Published: June 16, 2009 04:29 pm      

LION AND THE LAMB: What happened to auto labor?

"This is as far as I go," said the bus driver, as he stopped in the presence of a milling throng of pickets. It was in 1941, and the strike was on at the Ford Motor Company's Rouge Plant. That bus driver had no intention of trying to deliver a load of Ford workers to their daily jobs. That morning's news broadcasts had urged all workers to report for work, that all departments were open, and that that there would be no danger.

The sight of that mob of angry picketers changed my mind. I got off the bus and made my way back to my boarding house. I got into my Terraplane and drove home to Wauseon, Ohio, where I sat and mused for the few days until Ford surrendered to the CIO and signed a contract.

Back on the job things were different. Gone were the "service men," fellows who would roam the plant, collecting union buttons and perhaps roughing up anyone who might object to their brutish ways. Gone were the notions that the only way to get a raise in pay was to buy the straw boss a beer. (I had never received a raise.)

Workers seemed more relaxed after the strike. There was less tension in the lunch lines, and the atmosphere was peaceful.

I was given a ten cent hourly raise in pay, from 55 to 65 cents. I began to attend union meetings. I became a happy member of Local 600, the Ford Dearborn local.

People, it seems, do not like the idea of labor unions. Unions bring on strikes. Strikes mean higher wages. And higher wages mean higher prices for goods and services, and who wants to pay higher prices?

Growing up in Wauseon was to be surrounded by conservative, "rugged individualists" people who had no use for organized labor, not at all. A speaker was brought in to the high school assembly to teach us about the evils of unionism. "It is no longer the CIO," he said. "Better call it the OIC — Oh I See."

My Sunday school teacher instructed us that people who go on strike lose more, unpaid during the strike, than they ever make up with increased wages. And we all pay the price of strikes. We cannot afford union bosses sending people out to picket, and the workers lose out in the end too.

The power of unions has vastly diminished since those days in the 1930s and '40s. The tide of conservativism has washed away many of the privileges won earlier. Even before President Reagan destroyed the airline flight controllers union, capitalists were finding ways to bypass the Labor Relations Act and, if caught, pay small fines as a part of doing business. Walmart is a notorious power in the wars to destroy unions. They have organizers to instruct store managers in ways to head off organizing by workers. The most common way is to identify the discontented workers and fire them.

Many years after the days of my youth, I was part of a university community. The faculty had grown restive, discontented at what they perceived as administrative neglect. Faculty input in decision making was almost non-existent.

Many professors petitioned for the right to organize into a union, to be part of a national educators' union. An election was held. But before election day, the school's president called for a meeting of the entire faculty.

He made an impassioned speech about how he wanted to continue the happy relationships that had existed before all the trouble about a union had been stirred up.

On stage with the president were two or three businessmen from the city. They were well known as generous contributors to the school's endowment. They said nothing during the meeting. They did not need to. The message was clear: Vote to organize a union and the college's future will be in peril as we lose the financing that we need.

The election was held. The vote was not close. There would be no union on that campus. No collective bargaining. No means for redressing faculty grievances.

President Obama has urged Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. This legislation would provide legal recognition at a workplace if a majority of the workers signed statements of support. Unions could grow again; workers would benefit.

Now, even if a large majority of workers sign union cards, employers can demand that the National Labor Relations Board hold an election, giving the company (or the university, or whatever organization), giving the employer time to bully the employees into voting against unionization.

EFCA has stirred up a hornet's nest of opposition from powerful groups which hate organized labor and intend to keep all their workers under their control. The sides are gearing up for a tough fight in Congress. Whether senators and representatives can be persuaded by large political contributions, or vote for labor anyway, is an open question.