN TOGETHER tarian politics has recently tended to be more complicated, if not more pronounced...
...The International, after all, is pressing for early retirement...
...Supervisors have been attacked or threatend and intimidated in a sort of industrial fragging similar to what happens in Vietnam...
...Among them are the ultraradicals, indifferent to benefits, wrung from employers by America's most progressive union, and opposed to those despicable reformist leaders who propose additional gains...
...Consider one case in point...
...Final recourse is appeal to the International union...
...To make more money right away...
...A cause embraced by the union is automatically suspect...
...That the leadership of Local 6 has been notably impartial about men for whom it has no special taste is best demonstrated by the case of Fred Hampton...
...That sounds like youthful zeal for the money only an excess of work can yield...
...A little later and partly for reasons not too obscure, Tractor Works was erased from the map...
...Heavy work loads produce fatigue and friction, the more so as management chisels on rates through frequent engineering innovations...
...Its workers were for the most part placed elsewhere at some possible cost of seniority and at considerable cost in inconvenience...
...Counter-cultural nerves are pickled or frayed...
...and the individual emerges as a thoroughly ambivalent human being...
...Now alcohol, not to speak of more modish substances, is back...
...Robert TORN APART AND DRIVEN TOGETHER 63 Park, the great University of Chicago soci ologist who fostered the systematic study of those communities, would be quite at home in today's milieu that, from his standpoint, has changed very little...
...He is not dismayed by the kind of fatal accident that occurred in 1971 when a cast-iron flywheel without shields on it exploded like shrapnel on a battlefield...
...About 1,000 of 62 them wound up at Melrose Park, and most of these had to commute from Chicago's inner city—which is about 40 minutes each way...
...Local 6 elected a black vice-president in the 'S0s when Negroes were a small minority...
...The old guard is conscious of this predicament...
...But the cutting edge of the white scissorbills is blunted by another kind of solidarity that pits every production worker against the company...
...Nowhere among the young white or black workers in Local 6 is this attitude discernible today...
...a virtuoso comprehends two or three sections...
...If you run this gauntlet, while getting properly graded and mysteriously calibrated up to 130 points, you're in...
...To the extent that electoral involvement can be equated with union democracy, Local 6 rates high...
...Julius Borzyk and his lackeys are PIGS...
...Egan was smeared as "a Klansman," and the proof his detractors put in evidence (aside from a fictitious biography that made this Northern liberal into a Mississippi redneck) was that he had selected only three black running mates...
...Local 6 of the United Automobile Workers represents approximately 3,100 workingmen—but next to no workingwomen, who have virtually, and rather atypically, disappeared from this segment of the labor force since World War II...
...Absenteeism and indiscipline worry the managerial class, but turnover is no great problem...
...But many newcomers could hardly care less...
...The greybeards air their resentment by noting that, "Young guys believe they're entitled to more for less...
...Youth culture no longer stops at the factory gates...
...Such precedent-making questions as those pertaining to discrimination are settled at higher levels...
...For all that, men making a dollar an hour more than their counterparts at General Motors are not about to give up a system universally condemned by good trade unionists...
...A shrewd proletarian wisdom moves members to ask of the aspiring demagogue given to rhetorical effusions, "What's in it for him...
...The subject we are teaching is Pigography...
...Harvester thinks it can get more out of the young, but surely not out of those young who come in (or stay home) hung over from the night before...
...Yet blacks, young and old, still feel they must fight hard for every step forward...
...During the 1952 race riots in Cicero, Local 6 printed a leaflet demanding that Governor Stevenson call out the National Guard...
...No officer or would-be leader of the Local dares claim that a high school diploma, though still useful in hiring and upgrading, has any relevance to factory employment...
...It manufactures tractors, "crawlers," farm implements, and construction machines...
...and by the pigs...
...Several cases that arose within the plant raised issues of nationwide significance, and went to the National War Labor Board for settlement...
...Here personal popularity, in addition to all the elements with which we have dealt—race, age, and ethnicity—comes into play...
...There is even some not unwarranted feeling that formal education interferes with efficiency on the line...
...Those who voice this kind of criticism are one part of the leadership that is taxing another part for a condition that is to some extent remediable...
