Download or read book Inside the Ford UAW Transformation written by Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the partnership between Ford and the UAW, forged through more than fifty pivotal events, transformed their capacity to combine good jobs with high performance. In 2009, the Ford Motor Company was the only one of the Big Three automakers not to take the federal bailout package. How did Ford remain standing when its competitors were brought to their knees? It was a gutsy decision, but it didn't happen in isolation. The United Auto Workers joined with Ford to make this possible—not only in 2009, but in a series of more than fifty pivotal events during three decades that add up to a transformation that simultaneously values work and delivers results. The pivotal events—some planned and some unplanned; some at the facility level and some at the enterprise level –were not all successful. All had the potential, however, to further the transformation, and all provide insight into how large-scale system change really happens. The authors—each with years of experience with Ford, the UAW, and the industry—provide an unprecedented inside look at how core operating assumptions are shifted and at the emergence of integrated operating systems for quality, safety, and other aspects of the enterprise. It is a transformation built on a foundation of dignity and mutual respect, guided by a vision of combining good jobs with high performance.
Download or read book Built in Detroit written by Robert K. Morris and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1935. In the middle of the Great Depression, after months of unemployment, Ken Morris found a job at the Briggs Manufacturing Company, the toughest auto company in Detroit. He would eventually play a pioneering role in building one of the cleanest, most socially progressive labor unions the world has known-the United Automobile Workers. Bob Morris, Ken's son, tells not only his father's story, but also the UAW's story: the battles with companies, the struggles within the union, and then the vicious attacks on Detroit labor leaders in the late 1940s. He also provides portraits of early auto industrialists, their companies, their henchmen and the gangsters they hired to destroy the labor movement.
Download or read book Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW written by August Meier and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic of labor history, with a new foreword by one of the leading figures in urban studies
Download or read book American Vanguard written by John Barnard and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The struggles and victories of the UAW form an important chapter in the story of American democracy. American Vanguard is the first and only history of the union available for both general and academic audiences. In this thorough and engaging narrative, John Barnard not only records the controversial issues tackled by the UAW, but also lends them immediacy through details about the workers and their environments, the leaders and the challenges that they faced outside and inside the organization, and the vision that guided many of these activists. Throughout, Barnard traces the UAW's two-fold goal: to create an industrial democracy in the workplace and to pursue a social-democratic agenda in the interest of the public at large. Part one explores the obstacles to the UAW's organization, including tensions between militant reformers and workers who feared for their jobs; ideological differences; racial and ethnic issues; and public attitudes toward unions. By the outbreak of World War II, however, the union had succeeded in redistributing power on the shop floor in its members' favor. Part two follows the union during Walter P. Reuther's presidency (1946-1970). During this time, pioneering contracts brought a new standard of living and income security to the workers, while an effort was made to move America toward a social democracy-which met with mixed results during the civil rights decade. Throughout, Barnard presents balanced interpretations grounded in evidence, while setting the UAW within the context of the history of the U.S. auto industry and national politics.
Download or read book The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism 1945 1968 written by Kevin Boyle and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The UAW engaged in these struggles in an attempt to build a cross-class, multiracial reform coalition that would push American politics beyond liberalism and toward social democracy. The effort was in vain; forced to work within political structures - particularly the postwar Democratic party - that militated against change, the union was unable to fashion the alliance it sought. The UAW's political activism nevertheless suggests a new understanding of labor's place in postwar American politics and of the complex forces that defined liberalism in that period. The book also supplies the first detailed discussion of the impact of the Vietnam War on a major American union and shatters the popular image of organized labor as being hawkish on the war.
Download or read book Not Automatic written by Sol Dollinger and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-05 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sol Dollinger's remembrance of UAW's early days are juicy and provocative. His recall of those goofy internecine political battles within the union is tragic-comic. Yet they, united, even though hollering at each other, made GM, Ford, et al,recognize the union. The sequence involving Genora Johnson Dollinger, the heroine of the 1937 sit-down strike, is deeply moving and inspiring." --Studs Terkel "Should be read by every labor person who takes the principles of trade union history seriously. . . . Brings the history of the UAW up for a new survey of the events to include the men and women who would otherwise be unsung heroes or written out of history totally." --David Yettaw President, UAW Buick Local 599, 1987-1996 This story of the birth and infancy of the United Auto Workers, told by two participants, shows how the gains workers made were not easy or inevitable-not automatic-but required strategic and tactical sophistication as well as concerted action. Sol Dollinger recounts how workers, especially activists on the political left, created an auto union and struggled with one another over what shape the union should take. In an oral history conducted by Susan Rosenthal, Genora Johnson Dollinger tells the gripping tale of her role in various struggles, both political and personal.
Download or read book Maurice Sugar written by Christopher H. Johnson and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Johnson chronicles the life of Maurice Sugar, from his roots in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, through his resistance with Eugene V Debs to World War I, and on to the struggles of the early 1930s to bring the union message to Detroit. It was Maurice Sugar, labor activist and lawyer for the United Auto Workers, who played a key role in guiding the newly-formed union through the treacherous legal terrain obstructing its development in the 1930s. He orchestrated the injunction hearings on the Dodge Main strike and defended the legality of the sit-down tactic. As the UAW's General Council, he wrote the union's constitution in 1939, a model of democratic thinking. Sugar worked with George Addes, UAW Secretary-Treasurer, to nurture rank-and-file power. A founder of the National Lawyers' Guild, Sugar also served as a member of Detroit's Common Council at the head of a UAW "labor" ticket. By 1947, Sugar was embroiled in a struggle within the UAW that he feared would destroy the open structures he had helped to build. He found himself in opposition to Walter Reuther's bid to run the union. A long-time socialist, Sugar fell victim to mounting Cold War hysteria. When Reuther assumed control of the UAW, Sugar was summarily dismissed. Christopher Johnson chronicles the life of Maurice Sugar, from his roots in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, through his resistance with Eugene V. Debs to World War I, and on to the struggles of the early 1930s to bring the union message to Detroit. Firmly grounded on the historiography of the UAW, Johnson shows the importance of Sugar and the Left in laying the foundation for unionizing the auto industry in the pre-UAW days. He documents the work of the Left in building a Black-labor coalition in Detroit, the importance of anti-Communism in Reuther's rise to power, and the diminution of union democracy in the UAW brought about by the Cold War. Maurice Sugar represents a force in American life that bears recalling in these barren years of plant closings.
