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The League radicals argued that the priority for Detroit auto workers was how to better working conditions, wages, and benefits, not to settle for fighting against givebacks or commiserating with corporations when their profits were temporarily down. The corporations had to give back, not the workers. The workers needed to control automation rather than be controlled by it. Automation should serve to increase the quality of cars, not profit margins. Winning support for such a perspective required extensive public education. We write at length on how the League struggled to accomplish that intellectual agenda and how it tried to set the rhetoric for discussions of race, class, finance, housing, education, and health.
The organizational focus of the League was the African American worker. But the leadership was not narrowly nationalist or separatist; it understood that fundamental change went beyond race issues. The League understood that interest rates and regulation of commerce were determined by government, but unlike entrepreneurs and bankers, the League thought economic planning should be directed to benefit the average American rather than executives, financiers, and the economic elite. Perhaps the League's most brilliant demonstration of how public resources could be used immediately was its transformation of Wayne State University's daily student newspaper from a socially marginal student organ into a dynamic community voice seeking to influence public policy. The League and its allies gained control of the paper by following the rules of the system. Moreover, their editorial work hewed to the spirit of the First Amendment's guarantee of the rights of freedom of speech, discourse, and assembly.
Unlike the movement identified with Martin Luther King Jr., the League was secular and urban. Unlike the urban movement identified with Malcolm X, the League initiated direct action to achieve racial equality whenever it thought the conditions were favorable. Unlike the Black Panthers who based themselves on youth and spoke repeatedly of white guilt, the League focused on workers and spoke repeatedly of capitalist guilt. In Finally Got the News, a film produced by the League, John Watson, one of the League's founders stated a major organizational premise: workers, unlike students or street people, had the power to shut down society in a general strike. Students and street people were not to be ignored, but they were not structurally situated to be the engine of social change.
In the pages that follow, we have attempted to relate the history of the Detroit struggle from 1967-1974, taking the activities of urban revolutionaries as our point of departure. We begin with a small core of black revolutionaries who began their political work in this period by publishing a newspaper and organizing in the factories and then led a series of activities which inspired other insurgent forces within the city and beyond. More than anywhere else in the United States, the movement led by black workers defined its goal in terms of real power-the power to control the economy, which meant trying to control the shop floor at the point of production. The Detroit revolutionaries did not get sidetracked into a narrow struggle against the police per se or with one aspect of power such as control of education. The movement attempted to integrate within itself all the dissident threads of the rebel- lious 1960s in order to create a network of insurgent power comparable to the network of established power. This movement, clearly in conflict with the wealth, power, and interests represented by the New Detroit Committee, generated an amazing sequence of separate but interlocked confrontations in the factories, in the polling booths, in the courts, in the streets, in the media, in the schools, and in the union halls.
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Increasingly, groups of white workers have begun to voice the complaints and pursue the objectives that black workers began to voice and pursue in the late 1960s. Ideas once limited to Marxists, youth counter-culturalists, and women's liberation groups can now be found on the shop floor in myriad demands and actions for a humane way of life. The capitalist work ethic has been discredited. Men and women no longer wish to spend 40 to 50 years performing dull, monotonous, and uncreative work. They see that the productive system which deforms their lives for a profit of which they have less and less of a share is also one that destroys the air they breathe, wastes the natural resources of the planet, and literally injures or disables one out of ten workers each year. Their rebellion is expressed in extraordinary absenteeism, particularly on Mondays and Fridays, in chronic lateness, in the open use of drugs, in poor workmanship, in repeated demands for earlier retirement, in sabotage, and in the wildcat strike. At the same time, many members of the working class, especially young whites unable to find well-paying jobs, have found. a solution to their employment woes by volunteering for the police and armed forces. White workers who can accept racial cooperation on the shop floor often remain hostile to similar cooperation in matters of housing, schooling, health care, and a whole range of social issues. Whether internal divisions will thwart the development of united class actio:1 is a question that remains to be answered.
