View all notes
Eleven weeks into their strike, these workers—780 had walked out initially—were holding strong against one of the world’s most powerful manufacturing companies, a behemoth with more than $45 billion in annual revenues, famed for its mighty yellow tractors. The strikers were furious that Caterpillar, in 2012, when it was crowing about record profits, was insisting on a six-year pay freeze for the factory’s more senior workers, representing two-thirds of the workforce. Caterpillar was also demanding a pension freeze in perpetuity for these workers as well as a hefty $3,800 increase in each worker’s annual contribution for health coverage. If acceded to, Caterpillar’s demands meant that the strikers, members of the International Association of Machinists, would have their take-home pay chopped by 20 percent over the life of the contract, after factoring in inflation.
[...]
For Williams, the walkout had taken a toll. After all these weeks on strike without his regular paycheck, he couldn’t even afford the $40 equipment fee for his eleven-year-old to play Little League. Williams, sporting a bold, thick mustache and a black baseball cap that covered his shiny, bald pate, was both worn down and riled up. Before the strike, he was solidly in the American middle class, earning $26 an hour after nineteen years at Caterpillar, $54,000 a year before overtime. In previous contract fights, Caterpillar, unhappy about blue-collar paychecks that large, had pressured its labor unions into allowing a lower wage tier for newer workers, which started at $12 an hour and topped out at $19. Some of these younger factory workers lived in trailers; some needed food stamps to feed their children. In this fight, Caterpillar was refusing to promise raises to even these lower-tier workers, hinting that it might grant them pay increases, depending on vague “local market conditions.”
[...]
To Williams, Caterpillar’s latest push for givebacks was a galling insult. The company’s record profits that year amounted to $45,000 per employee, nearly as much as his base pay. “It’s ridiculous. They’re giving the CEO a 60 percent pay increase, and the employees who make the product are being asked to sacrifice,” Williams said. “This is part of the climate across the country. Corporations are pushing to eliminate pensions and drive wages down.”
In the two decades since the Culinary unionized the MGM Grand, MGM’s Las Vegas holdings have expanded to include such giant casinos as the Bellagio, Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, the Mirage, and New York–New York. In the Culinary’s 2018 contract negotiations with MGM, one of the hottest issues was the union’s fear that many workers would lose their jobs to new technologies, like robots that vacuum hallways and make room service deliveries and touch screens where customers place restaurant orders. MGM and the Culinary, which has been one of the most farsighted unions on technology issues, agreed to create a committee that is studying how employees can be trained to harness—and work alongside—new technologies, instead of being replaced by them. The contract calls for giving the union 180 days’ warning before MGM deploys new technologies and for MGM to try to find positions for any displaced workers. “You are not going to stop technology,” Taylor said. “The question is whether workers will be partners in its deployment or bystanders that get run over by it….At the end of the day, [MGM] can move forward, but this gives us time to understand the effects.”
should go further tho
Lemlich had dreams of becoming a doctor, but for a seventeen-year-old girl with no English and few skills, sweatshops were her only real option. Factory life was far worse than she had imagined. Foremen often rousted workers from the bathroom and hustled them back to work. The apparel workers—much like many low-wage workers today—were often cheated, not paid for all the piecework completed and hours worked. At one factory, a manager tricked the workers by moving the clock’s hour hand to five o’clock when it was already six. At another, the boss required each newly hired employee to post a $25 security deposit that would be forfeited if she tried to unionize or protest the low wages. At many factories, the women complained of groping by managers and catcalls from male co-workers. Lemlich hated that the workers were searched like thieves at the end of each workday—to check that they weren’t stealing any thread or apparel. Some factories locked their exit doors to ensure that workers didn’t sneak away with garments."
IN 1936, Fortune magazine described General Motors as “not big, but colossal,” “the world’s most complicated and most profitable manufacturing enterprise.” With sixty-nine auto plants in thirty-five American cities, GM had 250,000 employees and produced nearly half of the nation’s automobiles. It was an icon of American industry and the world’s largest company.
In sharp contrast, the United Automobile Workers was, at that time, a proverbial ninety-seven-pound weakling. Founded in 1935, the union emerged from a hodgepodge of other labor groupings that had floundered because of factional feuding and fierce opposition from GM and other automakers. Systematic company-sponsored espionage had badly undermined earlier efforts to unionize autoworkers. GM’s spies posed as workers and joined fledgling union chapters so they could tell managers who the activists were. Inside the factories, these spies helped get union supporters fired by snitching to management whenever supporters broke a rule. Company spies sometimes even took positions as officials in union locals and deliberately sowed tensions to divide and weaken the locals. At times, an astonishing number of spies—two hundred—kept tabs on union activities in GM’s plants, with the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency maintaining an office literally next door to the UAW’s Detroit headquarters. [...]
