Labor’s Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism (review)

In Labor’s Time, Jonathan Cutler has written a closely researched study of the United Auto Workers Local 600 at the Ford River Rouge plant in Detroit and that local’s battle with UAW president Walter Reuther over the 30-hour workweek. This book reconstructs a struggle for economic change and union power that raged from WWII into the 1960s – and was forgotten soon after that.

Cutler’s book is a rich and meticulous reconstruction of the struggle – centered in Local 600 and other “dissident” UAW locals – to make the 30-hour workweek a top priority for the autoworker’s post-war contractual negotiations. Shorter-hours proponents saw the 30-hour week at 40 hours pay – 30/40 for short – as a key counterweight to growing threats from automation and technological unemployment. In Local 600, leaders and rank-and-file activists also saw the 30/40 campaign as part of a larger crusade to preserve shop floor autonomy, democracy and militancy in the face of growing centralization from the national union – especially from the Solidarity House headquarters staff preaching moderation and fealty to five-year contracts, and from what many line workers saw as Reuther’s increasingly autocratic rule.

Reuther and the national staff, in turn, saw the immediate demand for the shorter workweek as hopelessly unrealistic in an economy they portrayed as veering from tight labor markets and pressure for increased productivity to fears of post-war recession. It was one thing to pay lip service to the ideal of moving toward a world of more rest and leisure for the overworked men and women on the assembly line; it was quite another thing to make such a demand the centerpiece for the next round of contract negotiations. Moreover, with automakers and leading politicians unalterably opposed to such a short work week, Reuther and his inner circle concluded that the 30/40 crusade would only weaken the union’s bargaining position on wage increases and pension protection. The national leadership insisted that negotiations should revolve around high wages and overtime pay, so that when workers labored longer hours to build more cars they could take home a bigger paycheck to buy more goods. As the Cold War heated up, Reuther – never averse to red baiting when it served his purposes – declared that the demand for a shorter work week might even be a Communist ploy to weaken the whole American economy!

Cutler delves deeply into not only the internal fights between Reuther and Local 600 President Carl Stellato, but also the intense internecine conflicts between Communists, Trotskyists, Catholic trade unionists and various splinter groups all competing for workers allegiances at the massive Rouge manufacturing plant. Cutler shows how the fight over 30/40 quickly deteriorated from an argument about real economic change to a political football thrown around by various electoral factions within Local 600 and the UAW to win votes and undermine opponents. By the 1960s, with even Democratic presidents such as Kennedy and Johnson criticizing the 30-hour week as bad for business, and with the left wing virtually destroyed in the labor movement, the issue disappeared from the agenda at most UAW conventions. Once again, organized labor lost another opportunity to claim an ambitious goal around which to organize a more militant movement.

Cutler is thorough and insightful in reconstructing the multi-layered debates swirling around and through the Rouge and its Local 600. Yet this is a study that would have benefitted from more grounding in a discussion of what work was like in this massive manufacturing complex. What was it in the nature of labor there that led to such a militant-local, politically-fractured workforce and such an intense demand for a shorter work week? Moreover, because the politics were so convoluted, it is all the more incumbent on Cutler to constantly connect all this infighting back to his larger project of understanding the...