Download or read book Race Against Liberalism written by David M. Lewis-Colman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit examines how black workers' activism in Detroit shaped the racial politics of the labor movement and the white working class. Tracing substantive, longstanding disagreements between liberals and black workers who embraced autonomous race-based action, David M. Lewis-Colman shows how black autoworkers placed themselves at the center of Detroit's working-class politics and sought to forge a kind of working-class unity that accommodated their interests as African Americans. This chronicle of the black labor movement in Detroit begins with the independent caucuses in the 1940s and the Trade Union Leadership Council in the 1950s, in which black workers' workplace activism crossed over into civic unionism, challenging the racial structure of the city's neighborhoods, leisure spaces, politics, and schools. By the mid-1960s, a full-blown black power movement had emerged in Detroit, and in 1968 black workers organized nationalist Revolutionary Union Movements inside the auto plants, advocating a complete break from the labor establishment. By the 1970s, the tradition of independent race-based activism among Detroit's autoworkers continued to shape the politics of the city as Coleman Young became the city's first black mayor in 1973.
Download or read book Wartime Strikes written by Martin Glaberman and published by Bewick Editions. This book was released on 1980 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Beaten Down Worked Up written by Steven Greenhouse and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —The New York Times Book Review We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems, including increased income inequality, declining social mobility, and the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy few. He exposes the modern labor landscape with the stories of dozens of American workers, from GM employees to Uber drivers to underpaid schoolteachers. Their fight to take power back is crucial for America’s future, and Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be—and is being—rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first century. Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead. A PBS NewsHour Now Read This Book Club Pick
Download or read book The UAW s Southern Gamble written by Stephen J. Silvia and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-15 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The UAW's Southern Gamble is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. Stephen J. Silvia chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan and documents the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization. Silvia shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The UAW's Southern Gamble makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry.
Download or read book Inside the Ford UAW Transformation written by Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-05-08 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the partnership between Ford and the UAW, forged through more than fifty pivotal events, transformed their capacity to combine good jobs with high performance. In 2009, the Ford Motor Company was the only one of the Big Three automakers not to take the federal bailout package. How did Ford remain standing when its competitors were brought to their knees? It was a gutsy decision, but it didn't happen in isolation. The United Auto Workers joined with Ford to make this possible—not only in 2009, but in a series of more than fifty pivotal events during three decades that add up to a transformation that simultaneously values work and delivers results. The pivotal events—some planned and some unplanned; some at the facility level and some at the enterprise level –were not all successful. All had the potential, however, to further the transformation, and all provide insight into how large-scale system change really happens. The authors—each with years of experience with Ford, the UAW, and the industry—provide an unprecedented inside look at how core operating assumptions are shifted and at the emergence of integrated operating systems for quality, safety, and other aspects of the enterprise. It is a transformation built on a foundation of dignity and mutual respect, guided by a vision of combining good jobs with high performance.
Download or read book UAW Politics in the Cold War Era written by Martin Halpern and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1988-10-11 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of the triumph of the Reuther caucus over the Thomas-Addes-Leonard coalition in the United Auto Workers union. The dramatic defeat of the left-center coalition had far reaching significance. It helped to determine the shape of postwar labor relations, the direction of postwar liberalism, and the fate of the left. Based on manuscript sources, oral histories, and quantitative analyses of convention roll calls, UAW Politics in the Cold War Era places this union conflict in a national political context of postwar economic conflicts, the cold war, and the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. Halpern offers a fresh point of view on the character of the two contending coalitions and the reasons for the Reuther triumph. His work is a valuable contribution to the current reassessment of the domestic politics of the early cold war years.
Download or read book The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford written by Beth Tompkins Bates and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. This move was a rejection of the notion that better jobs were for white men only. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford
Download or read book Sit down the General Motors Strike of 1936 1937 written by Sidney Fine and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1969 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies the most significant American labor conflict of the 20th century
Download or read book Organizing the Unemployed written by James J. Lorence and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1996-07-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on Michigan during the Great Depression, this book highlights the efforts of community organizers and activists in the United Automobile Workers (UAW) to mobilize the jobless for mass action. In doing so, it demonstrates the relationship between unemployed activism and the rise of industrial unionism. Moreover, by discussing Communist and Socialist initiatives on behalf of displaced workers, the book illuminates the impact of radicalism on social change and shows how political claims influenced the cultural discourse of the 1930s. The book not only helps fill a void in our knowledge of community activism, worker culture, and labor history in the 1930s but also sheds light on the New Deal's domestication of American labor and the channeling of mass protest toward politically and socially acceptable goals. The UAW acceptance of responsibility for the underclass of the 1930s raises pertinent questions for labor in the 1990s.
Download or read book Talking Union written by Judith Stepan-Norris and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Members of the United Auto Workers Ford Local 600 tell about their activism as they experienced it.
