Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers' Union by Dollinger, Sol, Dollinger, Genora Johnson (2000) Paperback

by Sol Dollinger

Sol Dollinger's remembrance of UAW's early days are juicy and provocative. His recall of those goofy internecine political battles within the union is tragic-comic. Yet they, united, even though hollering at each other, made GM, Ford, et al, recognize the union. The sequence involving Genora Johnson Dollinger, the heroine of the 1937 sit-down strike, is deeply moving and inspiring.--Studs Terkel Should be read by every labor person who takes the principles of trade union history seriously. . . . Brings the history of the UAW up for a new survey of the events to include the men and women who would otherwise be unsung heroes or written out of history totally. --David Yettaw President, UAW Buick Local 599, 1987-1996 This story of the birth and infancy of the United Auto Workers, told by two participants, shows how the gains workers made were not easy or inevitable-not automatic-but required strategic and tactical sophistication as well as concerted action. Sol Dollinger recounts how workers, especially activists on the political left, created an auto union and struggled with one another over what shape the union should take. In an oral history conducted by Susan Rosenthal, Genora Johnson Dollinger tells the gripping tale of her role in various struggles, both political and personal.

Genres: History

Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this basically two part book, Sol Dollinger and his wife Genora Johnson Dollinger go into the formative and often divisive history of the UAW. In part one, Sol explores the many leftist militants that made up the nucleus of the union. While the history of the left's involvement in the UAW has largely been plotted, this book recenters the story from one that was purely the Socialist Party activists that produced the Reuther brothers and the Communist Party that allied itself with liberals to run the union from 1938-46. It presents a story that is more complicated than the right-wing vs the left-wing, as Dollinger remembers his time as a Trotskyist in both the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party. He notes that Homer Martin tried to suppress rank and file activism and that the "left-center" alliance largely encouraged it, though he also notes their support of the no-strike pledge proved to be their undoing. He noted that the Trots supported Reuther's rise as he seemed to support rank and filism, but quickly turned on all of the left-wing of the union, Communists and Trots alike, stripping away the autonomy of locals. In this part, he notes where the SP had support, where the CP had its support, and various places of militancy within the Detroit area, and argues that Reuther's purge of leftist opposition from the UAW destroyed the militancy that helped build it from the ground up (which is more or less what most other historians have also said.)

Genora's piece in the second part recounts her time as an organizer of the women's emergency brigade that organized support for the Flint Sit-Down strikers that inspired workers across the nation. She also recounts as the auto industry hired many women workers during the war how she was a lead organizer, though was eventually largely blacklisted. Her account is valuable in giving a eye witness to the utter totalitarianism of pre-union auto corporation, who would hire spies and lip readers to find union activists and immediately fire them (if not beat them up.) She shows the feeling of reclaiming of individual lives as they won their victories.

While the title is ambitious, I wish there was more about women in the UAW beyond Genora's account, which was a reprinting from the 1950s. Most of the book is about the left-wing factional fighting within the UAW, which is valuable to understand, especially as the SP and CP activists sometimes allied and used extremely similar rhetoric yet other times used Machiavellian tactics against each other to gain control of the union (Walter Reuther going the farthest even as he remained basically a social democrat in his views.) Sol does not that the story of the early UAW is not so much about the class-conscious militants, but instead of the union-conscious workers who joined together to radically reshape manufacturing power centers away from the corporate boards for a few generations. How those union-conscious workers got the most powerful corporations in the United States to recognize their union is one worth knowing.