GM’s spies kept close tabs on union activities in Flint, Michigan, which was one of the auto giant’s production hubs, with fifty thousand workers employed at GM’s Chevrolet, Buick, Oldsmobile, Fisher Body, and AC Spark Plug plants there. In the mid-1930s, GM employed 80 percent of Flint’s workforce, with one writer calling Flint, sixty-five miles north of Detroit, “a shabby shrine to the automobile.” Many of Flint’s autoworkers were transplants from Appalachia and the Ozarks, searching for a better life. In 1930, when a predecessor union to the UAW staged a walkout in Flint, police on horseback rode down the strikers, while other police officers arrested union leaders, seized the local’s membership rolls, and prohibited union meetings within city limits.
GM’s spying was so elaborate that in 1936 five of the thirteen executive board members of the UAW’s Flint local were either GM agents or Pinkerton spies. One union supporter told a Senate committee that because of all the surveillance, many autoworkers were too scared to openly back the UAW. “You don’t know who you’re talking to,” he said. “You never take a chance….You get suspicious of everybody.” According to a Senate committee report, spying and union busting had been so successful that auto union membership in Flint had plummeted from several thousand in 1934 to a mere 120 in 1936.
Flint’s union rolls shriveled even as autoworkers complained bitterly of dehumanizing conditions. One Chevy worker said, “Where you used to be a man…now you are less than their cheapest tool.” A New York Times reporter who visited a GM plant in Flint was shocked to see the beehive-like swarm of workers and the speed and monotony of their labor. That reporter, Russell B. Porter, wrote of “thousands of men…perform[ing] the same operation all day or night, five days a week, the year round.” Completing sixty cars an hour, “they seem to work on strings as a monster jerks them back to begin another car,” Porter added. “Speed, speed, speed—that is Flint morning, noon and night.”
One Buick worker complained, “We didn’t even have time to go to the toilet…if there wasn’t anybody to relieve you, you had to run away and tie the line up, and if you tied the line up, you got hell for it.” A Chevrolet worker said, “The supervisors…were just people with a bullwhip, so to speak. All they were interested in was production. They treated us like a bunch of coolies. ‘Get it out. Get it out. If you cannot get it out, there are people outside who will.’ ”
GM’s foremen had nearly absolute power to hire, fire, and discipline, which led to resentment, favoritism, and kickbacks to keep one’s job. Some foremen fired higher-paid, longtime workers and then rehired them at entry-level pay. “We was only beggars…with no power to demand anything that we asked for,” said James Mangold, a Chevy worker in Flint.
Many autoworkers said they could hardly support their families because of the severe seasonal employment that resulted from GM’s frequent plant closings (usually to retool for new models). While GM boasted that it had the highest hourly wages in the industry, many GM workers complained of meager annual earnings. In a 1936 speech in Detroit, President Roosevelt said one autoworker had told him that he worked just sixty-eight days the previous year, meaning he earned around $680 (about $12,000 today).
Workers at the Goodyear tire plant in Akron, Ohio, had conducted several sit-down strikes in the spring of 1936, while French workers had staged a huge wave of such protests that May and June. The sit-down had many advantages over traditional strikes. In typical strikes, workers trudged back and forth in front of their workplace, exposed to cold, rain, and snow. The police often attacked them, and replacement workers could easily take their jobs while the strikers picketed outside. With sit-downs, however, the workers were comfortably indoors, staying at or near their machines so “scabs” couldn’t take their jobs. Management was reluctant to send in the police to oust sit-downers out of fear that the company’s valuable machinery would be damaged or sabotaged. With most workers still too scared to stand up in favor of a union, it often took only a few dozen militant unionists to shut down an entire factory through a sit-down.
[...]
From the very first day, as Sidney Fine explains in Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937, the strike became a huge story, the lead article in newspapers across the nation. The sit-downers occupied the north end of the giant Fisher No. 1 plant because that section had the cafeteria and many finished car bodies to sleep in. The workers formed a fourteen-member governing council and a dozen committees: for food, education, press, sanitation, recreation, postal services, and more. The governing council banned liquor and established daily cleanup crews and six-hour-long patrols to watch for counterattacks and company spies. The sit-downers even set up a reading room—the chairs were car seats—and invited theater groups to perform. And the sit-downers sang. One song that became popular was this:
When the speed-up comes, just twiddle your thumbs,
Sit down! Sit down!
When the boss won’t talk, don’t take a walk,
Sit down! Sit down!
[...]
America’s corporate leaders condemned the sit-down, with one business group commenting that if workers “can seize premises illegally, hold [them] indefinitely, refuse admittance to owners or managers…and threaten bloodshed [in] all attempts to dislodge them…then freedom and liberty are at an end, government becomes a mockery, superseded by anarchy, mob rule and ruthless dictatorship.”
A week after meeting with Perkins, Sloan told her that he would meet with UAW leaders and Lewis, but Sloan soon reversed himself, saying it was indefensible for the sit-downers to throw so many other GM employees out of work. His about-face enraged Perkins. In a phone conversation, she told Sloan, as she later recalled, “You are a scoundrel and a skunk, Mr. Sloan. You can’t do that kind of thing. That is a rotter….You don’t deserve to be counted among decent men. Decent people don’t do such things….You have betrayed your government. You have betrayed the men who work for you.”
