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75 C h a p t e r 7 Unionization Nearly all the village industries had come into being by 1941, when the Ford Motor Company allowed its workforce finally to unionize—the last and most reluctant of the American automakers to do so.1 Ford’s personal and in turn corporate hostility toward unions has been well documented.2 Suffice it here to quote the 1937 pamphlet Fordism by Carl Raushenbush of the pro-union League for Industrial Democracy: On the industrial field in America, two formidable antagonists stand opposed —the United Automobile Workers [UAW], backed by the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations], and the Ford Motor Company, backed by all the anti-union forces of America. The Company is fighting for a principle—the principle of autocracy in industry. The union men want better conditions on the job. They also want to have jobs made available on the basis of equality, not dependent on political connections or subject to arbitrary firings. To them this is the matter of principle. Their method for restraining autocracy is the method of collective bargaining. In Detroit’s first Labor Day parade in 20 years, the Ford employees who marched wore masks to show that they would be arbitrarily fired if the Company knew that they had taken part.3 Having repeatedly declared that his company would never recognize the UAW or any other union—and that all his workers were loyal to him and uninterested in organizing—Ford nevertheless reluctantly dealt with unions in his foreign subsidiaries and in his domestic independent parts suppliers. Several years before its 1941 agreement with the UAW, the company went so far as to encourage a subservient union of its own, the Ford Brotherhood of America, Inc., membership in which required signing a pledge of confidence in the company. Meanwhile, the notorious Ford Service Department under Harry Bennett discouraged workers from joining the UAW by punish- 76 c h a p t e r s e v e n ing those who did and especially those who recruited new members. Punishment could take the form of demotion to lower-paid and less desirable jobs, outright discharge, blacklisting from other automobile company jobs, or physical violence. Such tactics led the New York Times to call the Service Department “the largest private quasi-military organization in existence.”4 In the absence (prior to the New Deal) of unemployment compensation, worker’s compensation, and pensions, such reprisals kept many potential UAW members from even the consideration of joining.5 As David Gartman observes, the Depression fostered unexpected decentralization of a kind within the auto industry, above all in the Ford Motor Company. Just because of the scarcity of jobs there was greater opportunity for low-level foremen to exercise exceptional authority and to pressure their charges mercilessly to work harder lest they lose their jobs: “Formally, power over hiring, firing, and wages remained centralized and under the control of the employment departments. However, during the depression, top officials in the bureaucracy seemed to have allowed the de facto decentralization of power into the hands of foremen, because the centralized rule-governed structure was no longer necessary to ensure a stable and compliant labor force.”6 If, on the one hand, the friction between labor and management that increasingly pervaded the Ford workforce in the 1920s and 1930s was largely absent from the village industries, on the other hand, the village industry workers certainly lacked the collective power of what became the UAW. Yet no doubt many of those workers, including some at the largest of the village industries, prided themselves on their very individuality and job flexibility. To suggest, as some have, that Ford established the village industries solely to stifle union activity in his company overall is to attribute to him singular motives that are without conclusive basis. The reliance on conventional branch plants in other states would probably have sufficed—and would surely have been much cheaper. This was the strategy of General Motors, especially after the sit-down strikes that led to its acceptance of unionization in 1937. As Business Week reported in that same year: “General Motors and Ford are on the move. Both companies are in the midst of major decentralization programs. In the case of General Motors, it represents mostly a trek out of Michigan; with Ford it is confined within Michigan’s boundaries, but is aimed at getting away from the huge concentration of men at...

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