THE UAW: TOOLING UP FOR THE'80s
Kornblum, William
As we enter the 1980s it seems certain that working people in the auto towns will suffer the full impact of the latest round of recession and regional depression. With all their press puffery,...
...The future commitment of the UAW...
...In the inner city's parks and other public gathering places, and in all but the poorest neighborhoods, there is a tangible feeling of well-being and even goodwill...
...This Sunday afternoon the bar is packed with steelworkers just off the day shift, but it also has its share of autoworkers from the neighborhood...
...Actually, the phase out has been going on for some years...
...We're losing plants all over the city...
...The Square Deal is near the gates of Midwest Steel's 80-inch rolling mill and next door to the headquarters of UAW Local 2, whose members work at a nearby plant of the Dana Corporation, fabricators of large truck bodies...
...These picnics are also reminders that Detroit has become another "black metropolis," and that to an important degree its future depends on the energy, confidence, and skills of its black leadership...
...In the offices of the union officials and shop committeemen the phones never stop ringing with questions from autoworkers on layoff...
...They never made any additions or modernization at the Hamtramck plant...
...In a plant the size of Flint Buick, the complexity of local issues and the pressures of day-to-day labor management relations may indeed blur the lines between manager and labor leader...
...now it's down to II or 12 percent...
...Sure it would be great to have a shorter week and things like flex-time," observes a veteran Dana millwright...
...But few of the thoughtful union activists with whom I spoke were worried by the pessimistic, "top down" assessments of their union's future...
...Or perhaps he and so many others whose livelihoods depended on the spending of autoworkers will not be able to believe that the plant is closing until it finally shuts down for good...
...There had been walkouts in the early 'S0s because blacks were placed there by management...
...The white suburbanite can't have concern for Detroit if he thinks it's a jungle only black people can live in...
...In the meantime, the Carter administration hastily offered to seek almost half of the needed capital...
...I think these comments from Bond French, vice-president of 599, convey a sense of this condition: This year we were the first GM local to settle our local agreement...
...Materials for these sessions stress background for the union's goals at the bargaining table and in civil politics...
...They're going to get active...
...One of them tried to make me feel better...
...But we've had so many strikes in the past—now we've decided to do it another way...
...But when I got to Dodge Main in 1964, in the trim department, there were only 5 black guys on my whole floor out of 500...
...But these days the union has to bargain like hell and maybe take a strike just to keep up with the cost of living...
...And even had this been possible to find, "inside dope" on which individual UAW officials are most likely to be sponsored in the coming union elections was only of passing interest...
...Detroit on the Balance YOU WOULD HAVE a difficult time convincing anyone in metropolitan Detroit that ours is a postindustrial society...
...well, blacks were just not electable before then...
...We had problems with inflating tires and a few guys have come up with a system that greatly lessened the amount of repairs needed...
...Their union reputations were won through difficult bargaining with the same Chrysler executives whose cause they must now carry to their congressional allies...
...One such place is Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors and home to some 65,000 active and 20,000 retired autoworkers...
...The black retirees rock comfortably on the front porches of their modest private homes just as their white union brothers and sisters do on theirs...
...The UAW would support a major federal role in the Chrysler salvage, in order to protect its members' jobs—but the corporation should be required to place a number of citizens, including UAW members, on the company's board of directors...
...The irony here is that the expense of Flint GM workers' demands for cost-of-living escalators on pensions is likely to force the loss of this and other important workers' rights issues at the GM bargaining table...
...Now Chrylser UAW has had more black presidents than any of the other companies...
...Now increasingly the home of working-class black families, Hamtramck is bordered by important Chrysler Corporation plants, including the giant known as Dodge Main...
...We've got to make more dollars available for out-neighborhood services agencies...
...Chrysler is in deep trouble and GM and Ford admit that their profit futures depend as much on sales in the uncertain international market as on "downsizing the American fleet...
...These are the same folks who are so important to Dodge, and the entire Chrysler Corporation, too...
...Three of my kids work here, including my daughter who is an apprentice toolmaker...
...In the late 1960s it was known for the militancy of its black workers and as the birthplace of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM...
...Memories of the Klan marches and the tense open-occupancy demonstrations of the 1960s are dim...
...If our people took their sweet time going out on lunch the way some of these general foremen do there'd be hell to pay...
...One sees the signs announcing these joyful gatherings: "The Coombs Family Picnic by the Band Shell," "The Williams Family Reunion Today," and so on...
