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Segmented Work, Race-Conscious Workers: Structure, Agency and Division in the CIO Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2009

Thomas J. Sugrue
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International Review of Social History , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , December 1996 , pp. 389 - 406
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Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1996

References

1 Executive Secretary's Report to the Executive Board of Directors, Detroit Branch NAACP, 8 September 1952, p. 2; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Group II, Box C90, File: Detroit, Mich., July-Dec. 1952; Local 49 Shop Committee to Brother Oliver, n.d. [c. March-April 1950], and Malcolm Evans to William Oliver, 10 April 1950, United Automobile Workers, Local 49 Collection, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library, Detroit, Michigan (hereafter ALUA).

2 “EXCELLO – Local 49 UAW-CIO”, Report of H. Ross, 27 July 1951 in United Automobile Workers Fair Practices Department Collection, ALUA, Box 16, Folder 16–23; letter [unidentified], 9 July 1956, ibid.; Complaint Against Excello Corporation, 1962, Detroit Urban League Papers (hereafter DUL), Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Box 48, Folder A12–25.

3 On Walter P. Reuther and the UAW's racial policies, see Boyle, Kevin, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism (Ithaca, 1995), esp. pp. 107–131Google Scholar; Boyle, , “There Are No Union Sorrows That the Union Can't Heal': The Struggle for Racial Equality in the United Automobile Workers, 1940–1960”, Labor History, 36 (1995), pp. 5–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lichtenstein, Nelson, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter P. Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, 1995), pp. 206–211, 315–317, 370–395Google Scholar.

4 For other examples of hate strikes in the auto industry after World War II, see Boyle, “There Are No Sorrows That the Union Cannot Heal’”, pp. 15–16, 18, 21. For a discussion of race, homeownership and politics in post-war Detroit, see Sugrue, Thomas J., “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction Against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964”, Journal of American History, 82 (1995), pp. 551–578CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On rates of residential segregation in Detroit, see Taeuber, Karl E. and Taeuber, Alma F., Negroes in Cities: Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Change (Chicago, 1965), p. 39Google Scholar; for CIO members' attitudes on integration, see Kornhauser, Arthur, Detroit as the People See It: A Survey of Attitudes in an Industrial City (Detroit, 1952), p. 91Google Scholar. On patterns of racial segregation generally, see Hirsch, Arnold R., “With or Without Jim Crow: Black Residential Segregation in the United States”, in Hirsch, Arnold R. and Mohl, Raymond A. (eds.), Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America(New Brunswick, NJ, 1993), pp. 65–99Google Scholar.

5 Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar. On the routine segregation of blacks and whites in the North, see Sugrue, Thomas J., The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996), chs 2, 8 and 9Google Scholar; Hirsch, Arnold R., Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; on religious institutions, see McGreevy, John T., Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century North (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar. On the CIO and blacks in the North, see Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliot, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York, 1979)Google Scholar. On the CIO in the South, see Honey, Michael K., Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana, 1993)Google Scholar; for an excellent overview, see Halpern, Rick, “Organized Labor, Black Workers, and the Twentieth-Century South: The Emerging Revision”, in Stokes, Melvyn and Halpern, Rick (eds), Race and Class in the American South Since 1890 (Oxford and Providence, 1992), pp. 43–76Google Scholar; on the parallels between the CIO in the North and South, see Korstad, Robert and Lichtenstein, Nelson, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor Radicals and the Early Civil Rights Movement”, Journal of American History, 75 (1988), pp. 786–811CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Goldfield, Michael, “Race and the CIO: Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism During the 1930s and 1940s”, International Labor and Working'Class History, 44 (1993), pp. 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The piece should be read in conjunction with the critical responses to it by Gary Gerstle, Robert Korstad, Marshall Stevenson and Judith Stein, in ibid., pp. 33–63.

