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chapter 5 “The Man in the Middle” A Social History of Automobile Industry Foremen The study of frontline supervisors—in the factory, office, hospital ward, and academic workplace—is once again making waves. The quest for a more efficient, and perhaps more humane, workplace all too often begins with advice and admonition directed toward those who are charged with supervising the daily work lives of the dozen or so individuals who fall under their direct authority. Many of the management handbooks for sale in this nation’s airport bookshops purport to explain how one can either get along with an irascible boss or, conversely, offer tips on making the staff work productively and harmoniously with their immediate supervisor. Such advice manuals echo an even older set of studies that bemoan foremen and forewomen as “men in the middle” of the workplace hierarchy. They were the “marginal men of industry” whose jobs were in desperate need of reform.1 Not unexpectedly the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the federal jurists have periodically recalibrated their definition of what constitutes the managerial strata in a wide variety of industries and worksites. Since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 virtually all of this redefinition has moved in a direction that is pleasing to corporate ownership. They have happily “promoted” millions of workers into the ranks of management, not to actually enhance their paycheck or their privileges, but to forcefully ensure their “loyalty” by making it legally impossible for them to join a trade union or exercise other democratic rights.2 In an expansive study of this phenomenon, historian Jean-Christian Vinel rightly observes that corporate insistence upon the “undivided loyalty of its management ” has become the “bulwark protecting the hegemony of the business world against the encroachment of freedom of association.”3 Unfortunately, much of this discussion, especially that in even the most sophisticated business journals as well as in the sociological and industrial relations literature, has had an ahistorical quality that assumes that the traditional role played by foremen and other frontline supervisors has been determined exclusively by either the technology of production or the structures of management. Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 56 5/24/13 8:04 AM “The Man in the Middle” 57 These have been important, but they cannot be divorced from either the larger politics of production or the changing consciousness of foremen and supervisors in the first half of the twentieth century. Foremen in the Mass Production Factory This essay seeks to uncover a slice of this complex history by emphasizing how cultural and political forces, as well as structural changes in the organization of work, shaped the role foremen played in the factory hierarchy. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, the changing collective identity of this stratum not only sustained a brief experiment in foreman unionism but also challenged the structure of authority inside the production facilities of the nation’s premier industry. In the process foremen began to explore and expand the definition of what constituted a self-conscious working-class identity at midcentury. In their studies of the early twentieth-century factory, historians Daniel Nelson and Stephen Meyer have demonstrated that the deployment of Frederick Taylor’s ideas on management was only possible with the virtual destruction of the shop floor “empire” commanded by many nineteenth-century foremen. The power, autonomy , and prestige of both “inside contractors” and skilled mechanics could not survive where both the technology and organization of production were geared to scientifically managed mass production facilities. As factories became larger and work more compartmentalized, and as production became standardized and coordinated, the foreman-contractor—who bid on a job, hired the workers, and then determined the pace, layout, and methods of work—vanished from the factory. Likewise, the skilled worker, who at one time might have employed a couple of helpers out of his own pay, became a toolmaker or repairman who served a vital though auxiliary role in the mass production facility.4 Much of the skilled work was taken over and systematized by a burgeoning managerial stratum, including a growing corps of engineers, accountants, clerks, inspectors, and personnel managers. In those industries that began to approach the ideal of mass production—rubber, meatpacking, oil, chemicals, automobiles— production line foremen had little say in scheduling or engineering and only a slight voice in the maintenance of the production facility or the control of product quality. Foremen did have some responsibility for cost control, and they sometimes kept rudimentary...

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