...Just as the Reuthers' 1949 pamphlet, A Small Car Named Desire, began the union's long struggle to get the companies and the government to support small-car production, so may Frazier's demand for representation on the Chrysler board have begun a new chapter in the union's approach to industrial democracy...
...With plant closings, the sense of community is effaced...
...He says the company has two times more capacity than they need or can sell cars for...
...We've all been through a lot together and it's made us close...
...q Reprinted, with permission, from the periodic UAW publication AMMO...
...We'd be stuck on the production lines watching the men working as stock pullers or inspectors, or in the skilled trades...
...This is happening in Northwest Detroit and other areas...
...The best available figures show that approximately 5,000 residents of Hamtramck are employed by some segment of the Chrysler Corporation...
...These articles in the business press are merely topical expressions of a dominant view of organized labor's role in contemporary America...
...We had some issues about seniority and transfer rights...
...We need to establish a federal corporation to start producing it...
...They hope to do their stint here," one local journalist tells me, "and then get promoted elsewhere in the GM system...
...400 Flint: The Dream Delivered...
...A good sense of how UAW officials who deal with the Chrysler situation feel comes from Joe Davis, recent president of Local 3 at Dodge Main...
...In fact, blacks weren't allowed in the plant in any significant numbers until around 1959...
...Three years ago Chrysler had 17 percent of the domestic market...
...But in another article inserted in Headlight by the paper's young editor, Doug Frazier explains why UAW members will soon stage a brief work stoppage and "write in" on energy: Exxon and Gulf and Mobile didn't put that oil in the ground in the first place...
...with layoffs and the fear of unemployment daily in the news, one gets the strong sense that much of the urban progress and eased race relations, which has marked Detroit in the past few years, is threatened...
...For instance, in an article that appeared in a recent Headlight, Local 599's paper, the president of the local writes about the energy problem quite as if the only need is to get more gasoline, regardless of the social costs involved, and without much sense of the role that the big corporations have played in creating the problem...
...The Chrysler situation once again raises the basic issue of how far the union can go toward cooperation with management without sacrificing the interests of its members...
...MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE UAW as it enters the 1980s is more optimistic...
...The UAW VicePresident's remarks explain a bargaining demand that GM drop the standard requirement of American industry that employees must work the day before and the day after a 403 holiday in order to collect premium pay...
...As the union enters the 1980s these traditions of aggressive plant organizing, class conscious publishing, and open debate will very likely continue in the ways that have been established for the previous generation...
...We also had between 1,500 to 1,800 women there, mainly in the sewing room...
...You must stimulate debate and discussion...
...Any blending of the classes that postindustrial futurologists suppose exists in America is almost impossible to find in Flint...
...You know that each of these changes closes the plants for weeks while we re-do the lines...
...If you treatpeople like adults, you'll find people react differently...
...They've shown no concern for the people who did all that production...
...Of course, they don't always know what to get active about...
...It forgives the continued propensity of the press to dismiss evidence of working-class consciousness and political action as mere holdovers from an outdated epoch when labor and capital were true antagonists...
...The expectations placed on them by the older white foremen are not based on compassion and the supervisors often can't get the quality of work out of them that they'd like 399 because it's still much easier for them to communicate with the middle-class white kids who are there for the summer or for a short time...
...We still have terrible problems with red-lining and with discrimination in insurance...
...This is an informal social group of black UAW activists who have been through the previous ten years of militancy and union activism...
...The UAW's Chrysler negotiating committee, at an August 1979 emergency meeting in Chicago, rejected this demand pending the settlement of contract talks with GM and Ford, but it did suggest that special sacrifices by Chrysler workers might be required...
...But the first thing he did was wield a bloody ax at Hamtramck and any other plant he saw as another liability...
...and in Lansing, Michigan, Joe Finkbeiner, an active democratic socialist, is president of the huge Oldsmobile local...
...So why not 402 encourage extensions of this "community interest" between GM and the Flint autoworkers into the daily relations of plant production...
...The declaration that ours is a postindustrial society excuses the continued separation of intellectuals from the political institutions of the working class...
...Is there any question who the executives and their Rotarian allies will blame for the shabby look of the yards in front of the narrow frame houses of increasingly black Hamtramck...
...We're going to have to take an active role...
...There are no blighted and dying commercial neighborhoods such as one finds in most of America's auto, steel, and mining towns...