6 On the North, Nelson confirms other findings about the deep-rooted resistance of northern working-class whites to liberal civil rights measures. See Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics”, esp. pp. 562–578; Hirsch, Arnold R., “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953–1966”, Journal of American History, 82 (1995), pp. 522–550CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Gary Gerstle, “Race and the Myth of the Liberal Consensus”, ibid., pp. 579–580.

7 Reids, Barbara Jeanne, “Ideology and Race in American History”, in Kousser, J. Morgan and McPherson, James M. (eds), Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982), pp. 143–177Google Scholar. See also Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race”, Signs, 17 (1992), pp. 251–274CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnesen, Eric, “'Like Banquo's Ghost, It Will Not Down': The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880–1920”, American Historical Review, 99 (1994), pp. 1601–1633, esp. p. 1606CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the American Working Class (London, 1991)Google Scholar; idem. Towards the Abolition of Wliiteness (London, 1994); Saxton, Alexander, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York and London, 1995)Google Scholar. Their approach owes much to literary studies and cultural anthropology. See, among many others, Hooks, Bell, Black Looks: Race and Representation (London, 1992)Google Scholar;Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1992)Google Scholar; Frankenberg, Ruth, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis, 1993)Google Scholar.

9 Compare Nelson, with Roediger, David, “Race and the Working-Class Past in the United States: Multiple Identities and the Future of Labor History”, International Review of Social History, 38 (1993)Google Scholar, Supplement, pp. 127–143. The Hill-Gutman debate, which has been replayed ad nauseam, needs no elaboration here. The debate was sparked by two articles: Hill, Herbert, “Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America”, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2:2 (Winter 1988), pp. 132–198CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “Race, Ethnicity, and Organized Labor: The Opposition to Affirmative Action”, New Politics, new ser., 1 (1987), pp. 32–182 and responses.

10 Kazin, Michael, “A People Not a Gass: Rethinking the Political Language of the Modern U.S. Labor Movement”, in Davis, Mike and Sprinker, Michael (eds), Reshaping the U.S. Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s (London, 1988), pp. 257–286Google Scholar; Lewis, Earl, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar; Trotter, Joe William Jr, Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932 (Urbana, 1990)Google Scholar.

11 Montgomery, David, “To Study the People: The American Working Class”, Labor History, 21 (1980), p. 492CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One work that is particularly attentive to employers' practices – and worker agency – is Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, esp. pp. 13–43.

12 Cox, Oliver Cromwell, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

13 Edwards, Richard, Reich, Michael and Gordon, David M., Labor Market Segmentation (Boston, 1975)Google Scholar; Edwards, Richard, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1979)Google Scholar;Reich, Michael, Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic Analysis (Princeton, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, David M., Edwards, Richard and Reich, Michael, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge, 1982)Google Scholar. My own research suggests that their categorization of firms is too simple: many “secondary sector” firms, like construction, did not hire minori-ties; many primary sector firms, like the automobile industry, did. Employment patterns varied widely from firm to firm in each sector. See Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, ch. 4.

14 Doeringer, Peter and Piore, Michael, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (Lexington, MA, 1971)Google Scholar.

15 Kirschenman, Joleen M. and Neckerman, Kathryn M., “‘We'd Love to Hire Them But…’: The Meaning of Race for Employers”, in Jencks, Christopher and Peterson, Paul (eds), The Urban Underclass (Washington, 1991), pp. 203–232Google Scholar.

16 Model, Suzanne A., “The Ethnic Niche and the Structure of Opportunity: Immigrants and Minorities in New York City”, in Katz, Michael B. (ed.), The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, 1993), pp. 161–193. Nelson uses Model's approach fruitfully in his discussion of Mexican-American longshore workers in CaliforniaGoogle Scholar.

