For some CIO leaders, disciplined mobilization was not the only way labor could contribute to the war effort. Philip Murray and Walter Reuther of the UAW’s General Motors division proposed industry councils, where labor would join with management to allocate resources and improve productivity. Of course, corporations would not share such management prerogatives with labor unless directed by the government, and political hostility to unions was rising. Congressional conservatives were strong enough to override Roosevelt’s veto of the War Labor Disputes Act (“Smith-Connolly”) in June 1943, the first antilabor legislation to become federal law since 1932. It imposed a thirty-day wait after a vote to strike, allowed the government to take over war production plants when a strike was called, banned even talking strike in federal facilities, and limited union participation in elections. The same Congress voided NLRB prohibitions on the “back-door” contracts employers signed with AFL unions to block CIO drives.
The CIO set up a Political Action Committee (CIO-PAC) to marshal union support for the President, prolabor candidates, and progressive legislation. Under Hillman’s direction, CIO-PAC raised money and worked with progressive groups but its main effort—chosen after study of the 1942 elections in industrial districts—went into turning out the union vote. It lobbied legislators to let military personnel register and vote by mail. It also made special appeals to women and African Americans, who could best build on their wartime gains by joining union members in backing a revitalized New Deal. CIO-backed candidates did well in the primaries.
CIO-PAC was technically nonpartisan, and endorsed a few Republicans, but labor support for the President was a campaign theme—Republicans loved to repeat the story that Roosevelt told anyone who suggested a candidate for vice president to “clear it with Sidney” Hillman. In fact, CIO delegates to the Democratic Convention abandoned their first choice, incumbent Henry Wallace, to support Missouri Senator Harry Truman (and block South Carolina Senator James G. Byrnes). The general election was disappointing. Roosevelt was reelected and Democrats gained in Congress, but the electorate provided no mandate for a new New Deal.
As the war wore on, divisions began to strain labor peace. Some unions kept the color line. In 1943, twenty AFL affiliates and independent rail brotherhoods still excluded black members; another eight put them in Jim Crow locals. When the FEPC ordered AFL Boilermakers to cease discrimination in 1944, the union charged the Committee was run by communists. CIO unions generally endorsed women’s rights to their jobs after the war, but some UAW locals colluded with employers to push women out of “men’s work.”
The no-strike pledge hurt. Stella Nowicki, working at the Swift plant in Chicago, saw its effect on her CIO United Packinghouse Workers local: “Grievances were hung up without being settled or turned down because the company knew we couldn’t do anything.” Meanwhile, production speeded up. Kaiser steelworkers could build a cargo ship in about eighty days in early 1942; by 1944 they needed only twenty-two. Industrial accidents kept pace—the Labor Department recorded more than six and a half million during the war. Through 1943, industrial accidents claimed more lives (37,600) than combat.
Most unions had to suppress local job actions to keep the pledge. Union members still staged thousands of strikes—virtually all wildcats—during the war, most over local grievances. In 1944, the Labor Department counted 4,956 strikes involving about 2.1 million workers, a record year by both counts. As Buick worker Norm Bully recalled,
Corporations were showing no sense of patriotism or loyalty and were contributing nothing. All the sacrifices were on the part of the workers. When real and pressing grievances arose and there was no solution and management hid behind the no-strike pledge, the people felt that they were justified . . . in forcing a settlement.
Fisher Body sandblasters struck to get ten minutes paid cleanup time at the end of the shift. Ford River Rouge assembly line workers walked out when the company removed their stools, and again to protest bad ventilation. Briggs Mack crane operators refused to work more than eight hours straight. UAW locals in southern Illinois walked out when members on leave for military service returned with medical discharges and were declared unfit for work. Half of all autoworkers got involved in strikes in 1944, many in sympathy for workmates unfairly disciplined or discharged. In contrast, fewer than one in twenty electrical workers joined strikes that year. UE was a “red” union and the UAW was not—in general, communist union leaders were the quickest to crack down on anything that might disrupt the war effort.
John L. Lewis never took the pledge. To beat the Little Steel formula he led half a million miners out on strike four times in 1943. Few union leaders could have imitated him even if they had tried. He controlled his union from top to bottom. He was a master of negotiation by showdown. And union coal was not so critical to the war—the administration could afford to wait to find out what he would accept. Though his strengths were unique, his constant criticism of union cooperation with government made sense. The NWLB’s approval of closed shops (“maintenance of membership”) brought in thousands of new union members with no commitment to the union, but check-off docked their pay for union dues anyway. With no strike threat, employers had no reason to negotiate, so union leaders depended on politicians to win concessions. Politicians wanted production without disruption, and inevitably union leaders sometimes blocked even the most urgent and legitimate demands of their members to keep their political friends happy. The 1943 miners’ strikes made a lot of politicians unhappy.
During 1944, the war turned in favor of the Allies. Germany was caught between massive Soviet armies and Anglo-American forces. They met at the Elbe River late in April 1945; Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 7. (Franklin Roosevelt did not live to see it, dying suddenly on April 12.) In the Pacific, U.S. forces had nearly reached Japan itself. On August 6 and 9, U.S. airplanes dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 80,000 and 35,000 people instantly, and tens of thousands more within days from burns and radiation. The Japanese surrendered August 14. As the Allies occupied Poland and Germany they liberated camps where the Nazis had exterminated millions of Jews—along with Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs, and communists.
