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April 2000
ISBN:
1-58367-018-1
$18.00 paper
ISBN:
1-58367-017-3
$48.00 cloth
220 pp./photos
also of interest:
TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS
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Excerpt
Foreword by Kim
Moody
In writing Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto
Workers’ Union, Sol Dollinger aims to set the record straight. In so
doing, he brings us a wealth of new material and insight into how
America’s industrial unions were organized and won their first victories.
This is not a memoir or personal account, but a well-researched history of the
early years of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union as viewed through the eyes
of a participant. Covering the period from the early 1930s through the late
1940s, Not Automatic brings to life many of the worker activists whose
roles in creating the UAW have been ignored or trivialized in much of the
literature on America’s most studied union.
As Dollinger recounts the struggles, the factional fights, the heroism and
savvy of “regular” working-class men and women, the cowardice and
false wisdom of old-guard union bureaucrats, and the perfidy and plunder of
corporate giants still on the prowl, the lessons for today leap out and demand
our attention.
The unorganized were not “organized”; rather they organized
themselves or were recruited by fellow workers, sometimes with help from the
best of the contemporary officials. Dollinger writes:
The battles for unionization engaged tens of thousands of rank-and-file auto
workers, who volunteered hours, days, and weeks of superhuman, self-sacrificing
activity. After their normal shift work these union warriors waged a battle
against the country's biggest corporations.
There was no organizing institute or legion of well-paid professional
organizers. When these did appear from the tired hierarchy of AFL officialdom,
they often did more harm than good. The real organizers of the UAW were rank
and filers or local officials like Charles Rigby, a press operator who
initiated the union in the stamping department of the Auto-Lite plant in
Toledo, Ohio that would explode into one of the first successful strikes in the
industry; or like Kermit and Genora Johnson, later Genora Dollinger, who would
play key roles in the great Flint sitdown of 1936-37.
After years of failed “blitz” drives by professional organizers,
we are hopefully witnessing the return to this kind of unionizing as we see
Teamster members volunteering to recruit workers at Overnite Transportation and
Continental Airlines, or Communications Workers members from telecommunications
signing up thousands of airline reservation clerks at USAir. Once again, it
seems, more and more U.S. workers are willing to put in the “hours, days
and weeks” of volunteer efforts needed to do the job.
Dollinger reminds us of something else, as well. It was corporate America's
relentless pressure on the workforce that set people in motion, but it was a
bigger vision that brought tens of thousands into the streets to defend and
support one another in struggle after struggle. While we certainly have an
excess of relentless pressure on working people as corporate America pushes for
lean and mean industries and society, the vision of what a vibrant, democratic
labor movement could do is hobbled by a commitment to labor-management
“partnerships,” hierarchical methods, and an obsession with media and
PR techniques. As welcome as the new vitality at the AFL-CIO is, it suffers
from a distrust of the rank and file that is not qualitatively different from
that of the AFL old guard or even many CIO leaders in the 1930s.
The vision that inspired workers in the 1930s as well as much of the
tactical and organizational know-how that made these activists so effective was
typically provided by workers who first acquired a bigger world-view, and
frequently a pretty good political education, in one of the many organizations
of the socialist and communist left of that period. Historians have tended to
focus on those who rose to high places, even if momentarily, in the UAW and
other CIO unions. This has favored well-known national leaders like the Reuther
Brothers and, oddly enough given America’s thirty-year Cold War
anti-Communist obsession, leaders and activists associated with the Communist
Party of the Depression years.
Without trying to deny the role played by these better-known figures,
Dollinger redresses some of the imbalance. Much of his “lost history”
is that of rank-and-file leaders who made history but didn't make the history
books. In particular, he tells the stories of those militant workers affiliated
with a number of non-Communist left organizations: followers of A. J. Muste,
Socialist Party members, and Trotskyists.
The focus on the Socialist Party of the mid-1930s is interesting because of
the contradictory nature of that organization. On the one hand, the Socialist
Party contained an ossified “old guard” that included a number of
top-level union leaders in both the AFL and the CIO. On the other, the one-time
party of Eugene V. Debs had seen rapid growth in the early 1930s as young
workers and students joined its ranks. Their leader was Norman Thomas. Into
that renewed party in 1936 flowed the militants from the Workers Party. This
itself was the product of a regroupment of Trotskyists who led the 1934
Minneapolis Teamsters strike, and members of Muste’s American Workers
Party who had led the great Toledo Auto-Lite strike of 1934. Thus, the
Socialist Party that Dollinger writes about was bubbling with working-class
militancy and a radicalized brand of anti-Stalinist socialism. With this
multi-tendency vitality came a certain amount of factionalism within the party
and between it and the Communist Party, the Lovestoneites, liberals, and
others. And it all spilled over into the UAW.
Not Automatic, reminds us of two remarkable facts about political
debate, struggle, and conflict in the labor movement. First, when the chips
were down, as in Flint in 1936 and 1937, these various political currents
worked together to shape a single unbeatable army capable of tumbling a giant
corporation like General Motors. Contrast today's almost (save the oppositional
UAW-New Directions Movement) single-party regime in the UAW, its stifling
internal life, and its increasing ineffectiveness in bargaining with such
corporations.
The second consequence of those days of internal union factionalism was a
level of genuine democracy not seen since in the UAW. Democracy, we are
reminded, isn’t just about good structures or appeals systems; it's about
membership involvement in setting the union's course. The many political groups
in the UAW in the 1930s provided a line of communication from the leaders to
the members; they sharpened policy debates and brought them into the open; they
mobilized members to support their side; and they moved the union along even
while its top leaders, almost from the start, were trying to centralize power
and control debate. They couldn’t do it for years because the members were
offered alternatives and issues to debate and mobilized to fight for them.
Not Automatic is not, however, a rerun of factional fights.
Rather it emphasizes the role of political rank and filers and local officials,
many in the Socialist Party at one time or another, in the big events of that
time. It sets the record straight, especially in relation to Henry Kraus’s
1993 Heroes of Unwritten Story, which recalls the same period from the
point of view of a one-time Communist Party member.
There is a lot more “lost history” here than that dealing with
forgotten heroes or those workers who saw the left as a way of giving
contemporary struggles direction and meaning Read Not Automatic to fill
in the holes left by other accounts, but most of all read it for what it tells
us about the kind of unionism we need now more than ever.
KIM
MOODY is director of Labor
Notes, and author of Workers in a Lean World (Verso 1997).
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