Autoworkers put up with the conditions because it allowed them to live the Fordist dream of purchasing the products they made and, thanks to the part of the picture neither foreseen nor desired by Henry Ford—the UAW—workers could do even more: buy homes and live in a prosperous community. For minority workers especially, employment in unionized industries provided the financial ability to climb up from poor neighborhoods to “middle class” surroundings with single-family homes, better schools, and safe streets.

By the late 1970s all this began to change. Mighty General Motors, the largest corporation in the world, was facing the challenge of increased global competition, particularly from Japan’s auto industry. By remaining blind to what the Japanese cars offered American consumers, GM watched its share of the U.S. car market shrink steadily. Its response, when it finally came, included three strategies to increase productivity and profits: stepping up automation; outsourcing production to the Third World; and introducing the team concept of labor-management cooperation, borrowed from Japan, to reduce industrial conflict.

In terms of automation, GM founded a robotics company in 1982, purchased software producer Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1984, and bought California-based aerospace corporation Hughes Aircraft for $5 billion in 1985, signaling its recognition that machines were going to play an increasingly central role on the assembly line and computer-related technologies would do the same under the hood. And GM would introduce automation its own way.

Bridges articulated the members’ fear of automation: “Machines when they came appeared as merciless monsters, more deadly by far than slack times, because jobs swallowed never came back, as one could hope would happen when slack times eased.” The machines in this case were container cranes, already in operation in ports elsewhere in the world. Their introduction would make West Coast ports more competitive, but at the cost of jobs. Debate among the members raged across the West Coast for two years before negotiations opened. The question boiled down to, “Do we want to stick with our present policy of guerilla resistance or do we want to attempt a more flexible policy in order to buy specific benefits in return?”

Union negotiators were sent into talks with a comprehensive list of objectives. They would authorize the introduction of new technologies in exchange for the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) guaranteeing the current workforce continued employment, no compromises on the pace of work or health and safety, and crucially, the transfer of a reasonable share of the cost savings gained through the new machines to the workers, through a special mechanization and modernization fund paid for by the PMA. This savings transfer bought strengthened pensions, lifetime medical benefits, and life insurance policies, as well as a lump-sum payment for early retirement. The members were to be provided with thirty-five hours work per week, or paid a handsome minimum income of $111.65 ($3.19 per hour).

Older workers would be able to retire from the hard physical labor of the docks at an earlier age, due to incentives that made sense to them and to the employer. Higher retirement pensions would initially cost the PMA more but would make room for younger, less expensive workers.

Both parties agreed that the union hiring hall and multiple-employer, coast-wide bargaining remained firm commitments. By 1960, the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement had been submitted to the members, ratified, and signed.

The future of automation had clearly arrived twenty years after the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement. Continuous technological change seemed a given, outside the reach of a labor movement playing defense. Like the ILWU, the UAW boasted militant origins; but the Autoworkers union hadn’t sustained the deep traditions of rank and file democracy that the ILWU had. And unlike longshoremen, who occupied a key doorway in the distribution networks of the global economy, autoworkers labored in manufacturing, increasingly vulnerable to shifts in production from one place in the world to another.

Close to 11.5 million American workers were laid off due to plant closings and outsourcing between 1979 and 1984. In the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, America’s largest corporations saw the opportunity to retool how they did business. At GM, an internal management document leaked to the press in 1984 laid out a plan to further downsize its hourly workforce by 80,000 jobs within six years through a combination of outsourcing and automation.

The disappearance of auto manufacturing jobs from California in the late twentieth century was a story that could be told of many other industries that experienced similar catastrophic shrinkage.

Steel production facilities in Vernon, Fontana, and San Francisco downsized dramatically or closed their doors. The aerospace industry, California’s largest manufacturing sector, accounted for close to 200,000 workers, or more than a fifth of all manufacturing jobs, in 1987. It celebrated the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s by jettisoning over a third of its employees. Unionized Los Angeles garment factories were dismantled and shipped off to Asia and Latin America—although the industry continued to grow in the city through the reestablishment of low-wage, nonunion sweatshops.

Even agriculture, tied to the geography of the land like no other business, saw large parts of its industrial infrastructure uprooted. In 1994 the Watsonville Green Giant packing plant moved to Mexico. By then, thousands of workers in a dozen plants had lost their jobs in a town that had processed nearly half the frozen foods of the United States only a few years before. A nineteen-month strike by Teamsters Local 912 cannery workers in the late 1980s couldn’t stop the industry from doing as it pleased.

In 1980, 21 percent of national income share came from manufacturing. By 2005, it had declined to 12 percent. California’s economy was reshaped in twenty-five years as businesses decided to move offshore, seeking higher profits through cheap labor and ineffective or nonexistent labor laws. Left behind were devastated rustbelt communities—not as obvious as in the northeast of the country, due to the sheer size of the Golden State’s economy and its economic diversity—but still leaving giant holes where well-paying jobs once were and large numbers of displaced workers. The tax base of cities and counties across the state deteriorated as worker incomes slumped and corporate taxes disappeared, compounding the problem of how to fund local services in the wake of Proposition 13, precisely at the moment when they were most needed.