Labor's Time: Shorter Hours, The Uaw, And The

by Jonathan Cutler

The movement for a shorter workweek was once the defining feature of the labor movement in the United States, but that movement was largely displaced by the new corporatist structure of organized labor in the post-New Deal era. Labor's Time examines the structural transformation of organized labor and traces its influence on the decline of the shorter hours movement. Focusing on the internal union politics of the influential United Automobile Workers and Local 600, its local union at Henry Ford's massive River Rouge factory, Jonathan Cutler demonstrates how an all-but forgotten, interracial movement for a shorter workweek during the 1950s and 1960s became a casualty of an increasingly top-heavy union bureaucracy that lost touch with the desires, fears, and aspirations of rank and file workers and dug its own grave in the process. movement emerged within Local 600 in the 1940s. He then chronicles the attempts by Walter Reuther, the head of the UAW, to suppress the demand for thirty hours' work and forty hours pay within the union. Cutler also considers the role of the Communist Party in relation to Reuther and the demand for shorter hours and larger pay. Lastly, Cutler documents and examines the ways in which the UAW was forced to respond to rank and file pressure for a shorter work week, and how the complexities of the local's own organization allowed Reuther and the national union to wrest control away from the dissidents demanding that the shorter work week remain the central platform of union activity. Fresh and boldly written, Labor's Time offers a new history of labor, and recreates the moment when unions - as a movement, not as an amalgam of leaders - could have transformed the landscape of work in the US.

Genres: Labor, History

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cutler looks at the late history of the movement for a shorter work week, the 30 hour for 40 hours of pay (30-40) demand amongst militant rank and file workers in the UAW at the height of its power in the 1940s-50s. He argues that while the Reuther vs the Communist factions has taken much of the history of the UAW, there is a deeper question of philosophies between Reuther and leftist militants: corporatism vs syndicalism. Reuther's social democratic leanings embraced corporatism, with its emphasis on labor-management harmony when possible and mediation and bargaining when necessary. Syndicalism of the rank and file militants (who slowly drifted from the CP as it became less relevant) sought worker control over not only their workplace (decision making, election of managers) but also over their lives through more leisure time without loss of pay. 30-40 demand was enormously popular with auto workers and UAW membership, yet it was only used as a motto by Reuther to position himself to the left of the CP on his rise to power, only to abandon and red-bait its proponents endlessly. Much of the story is Reuther's battles after he came to power with the 30-40 syndicalists during the 50s.

Cutler focuses on the battles of Local 600, at the River Rouge Ford plant which at its height in WW2 had 85,000 members. It was also the sight of a large African-American membership who became militantly in favor of 30-40 along with an alliance of white ethnic workers, which briefly had the makings of a multiracial movement in Detroit. Reuther tried to suppress the movement by seizing Local 600, but the workers only re-elected those officials. Any union officials of Local 600 in order to stay in power had to advocate for 30-40, particularly amongst black workers, who saw 30 hour work week as helping solve unemployment and issues of racial structures of seniority (white workers tended to have seniority while black workers would be the first laid off during recessions.) Particularly, 30-40ers argued it would not only give workers more leisure time but it would help alleviate unequal racial structures and poverty. Reuther attacked its proponents as Communists trying to disrupt the economy even if he supported it in the long run, and that it was unrealistic. He briefly finally embraced it before the 1958 convention before abandoning it for an unpopular profit-sharing proposal. However, Local 600's power in the UAW gradually crumbled as the Ford company moved production to other plants and introduced automation, so by 1961 the number of workers at River Rouge was at 28,000.

This well argued book looks at the possibilities if the UAW under any of its leaders had pushed for a 30 hour work week, as today Americans work more than any other people in rich countries. Cutler argued by 1958, the UAW had stopped pushing the Big 3 auto makers and worked on maintaining labor peace or defending gains of retirees (or pushing for early retirement instead of shorter hours for active workers), which set the stage for the capitol offensive against labor beginning in the 1970s and expanding into a broad attack in the 1980s which labor crumbled against. Surprisingly, as Reuther had abandoned 30-40, it was actually Meany, the old racist craft-unionist plumber who ruled the AFL-CIO with an iron fist and of which Reuther was supposed to be the progressive alternative to, who pushed 30-40 in the 1960s. Sadly, as labor struggled to fight back against attacks by business, the demand for a shorter workweek by big labor disappeared. This book is what could have been.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really smashes the notion that labor was quiescent in the late 1940s/early 1950s. I had no idea that a 30/40 movement (30 hours work for 40 hours pay) raged in the UAW well until the end of the the 1950s. It was a key issue, if not THE key issue, that riled up opposition to Reuther. It's important because this was a labor/class solution to solving poverty (less hours worked at same pay created more jobs) as opposed to the liberal technical fixes of the later War on Poverty which tried to train people for jobs which did not exist. Reuther's role as the head of labor-corporatism really shines through in this book: he strongly opposed the 30/40 demand and maneuvered to stall and suppress rank and file support for it which rolled on for at least a decade. I was asking myself: why was he so opposed to this? The answer, I think, is because he really did believe it was bad for American capitalism (hence his corporatism-- something Cutler points out when he explains his approach in the first chapter). Anyways, really awesome book for understanding internal union politics, how anticommunism was used to break opposition, the tension between ran and file demands and the imperatives of the labor bureaucrats, and the broader tensions within the labor movement over labor's role and interests. Very fun to read to-- written like a novel after you get past the first chapter. Important, too: labor needs to come up with substantive solutions to our most pressing problems (environment, public health, joblessness, etc.) that go beyond surface-levels and bind together multiple issues into an agenda that makes intuitive and rational sense to the working class. Who else will do it? Who else has the social and economic power to?