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

Afterward, James Johnson Jr. did not remember killing his foreman, Hugh Jones, so others had to reconstruct what had happened. The details came from his co-workers—the confrontation, the gun, the mayhem—their meaning from Johnson's radical lawyers. Their client had never been a violent man, they argued, until the factory's brutalities drove him into a murderous rage. In a real sense, Johnson had not killed Jones. Chrysler had.

Jeremy Milloy picks up this argument in his compelling new study of workplace violence in the mid-twentieth-century auto industry. Auto factories had long been violent places, a consequence of the industry's relentlessly coercive production process and the rough, racist, and misogynist culture that dominated the factory floor. But mid-1960s transformations in labor relations intensified the problem, says Milloy. He makes his case through a fascinating comparison of the Chrysler Corporation's plants in Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. The facilities were component parts of a single industrial complex, separated only by the Detroit River. Yet in the latter half of the 1960s violence suddenly spiked in the Detroit plants, while the Windsor plants' rates seemed to remain constant. Precise numbers are impossible to come by, as Milloy readily acknowledges. But he has assembled more than enough evidence—from grievance records, union reports, and spectacular incidents like Johnson's 1970 rampage—to demonstrate the divergence.

Conditions outside the plants helped create the violence within, Milloy argues, but even the most troubling external factors—Detroit's skyrocketing violent crime rate, for instance—mattered less than the factories' strikingly different trajectories. In the mid-1960s, he says, Chrysler's management decided to squeeze as much production as it could from its decaying Detroit factories. The speed-up then intersected with the plants' profound racial tensions, as older white supervisors pushed young African American workers to meet the new standards the corporation had imposed. A militant union could have given the workers the support they needed. But the United Automobile Workers (UAW) had long since traded militancy for bureaucracy, so the workers had to face the pressure on their own. Up and down the line the violence ran, from foreman to worker, worker to foreman, and worker to worker, turning the factories into a battleground.

Chrysler also tried to speed up production in its Windsor plants, says Milloy. But the Canadian UAW fought back, its leaders by bargaining for better working conditions, its rank-and-file by confronting the company at the point of production, in the grand tradition of workers' control. The latter sometimes triggered violent incidents—a worker slugging his foreman, a fistfight at the local bar—but they were far less common than they were on the other side of the river, and far more functional. In Detroit the violence tended to be atomizing. In Windsor, violent means generally served collective ends.

That was precisely what James Johnson's lawyers wanted to do with his case when they went to trial: to transform a single horrific act that Johnson himself could not recall into a condemnation of structural injustice. It was a powerful argument then—powerful enough to get Johnson acquitted—and in Milloy's telling it is powerful still. It would be even more powerful, though, if it acknowledged that workplace violence is not only structural but also relational and deeply personal. Inside the plant Johnson and Jones stood on opposite sides of a conflict Chrysler had created, just as the lawyers said. From there Johnson's world stretched out to the little house he shared with his sister on Detroit's ragged east side, Jones's to a more substantial home on the west side, where he and wife raised their three children; to the church they attended; and to the aging parents he left behind. To fully understand the meaning of the carnage Johnson unleashed, and of the epidemic...