...And as this is being written, 19 of them have been taken on again...
...Those letters—HRUM—embellish a manifesto alongside the group's symbol, which of course is a rifle...
...They kept up a chorus of insults until enough white bigots were convinced of their accuracy...
...The plant went up in America's great defense boom...
...The chairman of that committee is responsible for processing paper through a hierarchical structure that has come to be somewhat rough and cumbersome...
...Still, the tremendous number of unadjudicated grievances is a sore spot that can inflame men who already feel put upon...
...Nothing incenses them or the union officials who espouse their cause more than the phony educational requirement for factory employment...
...Grievances, both weightier and pettier than these, are the guts of a local's inner life...
...White members did not take kindly to the union stand...
...A local as excellent in so many ways as the one I have here described stands little chance of preserving labor's best vision of itself unless there is also a rapid and drastic change for the better in American society at large...
...Heh...
...It seems to Stack that a period of relative quiescence followed, but that it was merely the prelude to a new upsurge...
...Without fear of attribution, he said, "An Uncle Tom is a Negro who has a job that a nigger wants...
...Italians, Poles, Bohemians, Yugoslays, Hungarians, Germans, Swedes, Irish, Appalachians, Chicanos and other LatinAmericans— each residentially segregated and not normally enamored of the other group—all are to be found at Harvester...
...Decentralization in the labor movement (and everywhere else) has its virtues, yet the defects of those virtues should not be blinked away...
...At election time the turnout swells to hundreds...
...These are sometimes the same young guys who want a drastic and immediate redistribution of wealth...
...Brendan and Patricia Sexton reminded us not long ago in these pages of the credo set forth for organized labor by Frank Tannenbaum: In terms of the individual, the union returns to the worker his "society...
...VIOLENTLY...
...An official reasoned with him, to no avail, and then the worker, changing his tack, declared, "You'd better win that grievance or I won't vote for you...
...Indeed, lately, the introduction of new chemicals and machines has made certain jobs even more hazardous...
...Actually you can call us teachers...
...For those who are not yet cued into the latest manifestations of factory unrest, let me quote from some admittedly extremist verbiage that appeared in a flyer circulated last year by HRUM...
...In fact, no more than three blacks would join him and he worried about his "unbalanced" ticket...
...These are advances for which the union has been struggling almost since its inception...
...tempers rise...
...A worker may well covet the job of steward, which promises goodies like extra overtime, superseniority, and a better than even chance for upward mobility...
...Whoever subscribes to its more puerile tenets does not take his own life too seriously...
...Harvester employs over 75,000 people in the United States and another 30,000 abroad...
...Not many attend, and the composition of those who do is predictable: mostly power-seekers of every stripe and their hangerson...
...It is peculiarly internalized...
...Mass-production workers, for instance, presumably want safety...
...The possibility is not to be entirely excluded...
...And only leaders with a long memory register so much as a pro forma objection...
...Last year only 150 employees left the shop, many more of them white than black...
...Workers, even slaves, have always had the power to disrupt any organization by refusing to comply with orders...
...In-plant politics focuses on their makeup...
...Probably, a majority still value their local for the kind of protection that an insurance company offers, but this is a majority of older workers...
...Karsh writes of this earliest period, `°In its relations with management the local was militant, just as management was tough...
...To Stack, SDSers perfectly fit this description—which has not prevented him and the Local leadership as a whole from backing a handful of them against unfair disciplinary action...
...The union constitution stipulates that piece work must be eliminated...
...And many of the union's strengths and weaknesses are rooted in this wisdom...
...By this and other BERNARD ROSENBERG means strikes were avoided until Japan surrendered, veterans returned, women departed, and Harvester bought the plant...
...Disdain's the name of their game...
...This electoral turnout is 10-20 percentage points better than the average involvement in general elections, about which nobody is exactly apathetic either...
...I learned of one 20-year man, with an excellent piece-work average and a good all-around record, who was a particularly unfortunate victim of the transition...
...Such an incident has a cohesive effect chiefly among oldtimers—traditional trade unionists, men for whom good working conditions are a high-priority goal...
...We'll tell you why...
