United Automobile Workers

UNITED AUTOMOBILE WORKERS. Until the period of the Cold War, the history of autoworkers and their unions was interwoven with the history of the American Left. Even though Socialists, Communists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and other radicals constituted only a tiny minority of autoworkers at any time, the Left exercised considerable influence in the industry and was involved in nearly every organizing and strike effort in the pre-union period and in many of the key struggles in the early years of the United Automobile Workers Union (UAW).

Though the American Federation of Labor (AFL) chartered the International Union of Carriage and Wagon Workers in 1891, it never seriously attempted to organize the autoworkers and even expelled the Union of Carriage and Wagon Workers in 1918 after it added “automobile” to its name and began organizing autoworkers on an industrial basis. The seeds of unionism in the auto industry were sown first by Wobblies, Socialists, and Communists. The Industrial Workers of the World, which had several hundred Detroit autoworkers as members before World War I, helped lead the first organized strike by autoworkers, a week-long walkout by 6,000 Studebaker workers in 1913 that may have contributed to Ford’s decision to initiate the “five-dollar day.”

After World War I, William Logan and other socialists led the Carriage, Wagon, and Automobile Workers Union. Largely due to the labor shortage after the war, the Auto Workers Union briefly enjoyed a membership of 40,000 and led several strikes in body shops. The Auto Workers Union remained the only union in the industry through the early 1930s, and though its membership never exceeded 3,000, it laid the groundwork for the successful organization of the industry by introducing the idea of industrial unionism to thousands of workers, including many of those who later organized the UAW.
In 1926 Communist autoworkers won the leadership of the Auto Workers Union, and they eventually affiliated the union with the Trade Union Unity League. Under the leadership of Communists Phil Raymond and William Goetz, the union held shop-gate meetings and circulated a regular newspaper that exposed conditions in the plants and promoted the idea of industrial unionism and the need to unite all workers regardless of skill, race, age, or sex. The union also aided scores of spontaneous strikes, including the most important strike in the pre-UAW period—the strike of some 12,000 Briggs Manufacturing workers against wage cuts in early 1933.

In the first years of the Great Depression, the campaigns for relief and against evictions of the Communist-initiated Unemployed Councils gave many autoworkers their first sense of organization and collective struggle. On 6 March 1930, a Communist-sponsored unemployment demonstration brought more than fifty thousand people into the streets of Detroit and thousands into the streets of such other auto centers as Toledo, Flint, and Pontiac. On 7 March 1932, in what became known as the Ford Massacre, Ford private guards and police fired upon a Communist-led Hunger March outside the Ford plant and killed four workers and wounded fifty others.

The Communists and their progressive allies made their most important contribution to the creation of the UAW in the years between 1933 and 1941. After the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act and the AFL’s start of an organizing drive in the auto industry in 1933, the Communists and their allies in Detroit, Cleveland, and Toledo organized the AFL’s most successful federal labor unions and spearheaded a rank-and-file movement among autoworkers that eventually forced the AFL to charter the UAW in 1935. The leader of the rank-and-file movement and vice president of the new UAW was Wyndham Mortimer, the organizer of the White Motor local in Cleveland. Outside the AFL, Communists and other leftists organized thousands of tool and die makers, most of whom merged with the newly formed UAW.

The key turning point in the establishment of the UAW as well as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) generally was the victory of the UAW in the forty-four-day sit-down strike against General Motors in 1936–1937. While many factors produced this victory, not the least was a united front that joined in common struggle a variety of leftists and nonleftists, including Genora Johnson, leader of the Women’s Emergency Brigade, the conservative Socialist and CIO representative Adolph Germer, and the socialist Reuther brothers. Key credit, however, must go to the Communists and their supporters. They provided the strategic and ideological direction by their insistence that successful organization required the unity of all workers, an industrial form of organization, and bold strike action, and they provided leaders at every front of the struggle—the early organizational work and strategic planning of Mortimer and Robert Travis, the publicity work of Henry Kraus, the legal help of Lee Pressman and Maurice Sugar, the shop leadership of Walter Moore and Bud Simon, and organization of the strike kitchen by Dorothy Kraus and Margaret Anderson.

While the UAW soon succeeded in organizing most of the industry, except for Ford, the unity that had prevailed during the General Motors sit-down strike quickly dissolved into bitter factional fights. At the center of this fight was a struggle between the union’s president, Homer Martin—who had surrounded himself with members of a small group called the Communist Party Opposition—and Wyndham Mortimer and the Communists. This fight lasted until 1939, when Martin was defeated, and the non-political R. J. Thomas was elected president.

Though these factional fights as well as the general growth of the union diluted the influence of the Left in the UAW, individual leftists nonetheless still played important roles in the organization of such shops as Ford, Allis-Chalmers, Vultee, and North American. At Ford in particular, the National Negro Congress and the fraternal organizations connected with the Communist Party played a crucial role in penetrating the Ford terror to recruit union members among the largely black and eastern European work force.

Even though Communist membership in the auto industry peaked during the years of World War II, its influence in the union declined. During the so-called national defense period, several leading left-wingers, including Mortimer, were dismissed for leading strikes in defense industries. During the war itself, the Communists’ support for the war blended with that of the mainstream leaders of the UAW and CIO. As inflation and the workers’ unresolved grievances increased, the Workers Party—a small Trotskyist group that opposed the union’s wartime no-strike pledge—enjoyed a brief popularity among many autoworkers.

After the war, the Left in the UAW was the first to experience the devastation of the Cold War. In 1946 Walter Reuther fashioned a Center-Right coalition that defeated the Left-Center coalition that had led the union since 1939. Aided by congressional investigations and a media Red Scare, Reuther drove Communists and other leftists from the UAW and became the first CIO leader to comply with the anticommunist affidavit provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act.

While the organized Left virtually disappeared in the union during Reuther’s reign, echoes of the radical origins of the union could nonetheless be discerned in the collective bargaining breakthroughs that the UAW made in the 1950s and 1960s, in the union’s support for civil rights legislation, and in its opposition to the war in Vietnam. Echoes of the early radicalism could also be heard in the voices of black autoworkers, who fought for better treatment and a greater voice through such groups as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s and in the rank-and-file protests against bargaining concessions and worker-management cooperation schemes in the 1980s and 1990s.

Halperin, Martin. UAW Politics in the Cold War Era. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.

Keeran, Roger. The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Meyer, Stephen. “Stalin over Wisconsin:” The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900-1950. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Mortimer, Wyndham. Organize! My Life as a Union Man. Boston: Beacon Paperback, 1972.

Peterson, Joyce Shaw. American Automobile Workers, 1900–1933. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Stepan-Norris, Judith and Maurice Zeitlin. Left-Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.