Although automakers voiced optimism that the banner year of 1955 would become the norm, layoffs increased in early 1956, largely because nearly a million of the record number of vehicles produced had yet to be sold by dealers. As a result, auto companies scaled back production. SUB benefits, at the heart of the 1955 contract settlements, were of little help, because the programs were not fully funded and most unemployed autoworkers could not meet eligibility requirements. Instead they struggled, as always, to cobble together secondary support systems. Making matters worse, many laid-off autoworkers had gone into debt during flush times in 1955 and were now saddled with mortgages, rents, or installment payments without regular income. Although automation continued to affect overall employment, it played a less noticeable role given the vast unemployment caused by overproduction in 1955, the demise of more parts manufacturers, the loss of remaining Packard jobs, and the continued threat of decentralization of the industry away from Detroit. Throughout 1956 and 1957, Detroit floundered while the national economy thrived. More accurately, Detroit’s working-class residents suffered from unemployment as well as insecurity on the job caused by the ripple effects of layoffs. Wealthier Detroiters shared in the nation’s prosperity by shopping intensely at leading downtown department stores while many businesses in autoworkers’ neighborhoods faced bankruptcy. State, local, and UAW officials pleaded for help from the federal government, but none was forthcoming. Federal officials and automakers saw no need for government intervention and blamed autoworkers, with their high wages and generous fringe benefits, for their own predicament. In late 1957 economists declared an official recession, and the rest of the nation began to face what Detroit’s industrial workers had long experienced.
* * *
In early 1956 the warning signs of the previous year proved accurate, as production cutbacks and layoffs accelerated in Detroit’s auto plants. The first to be let go had been hired in the 1955 boom, followed by waves of those who had become autoworkers in the 1953 upturn. Ford’s Mercury Division cut 2,450 workers, including 700 at its Wayne plant. Among the newly jobless at that facility was Thomas Nowak, who had hired in during the 1955 boom after trying without success to be an autoworker throughout 1954. He had no idea if he would ever be recalled. Placing the layoffs in perspective, Mercury officials noted that after these cuts the division still had nearly 19,000 employees, 4 percent more than were on its payroll in January 1955.1 Many autoworkers who were not on layoff were affected as well by the return of short time, for example three- and four-day weeks at Ford, and random total shutdown days at Chrysler. GM president Harlow Curtice was quick to dismiss speculation that the industry was returning to the doldrums, insisting to banking and industrial elites that 1956 would be “another big year.” At least 7.5 million vehicles would be produced, he claimed, and there was “every indication that full employment will continue.” These were bold predictions, especially since over eight hundred thousand cars built in 1955 remained unsold.2
Other industry observers foresaw troubled times, largely because of the automakers’ success in 1955, when revamped styling made new cars alluring and cheap credit made them seem affordable. As an auto sales manager explained, “Lots of people bought new cars in 1955 when their economic condition dictated that they buy used cars. We’ll pay for that this year.” A Detroit survey showed, unsurprisingly, that if new cars were less expensive, more people would buy them. Yet autoworkers, among the best-paid industrial workers, were still only marginal candidates to purchase new cars, and according to automakers, UAW wages and benefits stood in the way of building more affordable vehicles and increasing sales. Poor quality, resulting from the rush to assemble as many cars as possible, also hindered efforts to reduce 1955 inventories. One unhappy dealer complained that the cars on his lot were like “do-it-yourself kits that I have to put together at my expense to keep the customer happy.”3 For a host of reasons, then, dealer inventories continued to rise to more than 900,000 cars. Carl Fribley, president of the National Automotive Dealers Association, remarked that the entire industry was suffering from a “severe and prolonged hangover” caused by its “king-size binge during 1955.” With so many unsold vehicles, automakers reduced operations, and in mid-March unemployment in Detroit reached 120,000. This represented 8 percent of the metro area’s total workforce—as usual, about double that if considering only manufacturing employees—and approached the recession levels of March 1954. Acknowledging the industry’s grim prospects, Chrysler Local 212 president Pat Caruso warned, “Some of our members, who had a good year in 1955, won’t work on this model or the one next year.”4