...At best, they resemble New England town meetings, which Norman Thomas used to claim were exemplary—until late in life he went to one...
...Young men in hot pursuit of the buck like to live a little, and so stay away from their hateful work site as much as two or three times a week...
...That's why they won't take the company, the International, Defag Gilpin or anybody else on...
...Management can slight the safety issue with "young guys willing to take risks" their elders shun...
...What a big, fat document, with how many technicalities and ambiguities, has evolved out of the original one-page UAW contract...
...blame now is put squarely on the company, and often on the union...
...Young guys will lay their lives on the line more heedlessly than older guys...
...We are informed that the species is lowdown, filthy, nasty, greedy, "short-minded," obnoxious, selfish, sloppy and given to eating its own offspring: "Joe Hart and his immediate staff are PIGS...
...or, "What's his angle...
...This plus strike action, with which Local 6's history is laced, brings together persons the rest of our society pulls apart...
...If their ranks are nearly lily-white, they claim that it is the result of company policy...
...As long as he and his rival ideologues are acceptable functionaries, they can prate about revolution till the cows come home...
...And you know what...
...Machiavelli in America could hardly have hatched a better formula: lie about the integrationist candidate so stridently that real racists vote for him...
...Today one would be hard put to find "high regard" for the company...
...I nternal union conflict thus ranges in this local from race to age...
...We should all have learned by now that community control—or more precisely, control of a community—is no more inherently democratic than regional or national control...
...Sparsely attended meetings do not exactly signify the iron law of oligarchy, but neither do they embody the principle of participatory democracy...
...Well, "Baby, we gonna put this plant on the map...
...No one lately has undertaken to poll worker attitudes toward the union, but the widespread grumbling and heckling hardly suggest "high regard...
...Local 6 had an educational director, since eliminated, presumably over conflict with a regional director, and not replaced thereafter: "This local used to be an educational arena in which men developed...
...Winners at such a meeting run the forthcoming election, with watchers paid by the union, while those on the losing side are obliged to raise their own money...
...They are the pure embodiment of a panacea that in our time goes by the name of community control...
...Yes, because it's part of the contract...
...Some liberal and Socialist leaders think things were better in the old days...
...If low-IQ people without learning make the best workers, men with educational credentials no doubt make the worst...
...They point to the black college graduates who are finally allowed into the accounting department where they find whites with no more than a high school diploma...
...People carried away a concept of dynamic unionism...
...HRUM stands for Harvester Revolutionary Union Movement...
...A further factor may be that it is hard to abandon well-paying piece work prices for the bottom of a low apprenticeship rate...
...Yet his concluding sentence seems to come from another world: "The great bulk of these metal workers, it is clear, have a high regard for their company and their union...
...He directs little wrath at the supervisor who sends his buddy back to unsafe work, even when glass shatters and impairs the vision of that buddy...
...Over a short period he was thrice discharged and twice restored to his job...
...In 1958 Bernard Karsh published an account of Local 6 in The Worker Views His Union, a book edited by Joel Seidman and his associates...
...And some of these "aristocrats" have their doubts, too...
...While remunerative, piece work, conducted in an atmosphere of speed and push, also spells divisiveness...
...They have noticed how successful those of their peers are who raise hell in other spheres of American society...
...Ironies abound in this mixture of allegiances...
...If you don't win for him, I can be denied a job, too...
...The booby traps are experience, education, an interview, and recommendations...
...Trade unionism is . . . a social and ethical system, not merely an economic one...
...It is a point of pride that in the same year a black man was "put on a grinder," giving him the first semiskilled job any Negro held at Melrose Park...
...In the spring of 1971 Local 6 held an elec tion committee meeting...
...Melrose Park is basically an Italian neighborhood best described by an insider as "still fighting the Ethiopian War...
...This old-fashioned militancy helps unite people as much as the new militancy can fragment them...
...Yet, we can scarcely know with confidence who wants what in any collectivity, even a small one...
...Or that a veteran black leader who conceives of himself as a militant on the race question can at the same time argue that, "A young white Wallaceite and a young Black Panther are closer to each other then either one is to an older worker...
...It gives him a fellowship, a part in the drama that he can understand, and life takes on meaning .. . because he shares a value system common to others...
