Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 14:04:09 EDT
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From: "Seth Wigderson, University of Maine-Augusta"
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Subject: Rachleff reviews Milkman's Farewell to the Factory
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [EMAIL PROTECTED] (June, 1998)
Ruth Milkman. _Farewell to the Factory: Auto Workers in the
Late Twentieth Century_. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997. xiii + 234 pp. Tables, appendices, notes, and
index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-520-20677-0; $14.95 (paper), ISBN
0-520-20678-9.
Reviewed for H-Labor by Peter Rachleff
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota
"Adieu" or "Au Revoir"?
This book is much more complex than it appears at first glance
to be. On one level, it is a detailed, carefully researched and
constructed case study of a single factory--the General Motors
assembly plant in Linden, New Jersey--and its workforce--mostly
male, mostly white--as they face the overwhelming challenges of
the 1980s: plant closings, the whipsawing of locals, the rise
and fall of internal union dissident caucuses, concessions,
buyouts, and the reorganization of production away from the
long-established Fordism of the post-World War II era. On other
levels, however, _Farewell to the Factory_, confronts such
ongoing discussions as the decline of identification with work
and the rise of leisure-based identity, the crisis of the U.S.
labor movement, and notions of the "end of work" as we have
known it. Milkman is to be congratulated for having taken on
such a complex and important set of issues, and to have grounded
her study in a specific, concrete milieu.
During the fat years of the auto industry and the United Auto
Workers (UAW) union--1945-1970s--workers at the GM Linden plant
produced large luxury cars (Cadillacs, Buicks, and Oldsmobiles),
enjoyed increasing incomes and benefits, used seniority to move
from more arduous, dirty, and difficult jobs within the plant to
less unpleasant ones, counted on job security, and looked
forward to an economically-stable retirement. They took the
monotonous, routinized character of their work as a given, but
they chafed under the discipline exerted by frontline
supervision. They filed grievances and went on occasional
strikes. While most identified with the union (UAW Local 595),
only a few became activists.
As the fat years drew to a close, this world changed, suddenly
and thoroughly. In the 1970s, a new generation of workers began
to question the local union's willingness to defer to plant
management on such shopfloor issues as the intensity of work,
the application of seniority rules, and management harassment.
The Linden Auto Workers (LAW) caucus challenged the leaders of
the local as they tried to change its direction. They faced
determined opposition not only from the established union
leadership but also from the plant management, and caucus
activists were disciplined, suspended, and even fired. But the
model of militancy they put forward grew in popularity among the
workforce, and caucus leaders gained the leadership of the local
in 1982.
By the early 1980s, autoworkers faced more than a pushing,
hostile local management. The Chrysler crisis and bailout of
the late 1970s signaled that the entire industry had entered a
period of profound change. The gains made over two generations
were suddenly at risk, as the national managements of Ford, GM,
and Chrysler threatened to close plants which were "less
productive" than others, a threat made real by industry-wide
overcapacity, a threat which all three companies acted on often
enough to impress workers that they were serious. Management's
demands for concessions were far-reaching: wage freezes, reduced
wages for new hires, the rewriting of work rules and job
descriptions, increased work loads and mandatory overtime.
While Local 595's new leadership was eager to resist these
demands, they received no support from the UAW national
leadership. Much to the contrary, they allowed the Big 3's
management to whipsaw locals against each other. Concessions
became the order of the day, plants were closed, the UAW lost
tens of thousands of members, and the union's power was markedly
diminished.
But the changes went even further, especially at Linden. In
1985, the Linden plant was closed for a complete makeover,
involving a change in product lines from luxury cars to small
ones, the introduction of automation and new technologies, and
the reorganization of production with a much smaller workforce.
The plant was closed for more than a year, during which time
workers collected unemployment and "SUB" (supplemental
unemployment benefits as per the union contract) benefits. As
GM made ready to reopen the plant, it offered a "buyout" program
to encourage workers to leave altogether.
These are the issues that most interested Milkman. She
carefully explores who took the buyout, who didn't, and why.
She relies on considerable demographic data from employment and
union records, along with surveys, focus groups, and oral
interviews that she conducted with the workers. It is from this
part of the project--the exploration of choices made around
the buyout--that she derived her title, _Farewell to the
Factory_.