...Now the main thing they want to know is what you're doing to help them with inflation...
...But we've lost sight of human needs...
...Down the bar from where I am sitting with a group of autoworkers, the rolling-mill gang is carrying on a joking review of events on that day's turn...
...And this is a family place...
...A hot summer Sunday brings them by the hundreds to Belle Isle's magnificent beach, where one swims in cool river water in front of the commercial buildings and industrial plants of downtown Detroit...
...But when I steer the conversation toward current negotiations in auto, the mood thickens...
...The Mack Avenue Plant, Local 212, has lost half its people...
...It's not that we're giving anything away...
...This demonstration was led by Frazier and other top union officials...
...Right here you're looking at the local that pioneered in early retirement...
...Above them are district committeemen who are responsible for resolving conflicts in production units as large as 3,000 persons...
...A white incumbent mayor and a popular black politician are competing in the Democratic primary, but few blacks or whites view the contest in racial terms...
...In August we have a meeting with Mr...
...Women weren't allowed in the skilled trades years ago...
...We did all the sewing for Chrysler before the operation was taken out and put in Detroit Trim in Highland Park...
...We're not in any hurry to settle our local contract because of these problems...
...So here we are only 20 years behind England, and 50 years behind the others...
...In this union of some 1.4 million members, who labor not only in auto plants but in almost every conceivable work-setting throughout North America, there are cherished traditions of democratic competition, political debate, and worker education...
...GM in Flint is all there, is where a person can make a decent living and have something to live on in retirement...
...I too am concerned whether the union's emerging leadership will be inclined to carry forward the UAW traditions of -progressive unionism and social activism, but I believe that much of the more extreme criticisms from left and right entirely miss the implications of the struggles the autoworkers and their union are involved in at every level of their 1.4 millionmember organization...
...I am sure that if this union turned too far to the right, black people would never lie down and take what they did in the past...
...Still, most of the large gatherings are black affairs, with from fifty to a hundred or more members of an extended family gathered for a weekend reunion...
...In Canada they need permission, in Germany, too...
...And their commitment even to that community is minimal...
...We're here to have fun and spend a day in the park," Bobo, a stocky foundry worker from Detroit Forge, tells me...
...Writers in Fortune and Business Week quote corporate executives who fear the end of relative "labor peace" in the vast automotive empires...
...These companies don't give anything away without a big fight...
...Out of 36,000 persons employed by Dodge, a large percentage of them are from Hamtramck...
...We are going to have to be vocal and let blacks in the plants know that the progressive issues are to be fought for...
...They come from men whose years of human relations work in the factories convince them that the adversary relationship built into collective agreements is sometimes an artificial barrier to the realization of larger, community interests...
...Joe Davis actively supports this position: President Frazier is focusing a lot of attention on Dodge Main...
...This will be a constraining legacy for any UAW leader in the 1980s and beyond...
...This year we got together with other GM locals and made cost-of-living increases for retirees our top demand...
...it indirectly legitimates the myth that the top corporate executives actually deserve their bloated salaries and bonuses, and it supports the apolitical musings of social scientists who think the only remaining task of the American labor movement is to create more "humane" workplaces...
...Still, at maximum running we put out 2,000 cars a day or better in 1975 and 1976...
...These benefit plans are won in national negotiations, but in big locals like 599 so many problems arise with delivery of benefits to individual members that at times it's hard to distinguish the elected union officials from insurance agents...
...This position is supported in another article by Local 599's recording secretary, John Lukes...
...I think the loss of Frazier and Bluestone will cause problems, but we can't just wait till a Reuther comes around...
...and Western Europe, and the gathering strength of the multinationals, any faltering by the UAW could be a serious blow to the hopes of democratic socialists in North America...
...We influenced the union executive board to make that demand their top priority...
...If a supervisor has a kid who's too dumb for college," more than one autoworker claimed, "they send them here in town to the General Motors Institute to become foremen...
...If this comment sounds politically naive, it should be remembered that it comes from a local union leader who must run for office in her large plant every three years...
...By 1981 that foundry operation will be closed...
...In the hands of ideological conservatives the theory of postindustrial society becomes a weapon in the armory of corporate power...
...Similar expressions can be heard from young autoworkers...
...They roll more steel in this bar than they do in the mill," claims one of my autoworker companions...
...Given the recent trends toward electoral conservatism in the U.S...
...He said that in England they've only had authority over plant movements for 20 years...