...Once a month membership meetings are called, separately, for skilled tradesmen and production workers...
...Elections, which used to be annual and have become biannual, are scrupulously honest...
...Awareness of automation and competition from other, more efficient companies also solidarizes the races...
...Blacks either did or were thought to outnumber whites in the plant...
...Race looms large, and now more so than before...
...On three shifts, 10,000-14,000 workers ceaselessly turned out Pratt-Whitney engines...
...The local's home base is a plant owned by the International Harvester Company in Melrose Park, a suburb of Chicago...
...About half...
...That Dick Egan was elected to a second term as president in 1971 after his victory in 1969 is something of a phenomenon...
...They are egged on by the college kids in their ranks...
...I found them exceptionally intelligent, alert, sensible, and literate...
...And a year or so ago Melrose had its first shooting—not as a consequence of ideological differences, but over something as corny as "a broad...
...Heaven and earth had to be moved for that handful: three electricians here, a few toolmakers there...
...Stewards are crucial in handling mundane but vital dissatisfactions...
...Why don't they take us on...
...But then leadership, membership, and union, all were young...
...We have come to expect as much from the UAW, where Walter Reuther's spirit and that of his brothers is still enshrined...
...According to one guestimate, former students who have gone beyond high school number as many as 200...
...One such official maintains with good reason that "workers are the best teachers...
...Julius and them would rather drink muddy water...
...The surprise in store for them was an unusual number of black activists who 68 succeeded in winning eight spots out of eleven...
...They are part of the bestpaid nonwhite work group in the Chicago area...
...By marked contrast with unions that are run autocratically, the labor elite of Local 6 circulates...
...Local meetings and town meetings can be managed, manipulated, and captured...
...Communists in the plant united with management to suppress discontent: lift-truck operators were alerted to "get guys who make trouble...
...Older blacks and whites are not given to quarreling...
...Race prejudice no longer automatically blocks his path to promotion, for under the present regulations every opening must be posted on the foreman's window, and length of service determines who will rightfully bid for it...
...They will be younger and blacker, and their work will be cut out for them...
...Y'all pardon us while we clarify a few things...
...Nor do irregular work habits endear these young workers to their older colleagues who are put down by the new generation as being too docile...
...To the aggrieved this is adequate proof of bureaucratic bungling, but much depends on how grievous are the grievances...
...Soon after the end of World War II, Harvester was smitten with authorized and unauthorized strikes...
...Saving money 66 strikes them as senseless in an inflationary era, and there are good things to be bought with hard cash...
...Not to move up is a sign of oppression—and when one moves up it's a sign of capitulation...
...Even a part-time union job promises perquisites, trips, hotels, conferences and, the biggest advantage of all, "lost time"—in other words, temporary escape from the facEFRNARD ROSENI3ERG tory floor...
...Committeemen and zone men are key people...
...They fight with ideological weapons that the rank and file both tolerate and ignore...
...such is not the lot of a local leader in the UAW...
...For this reason, to be chairman of the shop committee is to be in a cockpit shared only by a financial secretary who, however, acts outside the plant as a member of the Executive Board and is therefore isolated from day-today problems...
...Skilled trades constitute a tight conservative bloc, shot through with prejudice...
...Nor are workers, accurately viewed as "up-tight" because of inflation and visible unemployment, inclined to walk off their jobs...
...Drinking cannot be called a new factory phenomenon, but it virtually disappeared at Harvester years ago, after Local 6 lost an arbitration case over whiskey in the plant...
...He remembers that when Harvester opened, it was full of rambunctious veterans fresh out of military service...
...The authors then explain their name, their signature—and their program: "Our program is simply the truth about the trickery and treachery going on in the plant...
...The third time Hampton was permanently discharged, but even then not without union efforts on his behalf...
...Their jobs continue to be hazardous...
...But why not once again...
...To be sure, qualifications are based on standards set by the company...
...Top officers are rarely reelected in consecutive contests...
...TORN APART AND DRIVEN TOGETHER 69...
...This exercise in persuasion begins: "Heh...
...What grievance...
...There and in nearby Maywood or Wheaton, nonwhites are less than welcome...