The difficult post-war decades had brought one tremendous advantage to the Big Three (GM, Ford, and Chrysler): a chance to counter the effects of unionism. Frightened by the radical spirit and mass actions of the late 1930s, the Big Three made a deal with the UAW after the war. Their overriding managerial concern was maximizing profits, and the prime condition for doing that in the auto industry was control of the shop floor. All operations had to be evaluated in terms of worker-hour and worker-minute costs. Time-study experts investigated each job to eliminate wasted motion and to 'invent new procedures for increasing the work load. A worker at the GM plant at Lordstown explained the process in an interview printed in the September 9, 1973, issue of the New York Times: "They tell you, 'Put in 10 screws,' and you do it. Then a couple of weeks later they say, 'Put in 15 screws,' and next they say, 'Well, we don't need you no more; give it to the next man."' This worker was giving a specific example of the way management tried to systematize speed-up on an unprecedented scale. Sometimes the entire assembly line was accelerated either on a permanent basis or for temporary periods. Sometimes the number of operations required of a single person was increased. And sometimes workers were forced to keep up with the precise rhythms of a new machine or tool. Management could not get back to the "good old days" of Henry Ford when workers were not allowed to talk during lunch; but washing-up times, rest periods, job-preparation periods, and other paid non-production times were reduced. The net result of all facets of speed-up was that more labor was extracted from each person during each working hour. This increased tempo of work was not confined to a 40-hour week. The companies discovered that the savings from not paying fringe benefits to additional workers made it cheaper for them to pay time-and-a-half rates for overtime than to increase the total workforce. Compulsory overtime was enforced throughout the industry during the 1950s. Auto workers were made to work one to four hours overtime after finishing their regular eight-hour shift, and many were made to work on Saturdays and occasionally on Sundays.
The only weapon left to the worker was the grievance procedure. If a job was speeded up or an extra procedure added, if safety goggles or gloves were inadequate, if a machine malfunctioned, the worker could not fight it out on the factory floor in a direct confrontation with a superviser. The worker could only write out the complaint, file it with the union "rep," and wait for the complaint to be processed. Meanwhile, whatever the new procedures or safety violations might be, they remained in effect unless they were gross enough to trigger a walkout by all the workers. The grievance procedure became yet another device by which company and union eliminated worker participation in decision-making. The companies and the union had developed a division of labor. The companies looked after the machines, and the union looked after the workers. American auto workers were told by the mass media that they had one of the world's highest standards of living. They were not told that they also had one of the world's highest and most grueling standards of work.
Possibly the only group exploited more than blacks at Dodge Main was the recently immigrated Arabs. In 1968, they already numbered 500, and in the next six years that number would multiply fourfold. These workers were often totally confused by American conditions, and they were fearful of losing their jobs or being deported. The bulk of them were men who lived alone and sent most of their pay to relatives in the Middle East. A 1972 bulletin put out by Spark, a radical organization at Dodge Main, described the situation:
Chrysler figures that no one will try to help an Arab worker when Chrysler attacks him. So now Chrysler is attacking. Foremen tell Arab workers to do more work than their jobs call for. Eventually the "extra" work is "officially" added to the job. Other Arab workers are kept as floaters and continually put on the worst jobs, despite their seniority. Medical passes get put off. Reliefs are forgotten about....
It's the same kind of shit they have pulled for years with black people. At first, black people were given work only when Chrysler was trying to break a strike. Chrysler consciously set white workers against black workers -- both fighting for the same job, during the desperate high unemployment of the Depression, when there was no union.
Then when Chrysler finally did hire black workers regularly into the plant, it was only in the foundry (or the Body Shop a little later) -- all the hot, heavy dirty work around ....
Then in the fifties, the company finally figured it could get a greater advantage by letting black workers go on the line in other parts of the plant. And most white workers in the plant were suckered into the company's plan -- most of the whites sat down, to protest that black people were coming onto the line ....
Now today, Chrysler is trying the same thing again -- bringing in still another group of workers. Chrysler hopes to make conditions worse for all of us by first attacking conditions for the Arab workers. And they count on turning us against each other so they can do this.