17 One of the most perceptive reviews of Gordon, Edwards and Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers, noted that “the authors assume that the job is the only place where people develop ideas about work”, and they fail “to acknowledge the importance of culture, ideology, and politics in working-class history”. Schatz, Ronald, “Labor Historians, Labor Economics, and the Question of Synthesis”, Journal of American History, 71 (1984), p. 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a equally pointed criticism of the labor economists' “neglect of the cultural and ideological aspects of workers' lives”, see Kazin, Michael, “Struggling with the Class Struggle”, Labor History, 28 (1987), pp. 507–508CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Milkman, Ruth, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana, 1987)Google Scholar; see also idem, “Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Management's Postwar Purge of Women Automobile Workers”, in Lichtenstein, Nelson and Meyer, Stephen (eds), On the Line: Essays in the History of Auto Work (Urbana, 1989), pp. 129–152Google Scholar.

19 Examples of employers' use of blacks as strikebreakers abound. For a few examples, see Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, ch. 2, esp. pp. 69–71, 87–97; Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, pp. 246–247, 260–263; Dickerson, Dennis C., Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania (Albany, 1983), pp. 8–10Google Scholar, 13–17, 85–93.

20 Maloney, Thomas N. and Whatley, Warren C., “Making the Effort: The Contours of Racial Discrimination in Detroit's Labor Markets, 1920–1940”, Journal of Economic History, 55 (1995), pp. 465–493CrossRefGoogle Scholar. National Urban League Department of Research, “Observations of Conditions Among Negroes in the Fields of Education, Recreation and Employ-ment in Selected Areas of the City of Detroit, Michigan”, June 1941, pp. 35–36, in DUL, Box 74, Folder: History.

21 Quoted in B.J. Widick, “Black Workers: Double Discontents”, in idem (ed.), Auto Work and Its Discontents (Baltimore, 1976), p. 54.

22 For examples, see Conversations with “BIG THREE “ (Motor Industry) Vice Presidents in Charge of Personnel, Detroit, 29 September 1943, in “Survey of Racial and Religious Conflicts in Detroit”, Civil Rights Congress of Michigan Collection, ALUA, Box 71.

23 Model, “Ethnic Niches and the Structure of Opportunity”, esp. pp. 161–193.

24 Quote from Boyle, “'There Are No Sorrows That The Union Can't Heal'”, p. 9. On hate strikes, see for example, Meier and Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, pp. 125–136; Bailer, Lloyd, “Automobile Unions and Negro Labor”, Political Science Quarterly, 59 (1944), pp. 568–575CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nelson, Bruce, “Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile During World War II”, Journal of American History, 80 (1993), pp. 952–988CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lipsitz, George, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana, 1994), pp. 69–95Google Scholar.

25 Walter P. Reuther contended that the UA W “spent some of the most precious hours of our collective bargaining time” pushing for a fair employment clause. See Testimony of Reuther, Walter P., Hearings Held in Detroit, Michigan, December 14–15, 1960 (Washington, 1961), pp. 42Google Scholar, 57. See also George Robinson, Oral History, pp. 1–2, Blacks in the Labor Movement Collection, ALUA. Many African-American unionists and Communists criticized Reuther for not pushing harder for an anti-discrimination clause. See George Crockett, Oral History, pp. 28–29, ibid. For a case of a CIO union that maintained control over the hiring hall, see Quam-Wickham, Nancy, “Who Controls the Hiring Hall?: The Struggle for Job Control in the ILWU during World War II”, in Rosswurm, Steve (ed.), The CIO's Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, 1992)Google Scholar. For examples of employer resistance to fair practices laws, see George Fulton to Albert Cobo, 27 October 1951, Mayor's Papers (1951), Burton Historical Collections, Detroit Public Library, Box 4, Folder: FEPC, DPL; Benson Ford to Reuther, Walter P., in United Automobile Worker (05 1953)Google Scholar.

26 On the limitations of state FEP laws, see Schermer, George, “Effectiveness of Equal Opportunity Legislation”, in Northrup, Herbert R. and Rowan, Richard L. (eds), The Negro and Employment Opportunity: Problems and Practices (Ann Arbor, 1965), pp. 74–75Google Scholar, 79–81; for a discussion of the Michigan law, see Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, ch. 6.