Significantly, none of the autoworkers laid off in late 1955 or early 1956 were eligible for the UAW’s new supplemental unemployment benefits. It took time to build up the SUB funds, and the earliest date for any benefit distribution was June 1, 1956, still months away. In addition, during the prosperity of mid-1955 the UAW and automakers agreed that to be eligible for SUB, workers had to be on company payrolls as of May 2, 1956, a month before payments could begin. With the downturn in the industry, tens of thousands of workers were laid off before May 2. Even in June the SUB accounts would be seriously underfunded, probably only a quarter of projected maximums. As things stood in early 1956, SUB funds would be able to help an unskilled autoworker with $7.18 a week for four weeks, on top of regular unemployment benefits, and $3.32 a week for the remainder of eligibility, which would be welcome but hardly significant assistance. There was also a good chance that if unemployment worsened, the funds would be exhausted within a month.5
Although there had been some modest upward revisions in regular state unemployment benefits over the years, for the most part those laid off in early 1956 faced the same circumstances that jobless autoworkers had confronted since World War II. Thousands lined up at Detroit’s MESC offices, welfare claims jumped, second jobs and odd jobs helped a bit, and many left the state to wait for recall notices. L. J. Scott, who had bought a new car during the 1955 boom, recalled that prosperity and steady work “didn’t last. It didn’t last.” Money was always tight for Dorothy Sackle, but the frequent post-1955 layoffs were especially difficult. “I remember when things were really rough,” she said. “I was working, and my boy said to me, ‘How come these people have oranges and we don’t?’” At one point Sackle sought assistance from the Detroit Welfare Department. “I had to cash in bottles to get twelve cents for the streetcars to take me downtown and tell them I needed help,” she remembered. She received minimal assistance and some useless advice. “They gave me six dollars,” she recalled, and told her, “‘You have to go to Friend of the Court.’” It was her ex-husband’s responsibility, they said, to support his children. The problem, though, Sackle emphasized, was that “he wasn’t very good at paying child support—at that time it was twenty-one dollars a month, for three kids.” Even that amount, if she had received it, would not have been enough to stave off a crisis.6
There were countless variations in circumstances, all made painful by lay-offs. Bascom Ely, forty-seven, had landed a job as an assembler at Chrysler’s Mack plant near the end of the 1953 boom, and he, his wife, and their four children, ages two to seventeen, had lived in a two-room, second-story flat. “My wife can’t climb stairs and I couldn’t afford the rent for most first-floor places,” he said. “One day, the baby fell out of bed and burned its neck on an exposed heating pipe. I knew then we had to get out.” With steady employment in 1955 and take-home pay of eighty-six dollars per week, Ely moved his family into a four-room apartment for ninety dollars a month. “I knew we couldn’t afford it,” he said, “but by scraping, I figured we could make it.” A week after settling in he received his layoff notice. Because he had also been laid off another time that year, he was eligible for only sixteen more weeks of state unemployment benefits and, of course, no SUB payments. A laid-off Chrysler employee identified as “R.E.H.,” twenty-six, provided another example of how autoworkers coped in these times. Like Ely, he had been hired at the tail end of the 1953 boom. During prosperous 1955 he had purchased a new car and a house, with payments of nearly eighty dollars a month due on each that together consumed half his wages. R.E.H. and his wife were expecting their first child when he was laid off in January 1956, and because of earlier periods of joblessness his unemployment compensation eligibility was about to expire. Fortunately, his wife found an office job, but it paid half as much as auto work. The couple cut back where they could, but they quickly depleted their two hundred dollars in savings and seventy-five dollars in war bonds. When not in the military, William Mazinkowski, forty-five, had worked for the Murray Corporation from 1933 to 1954. After the parts supplier closed, he had no job and his seniority was worthless. In his forties, he was on the outer edges of employability. Early in the 1955 boom, however, Mazinkowski landed a job at Dodge Main and worked steadily until he was laid off in February 1956. With little seniority, he gave up on waiting for a recall notice from Dodge and took a job at the Stroh Brewery, which lasted three months before he was laid off again. “No job in sight, no seniority anymore and funds running very low,” he described his situation.7
