I know I planned to do re-runs into January but today's article about anti-union legislation passing in Michigan enraged me. So here's my response, hopefully not garbled--still packing up!


1:57 A.M., January 29, 1936, Akron, Ohio

The foreman paced slowly past his workmen, his eyes darting in and out of the machines, eager for any betraying gesture. He heard no word, and he saw no gesture. The hands flashed, the backs bent, the arms reached out in monotonous perfection. The foreman went back to his little desk and sat squirming on the smooth-seated swivel chair. He felt profoundly disturbed. Something, he knew, was coming off. But what? For God’s sake, what?  

The tirebuilders worked in smooth frenzy, sweat around their necks, under their arms. the belt clattered, the insufferable racket and din and monotonous clash and uproar went on in steady rhythm. The clock on the south wall, a big plain clock, hesitated; its minute hand jumped to two. A tirebuilder at the end of the line looked up, saw the hand jump. The foreman was sifting quietly staring at the lines of men working under the vast pools of light. Outside, in the winter night, the streets were empty, and the whir of the factory sounded faintly on the snow-swept yard. 

The tirebuilder at the end of the line gulped. His hands stopped their quick weaving motions. Every man on the line stiffened. All over the vast room, hands hesitated. The foreman saw the falter, felt it instantly. He jumped up, but he stood beside his desk, his eyes darting quickly from one line to another. 

This was it, then. But what was happening? Where was It starting? He stood perfectly still, his heart beating furiously, his throat feeling dry, watching the hesitating hands, watching the broken rhythm. 

Then the tirebuilder at the end of the line walked three steps to the master safety switch and, drawing a deep breath, he pulled up the heavy wooden handle. With this signal, in perfect synchronization, with the rhythm they had learned in a great mass-production industry, the tirebuilders stepped back from their machines. 

Instantly, the noise stopped. The whole room lay in perfect silence. The tirebuilders stood in long lines, touching each other, perfectly motionless, deafened by the silence. A moment ago there had been the weaving hands, the revolving wheels, the clanking belt, the moving hooks, the flashing tire tools. Now there was absolute stillness, no motion anywhere, no sound. 

Out of the terrifying quiet came the wondering voice of a big tirebuilder near the windows: "Jesus Christ, it’s like the end of the world." 

He broke the spell, the magic moment of stillness. For now his awed words said the same thing to every man, "We done it!’ We stopped the belt! By God, we done it!"’ And men began to cheer hysterically, to shout and howl in the fresh silence. Men wrapped long sinewy arms around their neighbors’ shoulders, screaming, "We done it! We done it!" 

For the first time in history, American mass-production workers had stopped a conveyor belt and halted the inexorable movement of factory machinery. Rohan SDSU

That was the rubber workers in Akron.

One of the first sit-down strikes occurred in 1906 at General Electric’s Schenectady, New York plant. In 1910, women garment workers in New York City sat down in, a shop to prevent their bosses from farming out work to contractors not on strike. Variations occurred in Poland, Yugoslavia and France from the end of the First World War to the early Thirties. In 1933, 2,500 workers stayed inside the Hormel Packing Company plant in Austin, Minnesota, during a three-day strike.  Rohan SDSU

Two hundred and forty five miles away from Toledo, GM workers toiled in an unceasing din, shifts running twenty-four hours a day, making $20 a week and risking life and limb in dangerous conditions. One wife described her husband returning from the plant and crawling up the stairs at night, too exhausted to eat his dinner.
On December 30, 1936 in Flint, Michigan, autoworkers at the GM plant repeated the rebellion in Akron, pulling the lever to stop the assembly line and plunging the enormous factory into silence for the first time in its history. Those workers too shouted for joy as their ears at last stopped throbbing and their unity became obvious. Eventually, they would have to fight off 4,000 National Guardsmen as the state mobilized its police forces to crush the rebellion. But the workers, wounded and cold, held out for 44 days. During the 1950s, autoworkers enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. Of course, the titans of industry finally realized they could crush the worker movement more easily by moving jobs to countries where workers were docile and could be underpaid and shoved into dangerous conditions without the State complaining.
I just saw “Lincoln” and it started me thinking about how myths grow, specifically, the myth that Lincoln “freed the slaves.” Henry Ford occupies a similarly distorted persona in our history. Because he saw the importance of retaining workers you’d trained, he raised their pay in 1914 to an unheard of $5 per day ($120 per day in today’s dollars). His patronage paid off in a stable workforce, which led to his increased profits. But before we swoon over his generosity (as the media frequently does), let’s consider a salary of $120 per day, $600 per week, a grand total of $2598 per month. There are few places in the United States, if any, where $2598 a month will keep a family of four free from the wolf at the door.
The average mortgage payment is $1,061 monthly, leaving $1537. The USDA estimates the weekly cost of food on a low-cost model at $161 per week, or $644 monthly, leaving $893. Unless the family lives in Hawaii, they are likely paying $300-$400 monthly for utilities, leaving $493. Credit card debt racked up to furnish their home, clothe their children if not themselves, and pay for repairs to their house likely take most of that. Then there is transportation to and from work. Forget a car. Gasoline prices put that out of reach. And we haven’t even considered state and national income taxes.
If you think I’m splitting hairs and Ford’s boosting wages without suffering labor strife marks him as a compassionate man, read on:

To forestall union activity, Ford promoted Harry Bennett, a former Navy boxer, to head [his] Service Department. Bennett employed various intimidation tactics to squash union organizing. The most famous incident, on May 26, 1937, involved Bennett's security men beating with clubs UAW representatives, including Walter Reuther. While the Bennett's men were beating the UAW representatives, the supervising police chief on the scene was Carl Brooks, an alumnus of Bennett’s Service Department, and [Brooks] "did not give orders to intervene.". . . . For several years, [Ford] kept Bennett in charge of talking to the unions that were trying to organize the Ford Motor Company. Sorensen's memoir makes clear that Henry's purpose . . . was to make sure no agreements were ever reached.
The Ford Motor Company was the last Detroit automaker to recognize the United Auto Workers union (UAW).  Henry Ford

This morning’s NY Times features a front-page article on Michigan’s adoption of a union-busting law, pushed through by those Franklin Delano Roosevelt dubbed “economic royalists”.  Detroit News
The irony of Americans punishing and regulating unions, admittedly much in need of reforms, instead of the corrupt and greedy bankers on Wall Street who destroyed our economy defies reason. The very crooks who whine about over-regulation nevertheless seek to regulate the union movement out of existence. Their fealty to the American middle class doesn’t exist. They are not citizens of this country; they are multinational corporate robber barons.
The union movement has been eroded by the capitalist greed that infects all of us. Even so, as with Castro’s Cuba, you can trace their fault lines to an external attack calculated to smash anyone who seeks justice. Divide and conquer remains strategically viable.
Sad to see so much success and relatively little informed opposition.