...Hence disgruntled blacks, as well as prejudiced whites, impede racial justice...
...HRUM goes on: The executive board knows who we are...
...If unresolved at negotiation time, they are set aside as management and union rush or falter to a master settlement...
...Let us briefly examine one local union, realizing that there are locals and locals...
...Black/white polarization can be documented a dozen different ways...
...In 1970 it shut down the Tractor Works plant in Chicago...
...Far from abandoning Taylorism, the company has updated it...
...About 40 percent of the workers at Melrose are black...
...But if rigging is unknown, opportunists are not...
...This is the only way you'll be able to stop us...
...It is concerned with the whole man...
...That tipped the balance in favor of Egan...
...Small, conveniently located black suburban ghettos do exist, but the vast majority of black workers journey to work from central points in Chicago just as suburban white-collar and white-skinned workers commute to the city to work...
...They do work side by side, share the same locker rooms, and eat together in a cafeteria where, nevertheless, self-segregation obtains...
...One recalls Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy's neglected study showing that in Connecticut, factory workers with a low IQ were excellent providers and steady workers, pleased their bosses, did not grumble on the job, and felt no special boredom deriving from dull repetitive tasks...
...Its ends are the "good life...
...and it goes with moonlighting...
...The paradox is resolved by whites at this level, when it becomes impossible not to see that their job security and well-being are bound up with those of blacks...
...They're scared...
...When no more than 3-5 percent of the membership are attracted to monthly meetings (unless strike strategy, an election, or the ratification of a contract is at issue), something must be wrong...
...Chicago, today as much as ever, is a collection of ethnic enclaves...
...The anti-Eganites maintained that joking of this sort was disrespectful and that it proved their point...
...Local 6 hoisted the banner of equal pay for equal work even in 1941—but not high enough to encompass the sexes: male and female inspectors continued to receive differential pay...
...Yet he admits that the current crop of hell-raisers is different, "more resentful of discipline, more sophisticated, more cynical" than any in his experience...
...And sadly enough, but by and large, they are to be found on the same side—in common opposition to blacks who in turn put them all in the same white bag...
...government bent on transforming the country into "an arsenal for democracy...
...One charged that the local had no business mixing in such matters...
...Jack Conway, who was to become a UAW leader of national stature, surfaced as chairman of the Bargaining Committee...
...Alarm spread among suggestible whites and certainly swung some of them over to Egan's slate...
...No one quite knows what prompted this decision, but panic seems to have been a factor...
...Local 1301 which represented Tractor Works was, you might say, militant...
...How much less...
...In 1947 alone, there were at least 17 wildcats...
...How far removed from contemporary reality is Karsh's, or almost anybody's, statement about yesterday's American working class: "If they are dissatisfied with their lot in life, it is their own lack of education and training rather than any specific policies of their employer that they hold responsible...
...The norm hovers between 50 and 100 members, with 50 needed to make up a quorum...
...Harvester is noted for shutting down plants, among others one in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and another in Portland, Oregon— with the Milwaukee Foundry on its way out...
...The guild tradition persists, rooted in hereditary, ethnic succession...
...Just plain chicken bleep...
...The age factor is fundamentally centrifugal: it transcends race and ethnicity...
...The reason for this is piece work, a perpetual anathema to organized labor which, however, can bring unskilled earnings up to skilled levels...
...The official reason for all this is that the company has to stay competitive...
...Piece work goes out of kilter and ceases to be profitable if workers fail to cooperate...
...A black worker of the old school remarks, "When one guy supplies less to another, they both suffer," and it is not the white guy but the young guy he stigmatizes as erratic, impatient, and dangerous...
...If anyone brings booze, drugs, or guns into the shop—and some do—it is the likes of him...
...This local was and is a microcosm of the parent body—only more extreme...
...It will be more surprising, and altogether heartening, if their successors do likewise...
...In other words we know all about pigs, company and union...
...If Norman Roth, sometime local president and still a force to be reckoned with, takes off on a pilgrimage to Moscow for the Lenin centenary, it neither bothers nor concerns them very much...
...Youth has become a union constituency comparable to blacks, browns, and whites...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