With their spending, people like Bascom Ely, R.E.H., and William Mazinkowski were largely responsible for Detroit’s prosperity in 1955, but now they were saddled with debt and anxiety. Many economically comfortable observers viewed them, and their enablers, as irresponsible. “How are we going to protect men (and women) of this type against themselves,” scolded columnist Sylvia Porter, “and thus protect our entire economy against their extravagant spending and borrowing?” Auto dealers, lenders, and retailers, she complained, did not seem willing to say no to any prospective customer. A Detroit labor journalist had predicted this type of moralizing seven months earlier, before the boom fizzled. Robert Perrin asked his fictional autoworker, the French immigrant “Pierre le Travailleur,” why he seemed glum when times were so good. “We factory workers, when we are in the money, are coaxed from all sides to buy the cars we build, television sets, disposal units—all on unlimited credit,” Pierre replied. “When times are bad and the bills come due, we are berated for not being like the petit squirrels and storing nuts in the hollow tree for the cold winter.”8
Another blow to Detroit employment came with the end of operations at the Motor Products Corporation. A longtime supplier of window moldings and ventilators for Ford and Chrysler, Motor Products was caught in the same squeeze that had claimed other parts makers. The buyers’ market for cars in 1956 forced automakers to cut production costs, including demanding price reductions from suppliers, making profitability impossible for companies like Motor Products. Employment at the company’s Mack plant had dropped considerably since the peak of the 1955 boom, and in 1956 the last thirty-eight hundred employees were let go.9 Detroiters saw warning signs as well when the Rheem Manufacturing Company announced that it would produce auto parts in California. While Michigan’s share of final auto assemblies hovered between 30 and 40 percent of the national total through the mid-1950s, California had risen to second place. Parts factories in Michigan and Ohio still supplied most assembly operations outside the Midwest, but shipping costs, especially to the West Coast, were increasingly expensive. It made sense, then, to relocate parts production. If the Rheem experiment proved successful, Detroit stood to lose a significant number of jobs.10
These developments led to soul-searching questions. “Can the area continue to depend upon the automobile industry as a major source of employment?” asked the Detroit Metropolitan Area Regional Planning Commission. “And will the industry continue to grow and expand its production facilities here? Will the automobile industry decentralize to such an extent that Detroit will suffer from its loss?” Journalist Charles Wartman worried that if decentralization trends continued, “Detroit ten years from now will no longer be the Motor Capital of the world.” Black autoworkers, he recognized, stood to suffer the most: “The Negro worker is going to be the first and hardest hit. Although considerable seniority has been built up by many of them, the overall effect will be against them.” Even when industries moved only as far as the Detroit suburbs, Wartman observed, black workers were “placed at a disadvantage. For the most part housing restrictions have made it extremely difficult if not impossible to move near their jobs. Commuting is both expensive and in winter hazardous. … The Negro worker may find himself forced to start over again to establish himself in the industry.”11
Another jolt of anxiety hit Detroit with the announcement that sixty-five hundred of the city’s remaining Packard workers would lose their jobs. Packard’s merger with Studebaker had not proved profitable, and the company was about to combine with the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, which focused mainly on military aircraft. This improved the employment prospects for workers at Packard’s defense-oriented Utica plant, but the company’s remaining Detroit auto production would be consolidated in Studebaker’s South Bend, Indiana, facilities. At its postwar peak, Packard had over thirty thousand workers in Detroit, but in mid-1956 only about eighty-five hundred were still on the job. On average, they were fifty-two years old with at least twenty years of seniority. “What can I do now?” wondered Charles Binning, sixty-five, who had put in forty years with the company. “Luckily, my wife and I live alone now. Our children are married and on their own, of course. But—is my pension still good? Can I retire now? Or, can I get another job somewhere?” Emil Wilde, fifty-eight, with thirty years of seniority, mulled over the situation faced by many of his coworkers: “We are old Packard families with deep roots here, we have no other place to go, most of us are too old to get other jobs—so tell me, please, what are we going to do?”12
