CONTENTS - ouroboros ponderosa

III;I/ln; Ililt l 1 iiI" II 11\\111 1i,llId; , " wlull' .Iuhll I )lllIlllp_
I ,' ..;dll:-.ivt" h:lIg;lilllll1', ;11',1"111 slalus. or the closed shop, is Iht' primarv
IlislituliPIi hv wllich Illl' lI11itllJ t'nforces control of the wllrf...crs, (;oldclI
:",,1 I{ultt'llherg, two SWOC officials, cantlitlly argue in 'IIII' f)ynllmic.\· or
/1II/lIs'ri,,/ f)enwcmcy that unions neetl power anti responsibility to
"",illiain discipline. With the closed shop, the union acquires, in effect,
III(' power to fire unruly members; if a member is dropped from the
IIIIjoll, he is dropped from his job. Golden and Ruttenberg, as so many
other union spokesmen, point out that the union is likely to make noise
""lil it gains the closed shop arrangement, and that management rapidly
COllie'S to see the need for a strong (closed shop) union, in the interest
"I' a contained work force. The price of cooperation is thus the closed
shop, and it satisfies both union and management.
By I 93R, according to Brooks, only a "small minority" of employers
"pposed collective bargaining as guaranteed by the Wagner Act. It
t",mmes ea.;,y to sec why. Union leaders were "anxious to demonstrate
10 I he management their responsibility, and their willingness to accept
III(' burdcn of 'selling' the contract to the rank·and-file and keeping the
di"jdcnts in line," according to consultants Sayles and Straus.
As business carne increasingly to the awareness of unions as indispens'
ahk 10 the maintenance of a relatively stable and docile labor supply, the
rallks of labor exhibited more and more dissatisfaction with "their" new
organizations. The 1945 Trends in Collective Bargaining study noted that
"hy around 1940" the labor leader had joined the business leader as an
Ilh.ict of "widespread cynicism" to the American worker. Similarly,
Dougherty reported that workers were chafing under the lack of
st ructural democracy in the unions: "There was evidence, by the end of
I ')40, that the rank and file were growing restive under such conditions."
Workers, after some initial enthusiasm and hopefulness regarding the
(·to, were starting to feel the "closed system" nature of compulsory
,,"ions. In discussing union-management cooperation in the steel
i"dustry, CIa officials Golden and Ruttenberg admitted, for example,
Ihat "to some workers" the cooperation only added up in practice to "a
vi{'julls speed-up,"
Thus we return to the issue uppermost in the minds of industrial
","rkers in the 1930s struggles. And Richard Lester seems to be quite
WHect in concluding that "the industrial government jointly established"
I'"ssesses "disciplinary arrangements advantageous to management,
II' ,"kring worker rebellions more and more difficult."
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ORGANIZED LABOR VS.
"THE REVOLT AGAINST WORK"
Serious commentators on the labor upheavals of the Depression years
seem to agree that disturbances of all kinds, including the wave of sitdown
strikes of 1936 and 1937, wcre caused by the "speed-up" above all.'
Dissatisfaction among production workers with their new CIa unions set
in early, however, mainly because the unions made no efforts to
challenge management's right to cstablish whatever kind of work
methods and working conditions they saw fit. The 1945 Trends in
Collective Bargaining study noted that "by around 1940" Ihe labor leader
had joined the business leader as an object of "widespread cynicism" to
the American employee .' Later in the 1940s C. Wright Mills, in his 'J)"
New Men of Power: America's Labor l"eaders, described the union's role
thusly: "the integration of union with plant means that the union takes
over much of the company's personnel work, becoming the discipline
agent of thc rank-and-fiIe.";
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In the mid-1950s, Daniel Bell realized that unionization had not gIVen
workers control over their job lives. Struck by the huge, spontaneous
walk-out at River Rouge in July, 1949, over the speed of the Ford
assembly line, he noted that "sometimes the constraints of work explode
with geyser SUddenness.'" And as Bell's Work and Its Discontents (1956)
bore witness that "the revolt against work is widespread and takes many
forms,'" so had Walker and Guest's Harvard study, Th e Man on the
Assembly Line (1953), testified to the resentment and resistance of the
men on the line. Similarly, and from a writer with much working class
experience himself, was Harvey Swados' "The Myth of the Happy
Worker," published in The Nation, August, 1957.
Workers and the unions continued to be at odds over conditions of
work during this period. In auto, for example, the 1955 contract between
the United Auto Workers and General Motors did nothing to check the
"speed-up " or facilitate the settlement of local shop grievances. Immedi·
ately after Walter Reuther made public the terms of the contract he'd
just signed, over 70% of GM workers went on strike. An even larger
percentage "wildcatted" after the signing of the 1958 agreement because