Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960–80 by Jeremy Milloy (review)

Why are incidents of workplace violence now seen as the actions of individuals with particular pathologies, so-called "lone wolves"? And why is it that workers once pursued workplace justice collectively, but now most often seek individual solutions? These questions are at the heart of Jeremy Milloy's investigation, in which violence itself is the main focus and Chrysler auto plants in greater Detroit and Windsor provide the case studies.

Milloy argues that violent work processes and working conditions in auto plants were primarily responsible for violent acts committed by Chrysler workers, against each other and against supervisors, in the 1960s and 1970s. Chrysler workers toiled in dangerous conditions caused by management decisions to speed up production, reduce the work force, and refuse to invest in plant safety. The result was violence inflicted on those workers in various forms, including deaths, crippling injuries, extreme physical and mental wear and tear, and even tuberculosis. Harassment by supervisors, themselves under intense pressure, contributed to the hostile environment. As a result, at Dodge Main, the principle US example in this study, there was an upsurge after 1965 in punchings, stabbings, shootings, and killings. This is apparent in United Auto Workers (uaw) Local 3 grievance records, on which much of the Dodge Main portion of the argument relies. Milloy explains that this upsurge, to an extent, can be attributed as well to the breakdown in Dodge Main's robust shop steward system in the late 1950s and the gradual transition to a far less effective grievance procedure for resolving crucial in-plant issues, a system known to historians of labour as "workplace contractualism." The upsurge was also prompted by longstanding racial animosities in Detroit, and in the US more generally, and the hiring of large numbers of young, African-American workers in the mid-1960s. Racism in the plant and in the community were main ingredients in Dodge Main's toxic stew and a new organization, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (drum), struggled against it, often with violent rhetoric or by reserving the right to fight violence with violence. Underlying these developments, however, was the inherent violence of the production process.

In contrast with Dodge Main, violence in Chrysler's Windsor plants stayed at roughly constant levels throughout the period under consideration. Few Blacks lived in Windsor, and those who worked in Chrysler factories were not congregated in a single department. They therefore tended to respond as individuals to negative circumstances. Steadier employment and a less hostile racial environment in the community softened the impact of brutalizing production processes, although line speeds in Windsor were also slower than those in Detroit. With a few notable exceptions, especially the killing of a popular local union president, violence in Windsor Chrysler plants was mostly limited to fistfights between angry workers. Without a comparable trove of grievance records for the Windsor part of his study, the author gained access to Local 444 documents that had not previously been available for researchers. Oral interviews with leaders and activists bolstered source bases for both sides of the investigation, but proved especially helpful in Windsor.

With the baseline chapters on Dodge Main and Windsor in place, the author delves further into drum, whose members, in his view, accurately diagnosed the source of violence in the plant but did not create the violent conditions. Indeed, the upsurge in in-plant violence preceded drum and lasted well beyond drum's demise in the early 1970s. Local 3 leadership, particularly president Ed Liska, who was white, tended to interpret Dodge Main violence as the product of problematic Black workers, not as an understandable outcome of brutal and racist conditions in the plant. Neither management nor the local union showed interest in improving those conditions, which meant that any measures taken to reduce violence, like improving plant security or harsher discipline for individual offenders, had little positive impact on the climate of fear, anger...