With its economic woes, Detroit was an outlier during a year of national prosperity. Based on trends through the first six months, Fortune magazine predicted that 1956 would be the best year for business in U.S. history, with a few key exceptions, including the automotive industry. Nationally it was true that employment was up and unemployment was down. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, total manufacturing employment had increased by 150,000 during the first quarter of 1956, despite “reduced activity in the motor vehicle industry.” Also running counter to national trends, inflation in Detroit jumped .4 percent in March, four times higher than the national figure. Detroit prices continued to rise at nearly double the national rate in June—1.3 percent versus .7 percent. Food and medical costs appeared to be the major culprits, but the existence of relatively high inflation still confounded economists who expected to see declining prices in a region with high unemployment.13
Although the auto industry as a whole was underperforming, the experiences of individual carmakers varied. Despite Ford’s declines in production and employment, the company still reported its second-highest quarterly earnings ever in early 1956. In spring 1956 only 43,000 workers were on the job at the Rouge plant compared with 65,000 employees a year earlier, although only 3,085 people were on official layoff. GM’s sales to dealers were about the same as they had been in the record-setting first quarter of 1955, even if the company’s employment levels had dropped. Most severely affected was Pontiac Motor, where 4,500 out of the workforce of 14,000 were on indefinite layoff. Six thousand more were on short weeks. Chrysler was in the worst shape of the Big Three, with production down by 23 percent and profits down by nearly two-thirds over the comparable period in 1955. Roughly half of the 46,000 workers at Chrysler’s Dodge Main plant and in its Automotive Body Division (formerly Briggs) facilities were on layoff.14
Auto industry woes became a serious state issue, if not a major concern for the federal government. In May, Michigan governor G. Mennen Williams asked President Eisenhower to declare Detroit a critical unemployment area, giving the metropolitan region an advantage in bidding for defense contracts. The government obliged, but no jobs followed. Instead, administration officials rubbed salt in Detroit’s wounds. Referring to high unemployment in the auto industry, White House aide Howard Pyle coldly remarked to reporters, “The right to suffer is one of the joys of a free economy, just as the right to prosper is.” Walter Reuther retorted, “Laid-off workers in Michigan and elsewhere would be far more impressed by concrete action on the part of your administration to get them back to work than the sending of court jesters to tell them that suffering is really a joy.”15 Treasury Secretary George Humphrey sparked further outrage that summer when he called the auto industry’s doldrums a “refreshing pause,” at a time when monthly auto output was equal to the weekly production of a year earlier and when Ford announced that its model changeover period would last for nearly seven weeks, with prolonged layoffs for all seventy thousand of its Detroit-area workers.16
Many would-be autoworkers considered alternatives. Elwin Brown remembered that he “thought about being a policeman” or finding “some job in government” because it would be more stable. James McGuire thought he had put auto work behind him. After being laid off from both of his UAW jobs in 1956, he found a maintenance position at the University of Michigan’s Lawyers Club. At one point McGuire received employment recall notices from both GM and Ford, but he “quit them both.” The varied duties and his level of responsibility at the Lawyers Club appealed to him more. Besides, maintenance was steady work. “I was enjoying myself,” he recalled. While once again spending much of his time on layoff in West Virginia, Emerald Neal remained hopeful that he would return to full-time work at Ford. But others might have moved on with their lives. Ford officials reported that they “had to call an average of two people” to fill openings from attrition. “About half of those called did not respond.” No one could tell if the nonresponders had given up on auto work.17
Confusion was also evident in assessments of the impact of layoffs on local commerce. If joblessness caused such serious problems, it seemed that the proof should come in reduced levels of business activity and increased numbers of struggling store owners. “Instead we have a situation where business seems to be good as a rule,” observed one civic leader. “I have yet to meet up with many businessmen who are pessimistic or not confident in the future.” Milton Spencer, a marketing professor, conceded that mass unemployment amid solid business activity was “one of the great paradoxes of our time.” Detroit’s Retail Merchants Association reported that during the first four months of 1956, total sales at the city’s major downtown department stores, such as Hudson’s and Kern’s, were nearly 10 percent above comparable 1955 figures and that these stores were a “fairly accurate barometer” of overall commercial activity in the city. Such observations, however, did not take into account working-class neighborhoods. White-collar workers were on salary and were much more likely to shop at the thriving downtown department stores. Autoworkers rarely