Sloan was appalled, telling Perkins, “You can’t talk like that to me! I’m worth $70 million, and I made it all myself. You can’t talk like that to me! I’m Alfred Sloan.”
love it
The day of the settlement, the sit-downers marched triumphantly out of the Flint plants, proud that they were not vacating under a sheriff’s order. Thousands of supporters cheered them as the strikers sang “Solidarity Forever.” Outside the plant hung a fifty-foot banner proclaiming, “VICTORY IS OURS.” Roy Reuther described the scene: “I never saw a night like that and perhaps may never see it again. I liken it to…a country experiencing independence.”
Suddenly thousands of autoworkers who had been too scared to support the union or who had doubted that it could succeed flocked into the UAW’s ranks. Its membership nationwide soared from 88,000 in February 1937 to 400,000 in October. By late 1941, it had jumped to 649,000.
In the fall of 1945, just weeks after the war ended, Reuther was pushing two highly ambitious bargaining demands that he hoped would chart a course for postwar industrial America. First, he sought a 30 percent raise for the UAW’s 175,000 members at GM (equivalent to thirty-three cents an hour). GM’s workers were feeling explosive frustration after years of a no-strike pledge and wages lagging behind inflation. Moreover, Reuther argued that GM could afford to grant large raises while keeping its prices frozen because its production had risen 50 percent since 1941, its productivity was climbing by nearly 3 percent a year, and it had a 28 percent return on investment in some quarters. He believed passionately that workers should share in the benefits of their own and their company’s increased productivity. Second, Reuther demanded that GM agree not to raise its sticker prices, fearing that if the nation’s largest corporation hiked its prices, it would generate a wave of me-too price increases across America. That, Reuther feared, would wipe out much of the raises the workers received. That second demand grew directly out of the wartime practice of administering, and limiting, price increases. Indeed, Reuther pressed President Harry S. Truman’s Office of Price Administration to back him by ordering GM not to raise its prices. That second demand also reflected Reuther’s, and much of labor’s, view at the time that unions should have a real voice on fundamental issues like production and prices.
GM vigorously disagreed with Reuther. It offered a thirteen-and-a-half-cent raise (a 12 percent raise) and scoffed at the demand that it not raise its sticker prices. Joined by other automakers and the steel industry, GM urged the Truman administration to eliminate price controls. (To help raise take-home pay, GM also proposed getting Congress to legislate a forty-five-hour workweek to replace the existing forty-hour week. Reuther denounced that proposal as a major step backward, saying that GM was baiting the union and asking for a strike.) Reuther told GM that he would lower the UAW’s demand for a 30 percent raise if GM opened its books to demonstrate that it couldn’t afford such an increase. GM insisted that wages should have nothing to do with profit levels and refused to open its books or up its wage offer. “I am greatly exercised—perhaps unduly so—by the philosophy of ‘capacity to pay,’ ” Alfred Sloan wrote to another CEO. (Many workers saw GM’s stance as manifestly unfair, although GM’s view from the 1940s has come to dominate corporate America’s current view, with many companies refusing to give their workers raises large enough to keep up with inflation, even when their profits are soaring. That’s one of the factors fueling today’s income inequality.) Charles E. Wilson, GM’s president, told Reuther, “We shall resist the monopolistic power of your union to force this 30 percent increase in basic wages.” “Automobiles,” Wilson added, “would shortly cost 30 percent more to produce.”
Thanks to Reynolds’s ingenuity as a mediator and the city council’s eagerness to end the confrontation, a deal was finally reached. Unlike Loeb, the council agreed to bargain with the sanitation workers’ union and allow a dues checkoff. The council said the city was too financially strapped to grant anything but meager raises because it had spent so much on police overtime during the strike. Fortunately, a bighearted industrialist, Abe Plough, chairman of a large pharmaceutical company, donated nearly $60,000 ($430,000 today) to pay for an immediate raise for the sanitation workers. That made it possible to increase pay by ten cents an hour on May 1 and five cents more on September 1 (Loeb had originally offered a raise of eight cents an hour).
christ
When Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was elected president in 1976, the controllers hoped that after eight years of Republican presidents, Carter would bargain over wages (something not previously allowed under federal rules) and would move hundreds of controllers into higher job classifications to lift their pay. But Carter did neither thing. The 1979 oil shock pushed inflation to double-digit levels, and to help keep the budget deficit from soaring, Carter turned stingy on federal employee raises. From 1973 to 1981, federal employees’ pay slipped 3.1 percent a year, after factoring in inflation. This infuriated the controllers, who were already upset that they earned 18 percent less on average than private-sector air traffic controllers.
Carter’s embrace of airline deregulation made the controllers’ on-the-job stress even worse. Deregulation increased air traffic, encouraging the creation of low-cost airlines like People Express, which had a $29 fare from Newark to Boston and a $39 fare from Newark to Columbus, Ohio. Deregulation also spurred large airlines to develop a hub-and-spoke strategy, which meant a stress-inducing surge in takeoffs and landings each morning and late afternoon at many airports.