The end of the war found the U.S. with the apparatus of a planned economy—OPA alone had 73,000 employees and 200,000 volunteers—and facing the specter of postwar depression. Military contracts were cancelled, and war workers laid off—including four million women in the first eight months after VJ Day. Meanwhile tens of thousands of soldiers staged demonstrations in Manila, Seoul, Paris, and Frankfurt, demanding to be brought home to civilian life and work. Both civilians and veterans believed that their victory had earned them opportunity, equality, and a better standard of living.
Congress had already passed the “G.I. Bill of Rights,” the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, in June 1944. It provided subsidized home and business loans, student stipends and job training, unemployment benefits, life insurance, hospital care, disability pensions, burial allowances, and cash bonuses—the most generous benefits war veterans (or anyone else) had ever received. More generally, President Truman proposed to continue price controls, raise the minimum wage, legislate fair employment practices, and fund unemployment compensation and a national housing program.
CIO leaders wanted to mobilize for peace. AFL leaders wanted the government out of labor relations. Businessmen looked to dismantle not only wartime controls and regulations, but the entire New Deal. The political contest started early. In Detroit’s 1945 mayoral election, the UAW’s Frankensteen led the nonpartisan primary vote. Backed by city newspapers and business leaders, incumbent Edward Jeffries warned that if Frankensteen won, communists would move blacks into white residential areas, lowering property values. Frankensteen lost—the vote was not even close. The labor-management conference convened by Truman in November to discuss postwar conditions broke up without agreement.
THE POSTWAR WORLD
In the first twelve months after the war, more tha
n 4,600 strikes swept across the country. More than five million workers participated, mainly from industrial unions. The CIO Oil Workers Industrial Union started, striking on September 17, 1945, with the slogan “52-40 or Fight,” fifty-two hours pay for forty hours work, followed within days by 200,000 coal miners striking for union recognition and 24,000 AFL lumber workers in the Northwest. East Coast ports shut down for nineteen days while International Long-shoremen’s Association members struck against their “president-for-life” Joseph Ryan’s agreement with shippers. AFL and CIO Machinists stayed out 140 days, CIO textile workers in New England 133 days, CIO glassworkers 102 days, 70,000 Midwest Teamsters 81 days. Four strikes were huge—200,000 workers in auto, 300,000 in meatpacking, 180,000 in electrical, 750,000 in steel. Everyone wanted a raise.
Wages were central to CIO plans. Rising wages would provide the consumer purchasing power to sustain prosperity. Wartime profits were more than twice the prewar average, nearly the highest on record according to government economists, suggesting that employers could pay more without raising prices. Corporate analysts argued to the contrary that profits were so low any cost increase required waiver of price controls.
The UAW targetted General Motors first; Walter Reuther demanded a 30 percent increase in hourly wages and challenged the company to open its books to prove it could not afford the raise. G.M. refused Reuther’s offer of arbitration. On November 21, 1945, the UAW shut down ninety-two plants in fifty cities, and on December 8 rejected Truman’s order to return to work. In January a presidential Fact Finding Panel calculated a 33 percent rise in the cost of living since 1941 and recommended that wages increase about half that amount—about 19.5 cents an hour at G.M. Reuther accepted the deal but the company refused. The United Electrical Workers demanded the same and went on strike, followed by the AFL and CIO packinghouse unions, then by the Steel Workers. The Office of Price Administration began authorizing price increases, and by mid-March the unions had settled national pattern agreements in all four industries—G.M. was the last to capitulate. Reuther became the new UAW president.
John L. Lewis scoffed at the settlements, demanded higher raises plus employer contributions to the union’s welfare fund for his miners, and called 400,000 UMW members out on strike April 1. Truman seized the mines under Smith-Connolly. When the Supreme Court upheld contempt judgements against the UMW and Lewis himself, he called off the strike (but got what he wanted when the mines returned to private control a year later). When the Railroad Trainmen and the Locomotive Engineers issued a strike call in May, Truman asked Congress for authority to draft strikers into the military. The unions settled.
Some unions revived the general strike. In January 1946, 10,000 people from thirty AFL and CIO unions rallied in Stamford, Connecticut under the banner “We Will Not Go Back to the Old Days” after striking machinists were attacked by state and city police. The next month unions shut down Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for two days to stop police attacks on striking city transit workers. Later that month 20,000 AFL and CIO union members rallied in Houston, Texas, to force the mayor to negotiate with the AFL City-County Employees Union. In December, when the Oakland, California, merchants’ association refused to negotiate with Retail Clerks Local 1265,130,000 people joined a fifty-four–hour “work holiday”—“more like a revolution than an industrial dispute,” to quote Teamster president Tobin.