...He does admit that racial issues surface from time to time, but he attributes his success to skill in union work, not racial politics...
...Outside the spacious hall is a temporary waiting room for city and state politicians anxious to make an appearance before the retired autoworkers...
...We are seeing whites move into communities that were all black after the riots...
...Since they have less to do with their time, we do plenty of business...
...In the Russell Woods area there hadn't been a new white family in years...
...With the corporations scattering to the four corners of the country it could be a disaster for us...
...I hear the same kind of calm pessimism later the same Sunday afternoon in the Square Deal Tavern, a workers' stopping place in the blue-collar suburb of Ecorse...
...And with things like they're starting to go, you never know how much more you're going to need each other...
...The recording secretary writes that "they [Flint Journal] read their GM bosses' right and so now it's a waste of energy (get that) to send Washington a message to get off their dead fannies...
...Blacks and whites can't live in two separate worlds...
...I share my perceptions with him that, unlike other Northern cities with large black populations, Detroit's black leadership seems to have more control over events in the city...
...The way I see it, we are the union, people like us...
...I hope the UAW never becomes an organization that muffles the voice of dissent...
...He attacks a Flint Journal editorial that accuses Frazier of "indulging in demagoguery with his plan to have workers `stop the line and drop a line...
...We just couldn't leave all the discontent to the rump group to exploit...
...Besides," as Werner of Werner's Bar explains to me in his empty tavern one afternoon, "these layoffs aren't the terrible thing they used to be...
...There is also uncertainty about the future leadership of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), consistently the nation's most progressive industrial union...
...Flint's population is now about 40 percent black...
...In the immense two-andahalf square-mile Buick complex, only blocks from the Local 599 hall, workers assemble most of the Buick cars made in America...
...McPherson of GM...
...Dodge Main is a landmark, but the way it looks there may not be many plants left in the inner city at all...
...My goal in Detroit was not to "cover" reactions to what would be a stunning, two-to-one victory for the UAW in Oklahoma, nor was it to obtain exclusive interviews about the course of union bargaining with the Big Three...
...it takes time to instill this...
...But despite these pitfalls and momentary setbacks, the UAW's preeminence among the nation's industrial unions seems secure for at least the 1980s...
...But everywhere I also hear worried expressions about the possible meanings of economic downturn...
...This is the only industrial country in the world where plants can move as they see fit...
...And such representational election victories as the one in Oklahoma City are only the beginning of unionism for the workers there...
...I speak with Rudy Cardwell, chief of all committeemen...
...I spoke to some guys from England who were doing an article on the Hamtramck plant...
...In the Local's Shop Committee Department, elected shop stewards handle the grievances of units of about 250 workers...
...They just don't respect the rights of workers...
...The pride of home ownership is not something a guy wakes up with...
...This point is rapidly made clear in such provincial auto towns as Flint...
...Under present guidelines it's a pink elephant —you don't build plants on multiple levels—it doesn't meet the modern standards...
...With one in six American workers dependent on the auto economy, perilous times are ahead for our banana republic on wheels...
...In the heat of the corporate and government negotiations, the significance of the UAW's original demand may have been lost...
...The auto, tire, and steel plants dominate almost every aspect of life in this city...
...Joe Conroy, state legislator from Flint, explains to me that without the continued support of retired and active autoworkers it would not be possible to be elected in this town...
...In the Schaefer Puritan area whites are moving back in...
...So one of the things Frazier is saying is that we are going to have to have legislation in this country that prevents this sort of thing, so people don't just get thrown aside like some rag dolls...
...In Cleveland the UAW gave its full support to the fight against corporate takeover of the publicly owned power company...
...I have no idea who the new executive officers will be," Marge Van Kirk told me, "But I have a lot of faith that our union will put in the kind of people who've always made it the greatest...
...Bell's arguments with Marx's ghost are particularly troubling in this regard...
...sure it's a good deal, but some of them raise heck if they don't get laid off, and don't get the benefits...
...When Doug asks that there be a union member on the Chrysler Board, its's really for us to have a sane person to deal with their insane ideas...
...They should be part of that operation...
...The GM executives generally do not live in the town...
...They have questions about their SUB benefits, their insurance, their vacation pay, their hospitalization...
...You've got to stay in constant touch with them...
...We're up to 10,000 in the plant now and we have been for the past few years...
...we can put computers in pencils with our technology...
...We felt that if we could clear them up fast we'd get back to work quickly...
...This improves security for all of us...
