Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City

5. Who Will Feast on the Fruits of Labor?

C h a p t e r 5 Who Will Feast on the Fruits of Labor? They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn, We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn That the union makes us strong. Solidarity Forever! —“Solidarity Forever,” anthem of the U.S. union movement written by Ralph Chaplin in 1915; sung to the tune “Battle Hymn of the Republic” The stage that is Greater Detroit’s featureless plain has now been set. The antagonists have taken their places: the capitalists and the laborers of different racial backgrounds. How will the plot play out? In Greater Detroit, the story line developed historically through two closely intertwined subplots of conflict, one involving organized labor versus capital, the other black versus white. Many axes of tension have undoubtedly characterized Greater Detroit during its history. Examples include national origin, religion, and income. Yet I would argue that the dual dialectics of the capital-labor struggle and the black-white struggle shaped what Greater Detroit has become, and constrains what it might become, far more than any others. The rest of this book aims to build this case. The drama of capital and organized labor in Greater Detroit played out in four main acts. The first occurred from the dawn of the city’s industrialization into the 1920s, taking the guise of episodic advances and retreats in 110 Chapter 5 craft unionism. The second act consisted of pitched battles between industrywide unions and the auto companies in the 1930s. The third involved 1950s and 1960s cooperation between these forces and mutual (albeit fleeting) prosperity. The last act, since 1970 still painfully limping toward a finale at a workplace nearby, entails the progressive evisceration of the industrial unions and their capitalist antagonists alike. The common thread running through these four acts has been that the labor-capital dialogues typically do not involve polite discussions. They’ve been naked tests of power, raw and often violent. These acts have usually produced winners and losers: sometimes two losers, never two winners. This style of zero-sum economic play continues to dominate the region’s psyche and polity to this day. It did not take industrial Detroit long to demonstrate its penchant for acting out labor-capital disputes in irresolutely antagonistic and public ways. The so-called “Trolley Riot” of 1891 proved the perfect prologue. The Detroit City Railway Company was a private enterprise with a monopoly over public streetcar transportation provision in the city. Its horse-drawn trolleys daily shuffled tens of thousands about along rails embedded in the city’s main thoroughfares. But, like most monopolies, the Detroit City Railway Company was big on greed and small on service. Unlike as in most major U.S. cities, already turning to electric powered streetcars, the company resolutely stuck to the “tried and true.” Unfortunately, this meant customers had to pay five cents for the privilege of riding trolleys insulated with foul straw that the gas-powered lamp dangling precariously from the ceiling could combust at any moment. Although the vehicles’ pace was leisurely at best, riders were compensated by ample opportunities to sample the delicate and ever-changing aromas of horse manure that mounded the rights-of-way. The men who operated the trolleys were paid the princely sum of eighteen cents per day (and all the fertilizer they cared to shovel and cart home). When workers had the temerity to form a union, the Detroit City Railway Company fired twelve of the leaders. The resulting strike threatened to bring commerce to a halt, so the firm brought in strikebreakers; the city’s police force escorted them through picket lines of angry trolley drivers. But, in a remarkable display of public-union solidarity, crowds soon gathered at major intersections to support the strikers and to blockade the scaboperated trolleys with toppled lampposts, trees, and ripped-up tracks. The crowds even managed to “capture” one trolley and push it into the river. Who Will Feast on the Fruits of Labor? 111 Despite his capitalist background and prior opposition to the Knights of Labor organizing his shoe factory, Mayor Hazen Pingree was forced to side with the strikers. He even threatened to join the crowds if the company did not capitulate, which it quickly did. Despite losing this battle, however, the Detroit City Railway...