While employers freely took out injunctions against strike-related activities, they did not generally revive old-time terrorist tactics. The New Deal and wartime labor regulations had established the right to organize and bargain collectively, and the unions’ ability to defend and advance their members’ interests against the biggest corporations and at the highest levels of government confirmed the new importance of organized labor’s role in American society and politics. In November 1946 in Atlantic City, the CIO debated and adopted a new program. The delegates wanted fair employment practices enforced, strike-related injunctions banned, the Wagner Act extended to agricultural workers, and much more.
Delegates called for continued price and rent controls, massive investment in public housing, higher taxes on corporations and the rich, and expanded social security. They recommended federal prosecution of lynching, condemned poll taxes and other impediments to voting, and asked the Senate to expel Mississippi Klansman Theodore Bilbo. They urged affiliates to negotiate for equal pay and opportunities, endorsed an Equal Rights Amendment for women, and called for funding maternal and child health services, day care, nursery schools, and school lunches. They endorsed better veterans benefits, military reforms to eliminate “caste distinctions” and fix the “outmoded and unjust courtmartial system,” and an end to the draft. The convention backed self-determination for colonies, a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and universal disarmament. It approved CIO participation in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which recognized Soviet labor federations.
Amid this exuberant consensus on social justice, one division threatened unity. Murray introduced a “Declaration of Policy,” asking delegates to endorse democracy, Americanism, and Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” (freedom of speech and religion, freedom from fear and want), and to “resent and reject efforts of the Communist Party . . . to interfere in the affairs of the CIO.” Communist-led unions made up a fifth of CIO membership, but only two delegates voted against the declaration.
Business leaders countered CIO initiatives with public relations propaganda. After Truman gutted price controls in mid-1946, companies explained how union wage demands raised consumer prices. Wealthy conservatives funded groups like American Action—run out of the Chicago Board of Trade—to oppose CIO-backed candidates and alert the public to the dangers of communism.
Corporate lobbyists swarmed Congress. Their goal was “Taft-Hartley,” the Labor Management Relations Act. It outlawed mass picketing, sympathy strikes, and secondary boycotts; banned closed shops and unions of supervisors; held unions responsible for strike-related damages; banned strikes by federal employees; let states ban union shops; authorized the president to issue eighty-day injunctions if strikes threatened national health and safety; provided NLRB protection for decertification and deauthorization elections; and required unions seeking NLRB jurisdiction to file noncommunist affidavits every year for every officer above shop steward. As New York Congressman Donald O’Toole observed, the bill was composed “sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, by the National Association of Manufacturers.” Congress passed it over Truman’s veto on June 23, 1947.
Unlike previous anticommunist campaigns, the postwar drive fed and fed off of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy. The war was in progress when the government started planning the postwar world. Democracy “American-style” needed prosperity, which depended on trade. As a State Department official said, “we’ve got to plan an enormously increased production in this country after the war. . . . There won’t be any question about our needing greatly increased foreign markets.” In 1944, the Anglo-American allies set up the International Monetary Fund to regulate financial transactions based on the dollar, and the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (later called the “World Bank”) to promote recovery from the war’s devastation. When the U.S. freed the Philippines (July 4, 1946), it kept control of tariffs and monetary policy, along with twenty military bases (and rescinded Roosevelt’s promise of citizenship and benefits to more than 200,000 Filipino veterans).
Communism was the main obstacle. The Soviet Union had halted the Nazi advance, and communists everywhere, who had zealously supported (and often led) resistance to Axis occupation, looked to the Soviets—now stronger than ever—for inspiration and guidance, or for direct instructions. The generals who ran the Manhattan Project building the atomic bomb understood the immediate target might be Germany or Japan, but the ultimate target was the Soviet Union. The War Department told Murray in 1943 to stop the CIO’s Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians Local 25 from organizing at
the Berkeley Radiation Lab, and began purging suspected communists from the maritime trades, especially after merchant seamen protested their assignment to carry French troops back to Indochina in 1945. In 1946, the U.S. set up the Strategic Air Command—its only mission to prepare to drop the new atomic bombs on the Soviet Union. In March 1947, Truman declared the U.S. must help “peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” and asked Congress for $400 million in military and economic aid for Turkey, which guarded the southern Soviet border, and Greece, where communist insurrection threatened a British-sponsored monarchy. In June Secretary of State George Marshall announced his $16 billion plan to aid countries that accepted what a business magazine called “a business plan plus . . . plus political direction, plus diplomatic guidance.”
The world-wide war against Communism went back and forth. U.S. forces suppressed the Filipino Hukbalahap movement, the French drove Indochinese Communists underground, the Greek uprising failed, but Communists took over Czechoslovakia, and the Chinese Red Army marched into Beijing. India, Burma, Palestine, and Indonesia won independence, and rebellion simmered in colonial Africa. The Anglo-American North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Soviet Warsaw Pact split Europe in 1949. Korea—divided by the Allies in 1945—remained divided after three years of war beginning in 1950, involving both U.S. and Chinese soldiers.
A steel industry journal predicted, “maintaining and building our preparation for war will be big business . . . for at least a considerable period ahead.” The military budget went from $12 billion a year in 1950 to $40 billion in 1953, the bulk of it for nuclear weapons development and U.S. bases around the world. In 1962, Business Week magazine found that 24,000 companies had defense contracts, which employed more than 4 million workers.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 30
