Word: detroit
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...retooling. No scheme has yet been devised to bridge the employment crevasse of the annual shut-down in preparation for new models. The automobile worker regards it as inevitable and lays by savings to tide him over. In the last shut-down season there was no rise in the Detroit relief rolls, now down to less than 20,000. With shutdowns coming in late summer the regular layoff can be treated as something of a vacation. Formerly a worker got his payless "vacation" just before Christmas...
Labor into Unions? Not a motor maker but a Labor sympathizer once described Detroit as a "workingman's paradise." Automobile plants are clean, well-ventilated, scientifically lighted and entirely lacking in the sound & fury of, say, a steel mill. The speed of assembly and subassembly lines is not that pictured by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Chief complaint is not the monotony of putting a washer on a bolt or a tire on a wheel eight hours on end but a peculiar nervousness which comes from having to do it within a limited time, even if that time...
Neither corporate nor union solidarity is easy to create in Detroit with its 1,500,000 population. Plants and workers are scattered throughout the city with no geographical relationship whatever. But the automobile industry has been moving out of Detroit into the surrounding countryside, partly because of the city's high taxes, partly because of a general tendency toward decentralization. Detroit in the automobile sense now covers an immense area including cities like Flint, Lansing, Toledo, Windsor...
Labor espionage and the more direct methods of fighting unionism are as common in the automobile as in any other big open-shop industry in the U. S. Until the advent of the New Deal, boomtown Detroit was hardly aware that it was in fact open-shop. Its working population had drifted in from rural regions where unions never existed. Indeed, many an automobile worker learned about unions for the first time from the lips of the boss in 1933 when company unionism was budding under NRA's Section...
Even with the spade work done in advance by the companies, labor organizers have made little headway in Detroit itself though they have done better in the automobile plants outside the city. United Automobile Workers of America, a merger of most of the labor organizations whose internecine struggles helped contribute to Labor's failure in Detroit, claims a membership of some 60,000, which is less than one-seventh of all auto, body and parts workers, and is probably an exaggeration at that. But automobiles are on John L. Lewis' list of prospects for industrial organization...