...This was also only a few days before the critical union representation election at the new General Motors plant in Oklahoma City...
...The company can't keep up with demand...
...The government has some say-so—they protect the people...
...At first we were glad to hear that Iacocca was coming to Chrysler because he has a reputation as a go-getter...
...From the time he was first elected shop committeeman it has taken Cardwell about 14 years to achieve his strategic position in the local's leadership...
...We're hoping for extra work and we think that our early settlement will help us with that...
...As soon as Chrysler announced its need for a $1 billion federal infusion, Doug Frazier was ready with a subtle demand from the union's side...
...The assemblers, particularly the young blacks, are blamed...
...This is a common response in dying industrial towns...
...GM and other domestic investors were quick to offer immediate cash in return for safe Chrysler receivables...
...So now they're better informed about scheduling and some new jobs are coming in...
...In Hamtramck, the famous PolishAmerican enclave on Detroit's East Side, the mood is even more gray...
...They bought 300,000 motors for it from Volkswagen, but they should have had at least an option for another 200,000...
...Alliances with nonlabor groups may prosper or falter, the union's power in Washington decline, or grow rapidly, and recession and regional depression in the auto industry may result in short-term curtailment of the union's broad social goals...
...And the 1978 401 Quality of Work Life page in the agreement led us to a series of meetings with management, to restore trust...
...The Jefferson plant was building the big Chrysler...
...Two years ago we had 9,000 there...
...We can run our other affairs with management here in Flint to make the workplace more tolerable and to keep our jobs here...
...This great Olmsted 396 park was the scene of bloody racial rioting in 1943, and since the riots and burnings of the late 1960s it has been mainly used by innercity blacks and a few wealthy business executives or officials who keep their yachts in its marinas...
...And in a few cases just recently our people have done a fine job on this...
...The casual mixing of black and white fun-seekers, along with the occasional mixed couple, is an encouraging sign...
...Presumably the culture of this emerging society creates its own separate rhythms...
...Under collective bargaining, class conflict is constrained...
...Under their leadership the UAW has compiled a remarkable record in civil rights, income redistribution, Southern organizing, urban affairs, and support for disarmament...
...I think employees should have some say-so...
...Black and white workers appear at ease in the rough teasing...
...But there's no question that things are starting to turn for the better...
...And how forthright he is on the issue of racial politics in the plants and in the union's future: Sure, ten years ago Dodge Main was the home of DRUM...
...With all their press puffery, the auto executives cannot hide the plain facts: they have glutted the domestic market with a product neither the society nor the individual consumer has been able to afford...
...The union's major publications, Solidarity and Ammo, are two of the nation's best sources for information about corporate irresponsibility, industrial pollution, energy policy, and plant closings...
...These and other, more specific issues were on my mind as I undertook a brief pilgrimage to auto country...
...Cardwell is the highest elected black official in this plant...
...I hope Joe does a lot of work in the streets as well as the office...
...Take our SUB benefits, for example...
...We want them to use their brains so they can help improve the quality of the product...
...Each year in the last decade the union has conducted an average of about 330 plant-level organizing drives in the South and elsewhere —and it wins from 55 to 60 percent of these elections...
...The union's friends on the democratic left will be saddened by the departure from leadership of UAW President Douglas Frazier, Secretary-Treasurer Emil Mazey, and Vice-Presidents Irving Bluestone, Ken Bannon, and Martin Gerber...
...And with everyone else downsizing their cars, Chrysler takes its most potent plant, the Lynch Road facility, and closes it for six months to be able to produce the Chrylser Fifth Avenue, and now they can't get rid of it on the market...
...We really have been in good shape, are absorbing people from other plants, and we think our membership appreciates it...
...Obviously, Hamtramck is made up of solid hard-working citizens the kind of folks who are the core of a great industrial nation...
...Now white families are starting to see this and are beginning to move back into the city...
...AS BLUE-COLLAR TOWNS GO, Flint is extremely well-to-do...
...But now the younger ones are much more dissatisfied...
...most likely it is entirely misplaced...
...He agrees but is also quick to point out the obvious problems that remain: We've still got a disproportionate number of HUD foreclosures...
...IF THE FRUSTRATION the darkened hulk of Dodge Main evokes is strong, imagine what it must be for people like Douglas Frazier, the UAW president, and Mark Stepp, the UAW vice-president for Chrysler bargaining...
