Detroit, Michigan. Delegates at the United Automobile Workers (UAW) international convention, photograph by Arthur S. Siegel, 1942, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
What does it really mean to understand worker power and how it is exercised not just in union halls or during strikes, but in workers’ day-to-day lives? Decades ago, as a graduate student in an oral history seminar at Duke University, I set out to explore history “from the bottom up.” My first project led me to a North Carolina mill town and ultimately to my book Like Night and Day: Unionization in a Southern Mill Town, which explored how grievance procedures, made possible by unionization, improved the lives of cotton mill workers in the decades after World War II.
That early work showed that powerful insights into labor history often come from listening not just to the most vocal union leaders or activists, but by listening carefully to ordinary workers. My newest book, Listening to Workers: Oral Histories of Metro Detroit Autoworkers in the 1950s, grows out of that understanding. The book explores what rank-and-file autoworkers were thinking, feeling, and doing and how non-leaders and non-activists experienced work and life outside of work during that crucial decade. Scholars and popular memory held that the fifties were the heyday of the United Auto Workers (UAW), when lucrative contracts resulted in increased wages and benefits such as medical insurance, cost-of-living adjustments, and pensions. According to that narrative, this is the period when unionized workers created the middle class. I wanted to test whether this prosperity story matched workers’ lived experiences.
Retiree chapters connected with UAW locals were good places to locate potential participants in this project. Contrary to expectations, after the first twenty or so interviews, I wondered why so many of these former autoworkers, white as well as Black, recalled the post-WWII years as economically unstable and insecure. Were they the exceptions to the rule? This unexpected discovery led to years of research in Detroit newspapers to see if local coverage would corroborate or contradict the interview evidence. As it turned out, the newspaper evidence overwhelmingly confirmed the oral history recollections. Instability and insecurity stemmed from parts shortages, recessions, layoffs, strikes, automation, and decentralization – as well as the basic fact that even well-paid autoworkers often couldn’t afford to buy the cars they built. These insights became the backbone of a book I didn’t expect to write: Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom.
Detroit, Michigan. Assembly of Rolls Royce engines at the Packard motor car company. Dropping a cylinder bank on an upper crankcase. Photograph by Arthur S. Siegel, 1943, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
While Disruption in Detroit placed bits and pieces of autoworkers’ lives into the larger contexts of auto work and the auto industry, Listening to Workers situates people’s auto jobs and connections with the UAW into the larger contexts of their lives. When I started this project, a lot was said about ordinary autoworkers in the scholarly literature, but most of it had to do with how the bounty of the postwar boom made workers more content and less militant than they might otherwise have been. Past scholarship also explored whether those workers backed the bargaining agenda of UAW president Walter Reuther or preferred more radical alternatives. The consensus was that Black autoworkers did not experience the 1950s as prosperous and stable, and that women had lost most of the employment gains they had made during WWII. Still, some twenty years after launching this project, there was not much in the literature about ordinary autoworkers. Further, the labor movement was so imperiled that scholars who once thought that prosperity had undermined workers’ militancy tended to look back more fondly at an era of relative union power.
My argument in Listening to Workers is that autoworkers in the 1950s were complex, multidimensional people, with a wide range of aspirations and concerns that went well beyond their union. Their lives were much richer, more interesting, and at times more confounding than scholars had imagined. A number of themes emerge from the narratives, including the prevalence of family traumas during childhood, sporadic and uneven access to education, the impact of early jobs (which were often considered more difficult than any auto job, especially for those who had worked in cotton fields), the importance of religion and church, the appeal of hobbies and outside interests, the complexities of marriage, divorce, and childrearing, the impact of military service on auto careers, dangerous working conditions, the need for secondary support systems given the precarity of auto work, frequently tenuous relationships with the UAW during those years, battles with race and sex discrimination, and obliviousness by others to the existence of those struggles.
There were huge influxes of new autoworkers into Detroit during WWII in 1950 and in 1953, most of them from distant states, which meant that a sizable percentage of workers in the industry had no experience with or recollection of unionization campaigns in the 1930s. Many of the workers I interviewed entered the auto industry (which converted to defense during WWII) during these waves. Each of these people had a host of life experiences and interests before becoming an autoworker. Top UAW officials bemoaned the fact that they had to start from scratch in explaining the significance of the union to these newcomers. Chronic layoffs often made that hard message even more difficult to get across.
These stories offer important insights into worker power — not through strikes or large-scale militancy, but through quieter forms of influence. Listening to Workers surfaces stories about workers serving on shop committees to defend their coworkers against unfair treatment by supervisors – a crucial expression of union power. The most vivid examples involve workers who would have been fired if not for union protections. For example, an autoworker named Gene Johnson refused to work on Sundays for religious reasons after his son regained the ability to walk following a debilitating illness. Gene credited the recovery to faith healers. Sunday work was mandatory, but Gene was ready to be fired rather than violate his faith. Shop committee members stood up for Gene, even though the union’s contract didn’t support his stance. Gene kept his job. Without union pressure, he would surely have been fired. Many of the workers profiled in this book had their auto careers saved at some point by the possibility or reality of union support.
Detroit, Michigan. Assembly of Rolls Royce engines at the Packard motor car company. Workmen smoking cigarettes in an aisle during a five minute recess. Photograph by Arthur S. Siegel, 1942, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
These stories are important for how we think about the impacts of collective bargaining during this time period. While the contracts negotiated in the 1950s might not have brought prosperity and stability during that decade, they laid the foundation for better times in the future for those who were able to withstand the waves of layoffs that intensified in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, although supplemental unemployment benefits were negotiated in the 1955 contract, they took hold in a meaningful way in the late 1960s buffering UAW members from the volatility of auto jobs. Seniority clauses in contracts allowed many workers to bid for and retain jobs that gave them a significant level of authority, for example, as inspectors who determined whether or not parts were suitable for final assembly.
At the individual level, it is important to remember how powerful, resourceful, and resilient these workers were at finding ways through the tumultuous early postwar years. A crucial lesson from Listening to Workers is that union representatives or organizers have to meet workers where they are, understand them as complex human beings, and not expect them to have the same experiences and insights that would necessarily lead to thinking that unionization would be good for them. One hard truth in US labor history is that union activism, or even interest in a union, can jeopardize your job, no matter what the law says.
The stories in Listening to Workers remind us that worker power is not just about strikes, contracts, or leadership decisions — it’s about how ordinary people navigate insecurity, build systems to support one another, and defend one another on the shop floor. The UAW’s gains in the 1950s did not eliminate volatility, but they laid the groundwork for greater stability in later decades, giving workers the tools to claim more control over their lives. As Paul Ross, who became a skilled tradesman at a General Motors plant, reflected: “If it wasn’t for the UAW, I’d be dog beans, nothing! Everything we got, we owe to the union. If there hadn’t been that union, I wouldn’t have lasted at that place. There would have been a lot of us gone. They just look at you crossway and you’re out of there.”
Listening to Workers: Oral Histories of Metro Detroit Autoworkers in the 1950s is available through the University of Illinois Press.