[...] Racism had always been used as a weapon against unions in the auto industry, and Henry Ford had systematized the practice. Beginning in the late 1920s, Ford made it a rule to employ blacks in his factory at every job level in the same percentage as that of blacks in the general population. Ford helped finance the allblack suburb of Inkster and always provided low-paying jobs to any unemployed residents. This new-style "plant-ation" owner also cultivated a select group of black clergy and professionals. Ford was called a humanitarian for some of these actions, but his motives were strictly business ones. His personal views on blacks, Jews, communists, and other "un-American" elements were expressed in the Dearborn Independent, a paper he owned and personally financed for more than a decade, even though it lost more than $5 million. Ford considered the Jews to be the world's major problem, and in 1938 he went to Nazi Germany to accept an Iron Cross from Adolph Hitler. Dearborn, the city which Ford built, the home of the mammoth River Rouge complex, and the headquarters of the Ford empire, prohibited black residents. As late as 1970, Orville Hubbard, Dearborn's mayor since I 940, regularly used the word "nigger" in his public utterances.
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The hazardous conditions were supposedly compensated for by high wages. Auto workers were among the highest-paid workers in the United States, yet wage rates were deceptive. In the 1920s, Henry Ford made headlines by promising $5 a day to every worker in his enterprises. Ford workers soon discovered that it was not quite $5 a day for not quite everyone. Fully a third of all Ford workers never got the $5 a day. Likewise, at Eldon, the 1969 $4-an-hour average Chrysler wage proved a fiction. Before any deductions and without the cost-of-living allowance, which did not cover all workers and was never more than 21 cents an hour, most job categories at Eldon paid around $3.60 an hour and none paid more than $3.94. Workers found it difficult to get figures on hourly pay for their particular job, and they were often cheated out of increases by complex union and company clerical procedures. What the workers did know was that overtime had become compulsory and that most of them needed the time-and-a-half paid for overtime to keep pace with inflation. Census Bureau figures revealed that the value of the products shipped out of the plant, minus the cost of materials, supplies, fuel, and electricity, came to $22,500 a year per worker, as compared to an average wage of $8,000 for a worker putting in a 40-hour week. During the period 1946-1969, wages had increased by 25 percent, while profits went up 77 percent, dividends 60 percent, personal corporate incomes 80 percent, and undistributed corporate prof- its 93 percent. The industry moaned about its cycle of booms and busts, but in 1970 General Motors remained the nation's (and the world's) largest manufacturing enterprise. Ford was the third largest. And Chrysler, "the weak sister," was fifth.
Scenes within the Detroit factories and interviews with local leaders such as Ron March and Chuck Wooten supplement the more gen- eral approach of Watson with specific details. These sequences emphasize the deteriorating work and safety conditions within the factories. They reach an artistic peak when the off-camera voice of Ken Cockrel denounces capitalism in a long tirade that can only be described as a prose poem. Against placid scenes of executives "working" at their desks, a "voice from the ghetto" says:
They give you little bullshit amounts of money -- wages and so forth -- and then they steal all that shit back from you in terms of the way they have their other thing set up, that old credit-stick-'em-up gimmick society -- consumer credit -- buy shit, buy shit -- on credit. He gives you a little bit of money to cool your ass and then steals it all back with shit called interest, which is the price of money. They are mother-fucking, non-producing, non-existing bastards dealing with paper....
He is in mining! He went to Exeter. He went to Harvard. He went to Yale. He went to the Wharton School of Business. And he is in "mining"! It is these mother-fuckers who deal with intangibles who are rewarded by this society. The more abstract and intangible your service, the bigger the reward.
What are stocks? A stock certificate is evidence of something which is real. A stock is evidence of ownership. He who owns and controls receives -- profit!
This man is fucking with shit in Bolivia. He is fucking with shit in Chile. He is Kennicott. He is Anaconda. He is United Fruit. He is in mining! He's in what? He ain't never produced anything his whole life. Investment banker. Stockbroker. Insurance man. He don't do nothing.
We see that this whole society exists and rests upon workers and this whole mother-fucking society is controlled by this little clique which is parasitic, vulturistic, cannibalistic, and is sucking and destroying the life of workers everywhere; and we must stop it because it is -- evil!
from finally got the news