...My more modest intention was to listen to autoworkers and their less celebrated leaders discuss what issues they expect their union to face in the coming years...
...From this perspective, problems of leadership succession, such as the UAW faces, naturally produce transient tensions and perhaps local disruptions in productivity, but these are not likely to lead to fundamental changes or to result in ideological divisions based on class conflict...
...The Jefferson Avenue plant went from 5,000 to 2,700...
...This summer many of the assembly lines are down either for model changes or because of slack demand for the energyinefficient Buicks...
...After all, for so many years the company assured the good merchants and political brokers of Hamtramck that their community was an ideal location for automobile production...
...now they are moving in...
...President Frazier has said that one of his largest tasks is to see to it that the union goes through the transition in a way that recognized the UAW was built by whites and by blacks...
...This 16,500-member local is the second largest in the UAW...
...There is not, for example, the obvious despair of high-rise public-housing ghettos and open drug markets one sees in New York and Chicago and East St...
...now we have 2,000 and in less than six months the entire operation will be phased out...
...It is unlikely that the Chrysler Corporation will give in to this demand, especially with GM offering cash to forestall the exercise of government and union leverage...
...Only through efforts of working-class leaders ready to lead coalitions of workers, urban poor, and the progressive middle class will we ever see new limitations on the "rights" of private property and the insane calculus of profit...
...If there are important differences in how Buick's labor leaders approach issues that the UAW's top leadership is pressing, it is also true that most seem to be overwhelmed by GM's power to give jobs and to take them away...
...At the root of our inflation problem is the fact that corporations have too much power and people too little...
...The problems are still there, of course...
...In essence they say, "Let the union bargain with GM at the national level for wage gains, cost-of-living increases for our retirees, and earlier retirement rights, so our older members can leave the plants sooner and our kids can get work...
...One answer is that despite superficial appearances, Flint's class divisions remain firm...
...I side with those who understand that industrial democracy will not emerge either as a by-product of technological change or from the partially articulated yearnings of affinity groups...
...CONTRARY to what one reads in Fortune and other business organs about the inexperience of the UAW's potential new leaders, or of the presumed gulf between its middle-level staff and the ranks, I found or heard about any number of young men and women who like Joe Davis promise the union a solid future...
...But many of the shopkeepers and middleclass people with whom I speak along Joseph 397 Campau Boulevard in Hamtramck feel something will come along to rescue their local economy...
...Now the Chrysler Corporation has announced that the plant will close after the 1980 "model year...
...I don't think blacks can afford to wait around till someone with liberal ideas bubbles to the surface...
...It still is true that almost 90 percent of Chrysler facilities are on the East Side of Detroit, but our beef is that the new facilities they are building are elsewhere...
...But the fact that the demand was seriously made is evidence that the UAW is moving away from its historic reluctance to seek power over corporate management and planning...
...about 16% of the oil drilled in the U.S...
...But there is no serious talk that the problem with Chrysler is due to poor quality...
...we've lost sight of the people...
...Recently our local elections haven't drawn as much interest as they used to...
...As far as the future goes, I think the UAW has qualified personnel to handle all types of negotiations and I don't think any of 'em are radical...
...We've been launching new products for the past years and despite this our quality record has been excellent...
...Industrial democracy in auto will never develop from local initiative, because plant conditions rarely allow such cooperation for very long, and power invariably remains a management monopoly...
...Now they're taking the vans out and putting them back in the truck plant and they'll take the Volare and Horizon production to the Jefferson plant...
...I personally told Doug Frazier that we couldn't be out-unioned by a rump group...
...These cars are not moving toward the market they need...
...He knows there is a world of difference between the effects of closing Dodge Main and the routine layoffs for model changes...
...Now we have a serious local issue because some of these plant nurses think they're God and a lot of our people want the supervisor of the medical department fired...
...Dodge Main was an ideal place for the inception of DRUM...
...is on public land that belongs to the American people...
...We have an effective black mayor, a black police chief, and good community control over the police force...
...Local officials who adopt a conciliatory stance toward management will soon find themselves vulnerable to challenge from more militant aspiring leaders...
...These rather benign expressions of class conflict are heightened in bad times...
...There are some in the plant who say management and the union are in bed together but I don't agree...
...Even the potential power of American collective bargaining, given worker solidarity, has not been nearly tapped...
...In "post-industrial society" the industrial labor force accounts for an everdeclining proportion of the overall labor force...
