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

"Whatever happened to organized labor's perennial demand for shorter hours and higher wages?" is the question that Wesleyan University sociologist Jonathan Cutler takes up in his excellent book, Labor's Time. He concludes that the demand for shorter hours, the longtime bedrock of the syndicalist tradition of the American labor movement, was a casualty of the corporatist collective bargaining regime that emerged in the decade and a half following World War II.

Cutler explores the mid-century clash of syndicalism and corporatism through a detailed account of factional power struggles within the United Auto Workers (UAW). The book centers on the maverick Local 600, representing the tens of thousands of workers at Ford's enormous River Rouge plant, and its oppositional relationship to UAW president Walter Reuther.

The primary battle over the shorter hours demand played out between Reuther and Carl Stellato, president of Local 600 through the 1950s. Stellato championed the demand for 30 hours' work at 40 hours' pay ('30-40') out of political necessity, not personal conviction—the Local's militant rank and file left him no choice. As Cutler argues, Local 600, through Stellato, insisted that the demand for shorter hours remain on the UAW's bargaining agenda, even as Reuther worked to consolidate his own bureaucratic authority and steer the union toward more conciliatory positions.

The shorter hours fight disintegrated in the wake of the collective bargaining round of 1958. Abandoning the 30-40 demand in the lead-up to bargaining, Stellato instead staked out an accommodationist position within the Reuther camp, in preparation for a doomed campaign for U.S. Congress. In the months and years following Stellato's sell-out, as it was seen by much of Local 600's rank and file, the shorter hours movement fell further and further from the UAW's bargaining agenda. Cutler concludes that this foreclosure of rank and file militancy had disastrous consequences: after 1958 "the UAW moved into full retreat."

This story is extraordinarily important, with implications far beyond the internal politics of a single union. For its detailed explication of Reuther's opposition to shop-floor militancy, Labor's Time should be required reading for all students of the so-called labor-management accord of the postwar period. Moreover, Cutler expertly explores the place of Cold War politics within Reuther's UAW. At the height of American anti-Communism, opponents of the 30-40 demand argued that shorter hours for U.S. auto workers would only aid the Soviet Union.

As much as Labor's Time explains, it does suggest further study of the place of industrial work and workers in the larger configuration of postwar U.S. culture and society. Local 600's fight for shorter hours was part of a long history of workers' organizing for control of their own time. Cutler's study could be extended to engage directly with this history, as well as with the politics of working class leisure in the postwar period. Another key backdrop for Local 600's shorter hours movement was the ongoing transformation of American manufacturing, a process led by the auto industry. Though Cutler briefly discusses the push toward automation and decentralization, a more in-depth treatment of these matters would have enriched his analysis. Even with the further questions that it provokes, Labor's Time is an important new work in U.S. labor studies.