27 A t General Motors, the GM-UA W contract gave foremen discretion in the promotion and transfer of workers, allowing management's shop-floor representatives the power to discriminate by race. See Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, p. 374. On decentralization, see Sugrue, Thomas J., “Forget About Your Inalienable Right to Work: Deindustrialization and its Discontents at Ford, 1950–1953”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 48 (1995), pp. 112–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sternlieb, George and Hughes, James W. (eds), Post-Industrial America: Metropolitan Decline and Inter-Regional Job Shifts (New Brunswick, 1975)Google Scholar.

28 GM figures from UAW data submitted to Hearings, pp. 63–65; for the number of black and women crafts workers in the steel industry, see Northrup, Herbert et al. , Negro Employment in Basic Industry: A Study of Racial Policies in Six Industries (Philadelphia, 1970), p. 287CrossRefGoogle Scholar; in tire manufacturing, ibid., p. 428; for overall apprenticeship figures in all trades) see Marshall, Ray and Briggs, Vernon M. Jr, The Negro and Apprenticeship (Baltimore, 1967), p. 28Google Scholar. The representation of women in all sectors of the auto industry and electronic industry (with the exception of sex-typed jobs and pink-collar work) grew gradually in the 1960s and 1970s. See Milkman, Gender at Work, pp. 153–160. See also “NAACP Study Concerning Trade Union Apprenticeship” (prepared by Herbert Hill), 1960, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Group III, Box A180, Folder: Labor: Apprenticeship Training.

29 Lichtenstein, Nelson, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era”, in Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary (eds), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–19S0 (Princeton, 1989), pp. 122–152Google Scholar, quote p. 133; Rosswurm, The CIO's Left-Led Unions; Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth A., Selling Free Enterprise: Tlte Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana, 1994)Google Scholar.

30 City of Detroit, Mayor's Interracial Committee, “Racial Discrimination in Employment and Proposed Fair Employment Measures, A Report to the Common Council”, 7 December 1951, p. 6, in Detroit Commission on Community Relations Collection, ALUA, Part I, Series 1, Box 11; “Michigan State Employment Service Experiences in the Placement of Minority Group Workers”; see also Detroit Focus, December 1951, in DUL, Box 21, Folder 21–14; Memorandum from the Michigan Committee on Civil Rights to the Governor's Committee on Civil Rights, 29 December 1948, in Vertical File – Pre 1960, ALUA, Box 4, Folder: Fair Employment Practices, Michigan, 1940s; for other examples, see “Discriminatory Job Orders Placed With State Employment Offices by Chrysler Corporation”, 6 December 1954, in Francis Kornegay Papers, MHC, Box 4, Folder 124; UA W Local 600, Executive Board Minutes, 14 February 1950, in UA W Local 600 Papers, ALUA, Box 2. For similar patterns in Philadelphia, see Licht, Walter, Getting Work: Philadelphia 1840–1950 (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 125–126Google Scholar, 136–139.

31 H.G. Bixby, President of Ex-Cell-O, “How Shall We Produce a More Favorable Climate for Business, Industry, and Payrolls in Detroit and Michigan”, Speech before the Economic Club of Detroit, 18 April 1960, copy in Frances Kornegay Papers, Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Box 8, Folder 265. On unemployment rates in 1960, see United States Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Population, Detroit, Michigan and Adjacent Area, Final Report, PC1–24C, Tables 73 and 77. On youth unemployment, see “Detroit Metropolitan Area Employment by Age, Sex, Color, and Residence”, in Detroit Branch NAACP Papers, ALUA, Part II, Box 10, Folder 10–5.

32 Milkman, Gender at Work; on NAACP and Urban League campaigns to pressure employers to open jobs for blacks, see Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, ch. 6.