...The corporation almost immediately countered this move with a demand that the UAW forgo raises in the coming contract...
...At Solidarity House, Gary Brynner, the bright and capable former president of the militant Lordstown, Ohio, local, serves on Frazier's staff...
...Their business stupidity has put us in the position we're in today...
...There is plenty of evidence, and not only in Detroit, that these young activists are continuing to push the union in progressive directions...
...negotiations have become institutionalized...
...And in what I think is another version of the same position, Morris Janowitz, the pragmatic liberal sociologist at the University of Chicago, advises me to "write about why even a progressive union like the UAW has been so reluctant to press for some form of codetermination in the auto plants...
...Joe is now in charge of the UAW's political action programs in the Detroit metropolitan area and is clearly a rising young leader: At Dodge Main they make the Aspen and Volare, which were going to bring Chrysler out of the red, except cars got smaller and now these are not small cars or fuel-efficient cars...
...Shortly before my arrival in Detroit, thousands of UAW members demonstrated in the streets o Hamtramck to protest Chrysler's closing of Dodge Main...
...My dad sat in at Fisher I for 45 days, but that sense of closeness and struggle was bound to change as we got bigger...
...About 50 percent of our members are women...
...No matter which leaders assume top-level union posts, plant organizing in the South will continue to be a major priority...
...Yet for the moment, despite the oppressive heat of mid-summer, Detroit is calm...
...Louis...
...Before my time there were more than 30,000 at Dodge Main...
...Here, too, the UAW has a formidable record of past achievement and present practice...
...The commitment will have to be sought after...
...In short, in this technocratic and automated postindustrial society, the industrial working class and its political institutions are seen as fighting a rearguard action...
...In Missouri UAW personnel were leaders in the bitter 1978 fight against right to work legislation...
...I was never a member, but many of my constituents were and if it hadn't been for the young militant leaders in'67,'68...
...It high-lighted the union's claim that while federal auto production standards may have contributed to the company's financial 398 plight, the chief culprits, in the union's view, are Chrysler's managers...
...Dodge Main was always a center of autoworker struggle...
...405...
...On a Sunday walk through the park I stop for a moment at the "Action Group Picnic" and chat with some of the autoworkers and their families there...
...The union's extensive educational programs, including seminars for UAW members and their families at the Black Lake, Michigan, retreat and regional seminars for rank-andfile leaders, are models for combining substance and open debate...
...Also, Dodge Main is an eight-storied plant...
...But now white, working-class families are returning to the park...
...Their residential community is located in Grand Blanc, an affluent suburb outside Flint city limits...
...This energy situation also causes us plenty of worry, but what we got into—and it's one reason why we didn't have as many layoffs as we might have —is that we build a great many important component parts, especially for the new X car GM is developing...
...The recent victory for the UAW at the GM assembly plant in Oklahoma City is another important example of the union's vitality as a living institution...
...Up Front and Still Climbing JOURNALISTS' TALK of a "succession crisis" in the UAW is at least premature...
...In 1953 a newly appointed president of Chrysler's Dodge Division told the Hamtramck Rotary Club: As I drive through the community I can't help but note the small 30-foot lots, but everybody seems to take pride in keeping his small patch of lawn in top shape...
...We think that bad management at Chrysler has put us in the fix we're in today...
...Thus I was sure that the expressions of goodwill and cooperation that I heard at the Buick local would not be echoed uniformly in other Flint GM plants...
...Behind the alarms of the moment, the succession question, or the Chrysler salvage operation, deeper issues are being resolved by the fitful logic of this living institution...
...The UAW is recognized as the single most potent political power in the community, as GM is its economic force...
...One of the best places to observe Detroit's climate of class and race relations is on Belle Isle in the Detroit River...
...I had to get fired a couple of times and lead walkouts...
...I was one of the few stewards, and the militants felt that if you didn't identify totally with them you were an uncle Tom...
...But Chrysler has always been the most cautious, pessimistic corporation in the industry and this hasn't changed...
...the managers swing with children of the working class in cultural institutions that 395 develop their own memberships based not so much on class solidarity as on common lifestyles and preferences for music, sports, and sex...
...soon even the remaining 2,000 workers will become sad statistics in the toll that corporate capitalism inflicts on blue-collar towns like Hamtramck...
...Our people think most of the supervisors spend most of their time going out to lunch with the vendors...
...We've also lost about 1,600 people from our foundry...
