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Review
March 2001
NOT AUTOMATIC
WOMEN AND THE LEFT IN THE FORGING OF THE AUTO WORKERS
UNION
by Sol Dollinger and Genora Johnson Dollinger,
Monthly Review Press,
New York, 2000, 214 pp.
Just after Sol and Genora Dollinger's recent book on the early organizing
days of the Auto Workers' Union came out, newly released Bureau of Labor
Statistics figures showed that the percentage of American workers belonging
to unions had fallen in 2000 to 13.5%, the lowest point in six decades.
While some organizing successes were achieved recently by low-paid workers
like janitors and home health aides, as well as some high-paid
professionals like doctors, the steady declines have been in the core
industries such as auto and steel, where globalization has resulted in
increasing layoffs and plant closings.
Concern with these questions begs a look at a book like Not Automatic. The
title was chosen to stress that the gains workers have made for everyone
through union organization were not easy or inevitable, but came from the
hard, often bloody, battles waged by tens of thousands of rank-and-file
workers. Their focus is on the contributions made by "Women and the Left in
the forging of the Auto Workers Union."
There is no mistaking as they tell their stories that both authors were
proud of their lifelong identity as socialists. When Genora begins to tell
her story of the l937 Sitdown Strike in Flint, she begins with what she
calls the "preparatory work done before the strike by radical parties,"
such as the Communist Party, Proletarian Party, Socialist Labor Party,
Socialist Party (SP) and the Industrial Workers of the World.
The Socialist Workers Party appears on the scene shortly afterwards.
Unfortunately, the importance of the radicals seems at times to be
counterposed to what Genora calls the "spontaneous combustion of the
workers," which "many so-called revolutionaries talk about" but she
disputes.
Yet what she describes as the kind of "preparatory" work in which she was
engaged for the SP (holding lectures "in socialism, plus labor history and
current events" in a church basement), is not in a different world from the
creativity of ordinary workers who actually INVENTED the sit-down.
This book is divided into three parts. In Part I, on "Organizing the Auto
Industry, 1934-1948," Sol Dollinger begins with a detailed history of three
important strikes-the 1934 Electric Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio; the
1935 Chevrolet Transmission strike in that same city; and the 1936-37
sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan.
He recounts the way in which the "united front" of the main political
groups came to an end after the historic victory over GM. The story then
moves to the 1940-41 drive to organize at Ford, but more was involved in
those years than just factional warfare.
The bureaucratization of the union confronted by the rank and file by the
mid-l940s was the result of U.S. capitalism's preparation for and entry
into World War II. Thus, while the contract signed with Ford in June 1941
was the best one achieved in any of the big three auto companies, workers I
knew when I worked at Ford Rouge in the early 1950s angrily described how
the union they had helped win was unrecognizable when they returned from
the army four years later.
Part I ends with the post-World War II beginnings of the "Cold War" and the
red-baiting that accompanied it as we see the consolidation of Walter
Reuther's control and his capitulation to one draconian anti-union measure
after another.
Part II consists of an oral history interview with Genora conducted by
Susan Rosenthal in 1995. What is striking is how emphatically she rejects
being called the "Joan of Arc" of the labor movement by those who recall
the role she played when no women were considered capable of being leaders,
the severe beating she suffered from the corporation's hired thugs in
October 1945, and the never-ending battle she waged against the union
bureaucrats until the end of her life.
"It's not that I was born a heroine," she insists. "It was a question of
growing up in a company town where people were going without food and
children were going without health services. That wasn't the concern of GM.
They just wanted to get their production out. If you were living in a
company town, you would feel that, and you would do the same thing."
These pages testify to the hundreds of women who responded to the idea of
an Emergency Brigade. "We didn't know that nothing like that had ever been
organized before," Genora recalls. "We didn't know we were making history."
In a Part III called "Putting the Record Straight" we get a look of some of
the many different ways history is rewritten, whether by Henry Krause
inflating the role of the Communist Party in his THE MANY AND THE FEW, or
the union bureaucrats who were prevented by Genora from erasing the story
of the Women's Emergency Brigade from the 40th anniversary celebration of
the victory over GM.
There is much of importance in the labor history recounted in this little
book for a new generation to think about. One of the most important is the
quote from Karl Marx that serves as a frontispiece to one of the chapters:
"History does nothing....history is rather nothing but the activity of
humanity in pursuit of its ends." The masthead of N&L uses another quote
that sums it up differently: "Human power is it own end."
-Olga Domanski
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