Her findings, while hardly earthshaking, are interesting.
Younger workers with less seniority were much more likely to opt
for the buyout than older workers with more seniority. Women
took the buyout at nearly double their percentage in the
workforce, while African-Americans largely preferred to stick
with GM than try to re-enter the workforce elsewhere. Milkman
enriches these findings with research on the workers who stayed
at GM, focussing on their expectations of worklife in the "new"
plant. GM made many promises about the reorganization of
production, the new roles that workers would play, and the new
status that they would enjoy. Workers' responses to Milkman's
surveys and interviews suggest that those who turned down the
buyout opportunity had some hope that work itself would get
better after the changeover and that supervisors would treat
workers differently. Reality, as we all might have guessed,
fell far short of these expectations, and work in the "new"
plant was little different than it had been under the Fordist
regime of an earlier era, save for the skilled trades, who
increased in number and enjoyed more interesting work
assignments. There were, after all, more machines to repair and
maintain in the new plant, and these machines were more complex
and valuable.
Drawing on her findings about those who chose the buyout and
those who put their faith in a "new" GM Linden plant, Milkman
argues that both groups shared a deep distaste for the
organization of factory work, particularly the frontline
supervision, of the Fordist factory. For these workers, leaving
the factory altogether by accepting a buyout or placing hope in
management to reorganize production and labor relations in a new
way amounted to different ways to say "farewell" to the
conventional factory.
This is an interesting argument, one that provides academics
with a bridge to today's industrial (and office?) workforce.
Milkman's generation of information from surveys, focus groups,
and interviews provides useful material for all readers. Her
argument also explicitly engages those who argue that new
technology is a panacea, that labor-management cooperation is a
sham, that work itself is no longer central to workers'
identities, or that work as we have known it is disappearing
from the U.S. economy. These side discussions are often
animated and worthwhile, and they serve, at the least, as a
useful entree into these controversies.
There is one area that Milkman seems less willing to delve into
head on, however, which I think is of considerable importance,
that of the conflict between the militant local union leadership
and the UAW national leadership in the early 1980s--and of the
consequences of the outcome of this struggle on the choices made
by workers in the later 1980s. I don't want to suggest that
Milkman has swept these issues under the rug, as she has
provided considerable useful and interesting information about
them throughout the book. But she has chosen to treat them as
marginal to her central argument, about why workers made--and,
by implication, will make--the choices they do.
Milkman provides ample evidence that ensuing events bore out the
local leadership's analysis far more than that of the UAW
national leadership. While we cannot know if a struggle against
concessions could have succeeded, it is clear that granting
concessions, allowing locals to compete with each other,
relaxing work rules and job descriptions, and promoting
labor-management cooperation did not save jobs in the U.S. auto
industry. It also weakened the union, at local and national
levels, and contributed to the overall crisis of the labor
movement.
The demonstrated ineffectiveness of the union should have been
explored as an important factor in the choices of the workers to
accept the buyout offer or even to give management a relatively
free hand to reorganize work and labor relations. An
exploration of this topic might have led Milkman to question
whether there was a "farewell" to the union as well as the
factory implied--if not expressed--in the workers' choices. As
disturbing as this topic might be, it deserves to be tackled
head on.
I don't want to end on a totally negative note, about this book,
the UAW, or autoworkers in 1998. Recently, I heard Richard
Feldman, the co-author of the late 1980s book, _The End of the
Line: Autoworkers and the American Dream_ (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1990), speak at a labor conference. A critic
of the UAW national leadership's strategies since 1971 and of
his own local's venture into labor-management cooperation,
Feldman was elected a year ago to the shop chairman's position
(the top workplace union office) in Ford's Wayne, Michigan,
truck plant, where its hot-selling Navigator and Expedition are
made. In his comments, Feldman noted that one-third of the
workforce at the Wayne plant--which accounts for one-half of
Ford's total U.S. profits--has less than three years' seniority,
and that this group was his primary base of support within the
local. He has found them willing to oppose increased workloads,
to fight for more jobs, and to resist Ford management's "lean
and mean" late 20th century agenda. He--and they--are preparing
for a possible strike over these issues this coming fall.
Maybe Milkman's "farewell" should be translated as "au
revoir" (until we meet again) rather than "adieu" (good-bye
forever).
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