Systems of Male Privilege: The Industrial Relations Policies of the Ford Motor Company in the 1940s

This article examines the industrial relations systems constructed by Ford and United Automobile Workers (UAW) leaders for the Ford Motor Company in the 1940s. Ford’s industrial relations systems extended privileges to men and male-dominated groups to the detriment of their female counterparts and women seeking employment and advancement. Systemic male privilege was integral to Ford’s operations throughout conversion to military production for World War II and reconversion back to civilian production.

Yellow-Blue Collars: American Labor and the Pursuit of Swedish Policy, 1961-1963

This article studies the Kennedy administration’s labor market policies as a case of lesson drawing during a transnational moment in the early 1960s. With the election of Kennedy, leaders in the labor movement rose to positions of policymaking influence, in the process reimagining the United States’ political and economic landscape. This spirit of reform led to the embrace of Sweden’s solidarity wage policy and Rehn-Meidner model as lessons on how to balance full employment, economic growth, and a powerful labor movement. However, Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg and Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers found implementing Swedish policies to be more difficult than they expected, even with the support of a sitting president. Their experiences demonstrate the possibility for policy diffusion from small states to the United States over a short period, as well as its risks and limitations.

Building Union Power Across Borders: The Transnational Partnership Initiative of IG Metall and the UAW

This is a case study of how the transnational cooperation between two unions – IG Metall in Germany and the United Automobile Workers (UAW) in the United States – was put on a new trajectory. It is a template for the challenges unions face in adapting their nationally oriented self-interest toward building transnational solidarity and being able to leverage global corporate power in defence of workers’ interests across borders. Using the power resources approach, it highlights the unions’ transnational strategy built on mobilising associational and institutional resources. Understanding their make-up and utilisation became crucial in the process as limits to institutional power without involvement and mobilisation on the ground became evident. The case study focuses on the initiation and preparation phase of a more comprehensive organisational cooperation, culminating in a formal agreement to establish a Transnational Partnership Initiative (TPI) in 2015. While no organising gains were made in this phase – indeed, only losses – it was crucial for building trust and mutual understanding, as well as for actively promoting a broadly based anchoring of the TPI in terms of policy in both unions. The case study’s conclusions are generally positive on this count; yet they are preliminary as the overall project is a work-in-progress and its basis of support beyond the two unions (societal power) is still untested.

How to Build a Trade Union Oligarchy

Trade unions are ostensibly democratic organizations, but they often fail to operate as democracies in practice. Most studies of Western trade union democracy have acknowledged that oligarchy is the norm among unions but have nonetheless examined exceptional democratic unions to understand how those unions defied the trend. My study inverts this approach and instead examines two known oligarchical unions, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and the United Automobile Workers (UAW) in the United States. I argue that union oligarchy requires certain conditions to thrive. Both unions lacked democratic rules, close-knit occupational communities, local autonomy, rank-and-file decision making, internal opposition, equality between members and officials, and free communication, but these absences were expressed in different ways in each organization. Comparing a prominent US union with a prominent Australian union allows for assessment of the extent to which oligarchy was the result of national context. I argue that the experience of trade union oligarchy in the United States and Australia was more similar than different. National differences between the two countries were important, but they manifested primarily as different methods to achieve similar outcomes.

Rosie the Riveter Revisited

This chapter examines the ways in which employers contributed to the historical formation of the sexual division of labor and to patterns of job segregation by gender. It begins with a discussion of the formation of the sexual division of labor in the automobile industry prior to World War II. It then considers the logic of Fordism and the lack of incentive to retain or hire women workers after the war, with particular emphasis on how hiring policies fostered the gender division of labor. It shows that labor unions, and more specifically the United Automobile Workers (UAW), collaborated with management in purging women from the auto industry, with the latter playing the far more powerful role owing to its preference for male workers.

Business, Anti-Communism, and the Welfare State, 1945–1958

This chapter focuses on the Detroit business community's opposition to the growth of the government. These men made little distinction between the New Deal, Socialism, and Communism. The former, they argued, would ultimately lead to the latter. As a result, Detroit businessmen during the late 1940s and 1950s carried out a campaign to check state power. They targeted labor, particularly the United Automobile Workers (UAW), in this fight because they saw the union as one of the greatest advocates of an expanded welfare state. Like other conservatives, these men were anti-Communists. Their hostility to Communism was inextricably linked to their perception that free enterprise, as they understood it, was threatened by an expanding welfare state. Corporate managers discussed such issues as social security, unemployment insurance, and peacetime price controls—all measures they saw as part of the “march toward socialism or collectivism” and that labor-liberals believed were key to creating a modern welfare state.

The Decline of Industrial Detroit

An interview with Frank Hammer, former President of Local 909 of the United Automobile Workers (uaw) in Michigan, usa, conducted by Marek Hrubec, Director and Senior Research Fellow of the Centre of Global Studies at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic. Hammer worked for 32 years at General Motors, and retired in 2007. At present he organizes the Autoworker Caravan, an advocate association of retired and active autoworkers.