...Additionally hampered by racial divisions, apathy, and declining influence in public arenas, unions like the UAW have had their brief moment as "architects of the future...
...We had some troubled times...
...Children of the auto executives, who play tennis and golf at the posh Warwick Hills Country Club, often refer to the young autoworkers who gather at the Camaro Lounge on Flint's East Side or at Bill's Still on South Saginaw as "shop rats...
...Besides, the economic gains of workers result in blurred class lines in which "managers may be managers by day and swingers by night...
...Daniel Bell's analysis of the "encapsulation" of organized labor is perhaps the most sophisticated recent statement of this position...
...Marge Van Kirk was not aware of it, but almost as she was speaking to me about the excessive privileges taken by management in her plant, Irving Bluestone, in Detroit, was claiming that "The corporation doesn't trust workers to come to work when they're supposed to...
...There are excellent recreation and educational facilities, and with their increasing leisure time the workers delight in driving their big cars out into the fishing and hunting grounds of Northern Michigan...
...It might seem—as much for these newer arrivals to the town as for the more suburbanized white population—that what is good for GM is good for the families of Flint...
...In the same key as 599 other officials he is interested in talking to me about his administration's view of relations with local GM management: Discipline problems are at a minimum and drugs are not a big issue...
...Here and there on Belle Isle one sees large picnics organized by other groups like "The Retirees of the Detroit Teachers Union," or "Les Bridgettes"—a large multiracial organization of bridge players...
...Now they get SUB (Supplemental Unemployment Benefits) and that almost equals their full pay...
...Granted, the motives and actions of the union's leadership in Solidarity House are crucial...
...There are about 4,000 black workers at Buick...
...This year it looks like the target will be GM...
...they moved that to the Lynch Road plant and put vans in...
...Marge Van Kirk, a veteran production worker who is now the recording secretary at GM's large AC Spark Plug and Parts Plant in Flint, immediately confirmed my opinion: It's true that most of our concerns are with the national level demands —raises and benefits, you know—but we have issues here too, in the plant...
...I arrived in Detroit just as the UAW bargaining committees opened their 1979 contract negotiations with the Big Three auto makers...
...In characteristic UAW fashion, discussion leaders are told, "Remember, we don't have all the answers...
...By 1983 almost all of the union's CIO-era leaders will be retired...
...Now you should see how far we've come thanks to affirmative action...
...Hamtramck has always provided a reliable labor market, and there seems to be a strong affinity and allegiance between the citizens of Hamtramck and the Chrysler Corporation...
...But there are also many important segments of the UAW domain where the leadership seems more involved in the routine activities of day-to-day unionism and less capable of forming a coherent picture of its direction in the 1980s...
...The new Omni, for example, is an extremely hot product...
...Chrysler is just playing checkers with its workers...
...I doubt Werner actually believes what he was telling me...
...As head of the union's South East Michigan Community Action Program, the UAW's political arm in the metropolitan region, Joe Davis is concerned with the affect of recent events in the auto industry on the future of race relations in the communities...
...What we are trying to do is make the work better for our members instead of treating them like robots...
...We think if workers are trusted to do the right thing," he asserted, "they'll do it...
...Workers' pleas for protection of their dignity and their rights on the shop floor (the substance of industrial democracy) rarely generate as much solidarity as demands for material benefits...
...Allies of the corporations fear the "succession crisis" in the autoworkers' union will lead to dissention in the ranks and a decline of authority at the union's top...
...Our big problems, though, are with management...
...In his writing on labor in "post-industrial society" Bell argues that the union leaders are structurally bound to corporate managers by a network of legal precedents and bureaucratic procedures...
...I resisted this effectively...
...it's down from 6,000 to about 3,000...
...THIS DAY THE HEADQUARTERS of the Flint's Buick UAW Local 599 is crowded with hundreds of retirees who have come for their monthly chapter meeting...
...People around here get awfully anxious when there is a strike and so we're even more swamped with phone calls...
...It may take years of education and further organizing before the traditions of democratic unionism are accepted as part of the local blue-collar culture...
...Well, that will not happen in the natural flow of things...
...Although autoworker picnics are more likely to be held in suburban locations, in this autoworker city there are invariably a few of them at Belle Isle...
...We can build Skylabs and do open-heart surgery...
...This is an excellent record, but it shows how difficult is the course of basic 404 union organizing...
...These expressions of a desire to maintain good relations with management are hardly surprising...
Vol. 26 • September 1979 • No. 4