shopped at Hudson’s and Kern’s, and businesses in blue-collar neighborhoods experienced huge declines in sales from the 1955 boom. Furniture store manager Morris Kane, whose shop was near a Chrysler plant, reported a drop-off of 50 percent. “When people don’t have money,” he said, “they don’t buy, even at bargain rates.” Antoinette Bruguglio’s bakery was also hit hard. “I figured pastry sales would drop,” she said, “but they’re even buying less bread.” Appliance salesman James Affhalter pointed out that “it only takes one or two sales a week to mean the difference between profit and loss.” He was closely attuned to each prediction about employment levels in Detroit factories. So were bar owners, whose traffic picked up immediately when workers were recalled or went from short weeks to full-time. “The blight of empty store fronts in neighborhood shopping centers has spread throughout the city,” declared one report. “Any conservative estimate of the total number of unused stores in Detroit would run in the thousands.”18
There were conflicting indicators as well in the fall. On a positive note, nearly 20,000 Detroit-area autoworkers returned to their jobs when Ford and Chrysler completed their model changeovers. Ford reported that most of its recalled workers, more than 12,000 of them, had been laid off for nearly ten months. In Pontiac, 5,900 GM workers with seniority returned and 230 new employees were hired.19 The good news was tempered by the impact of decentralization. Although Ford still employed about 70,000 in the metro Detroit area, it now had about an equal number of hourly workers in its plants outside the region. In addition, auto production totals were still 20 percent below the automakers’ original projections for the period. More jobs, then, were available, but nowhere near enough to absorb the large numbers of unemployed Detroiters—or autoworkers anywhere in the nation. The U.S. Department of Labor reported in mid-October that employment levels in the auto industry had been “one of the chief exceptions to an otherwise generally abundant job situation.” Despite these troubles, 1956 maintained its status as the third-best year in automotive history. To be sure, the figure was padded by more than eight hundred thousand vehicles left over from 1955, but increasing fall output and aggregate sales numbers demonstrated that 1956 was a good year for automakers. Still, Ford’s production was down about a quarter from 1955, and Chrysler’s decreased by 34 percent. Even GM’s best-selling division, Chevrolet, reported an 11 percent decline from 1955, while the midsize Pontiac brand took perhaps the largest hit of all, a 43 percent reduction.20
The annual figures received boosts from ramped-up production in the fall, which provoked new workload disputes, something that surprised outsiders given the recent history of bleak employment in auto plants. But wildcat strikes occurred whenever factories operated. Earlier in the year most such strikes had occurred in response to speedups intended to maximize efficiency and reduce labor costs during a serious sales slump.21 In the fall most of them occurred because of speedups motivated by the chance to sell more cars in a suddenly expanding market. One such conflict at Chrysler’s Nine Mile press plant revolved around unfair promotions to the “gas welding” classification and ultimately resulted in the shutdown of nearly half the company’s Detroit operations. The strike ended quickly, according to Local 869 president Earl Walters, because of pressure from Chrysler workers outside the affected department. After months of missed paychecks, many autoworkers had little patience with the problems faced by others. “We thought 1954 was rough but this year we are finding out what rough really is,” remarked an autoworker’s wife in December. Counting on that frustration, Chrysler management criticized the wildcatters for “jeopardizing the welfare of other Chrysler employes and the entire economic community.”22
Those who clung to auto jobs often experienced instability from frequent moves to new positions. Layoffs prompted rounds of “bumping,” in which higher-seniority workers claimed the jobs of those lower in rank, often in departments from which the longer-term employees had once escaped. “I went to every plant there was,” Margaret Beaudry remembered, “because they go according to seniority.” At first she was moved to Pontiac Motor’s Plant 7, operating small presses to make parts. She was amazed at the intricacy of the process. A piece of metal entered a line and was passed from press to press, each one refining the shape as it gradually became the desired part. Beaudry helped produce headlights, control arms, flywheels, and much else. Despite the massive pieces of equipment in the room, she recalled, the work itself “wasn’t heavy” and was probably easier than what her previous position entailed. But operating small presses was dangerous. “You could get your fingers taken off,” she said. “If you followed safety rules, you wouldn’t have to worry, but there was several people that lost their hands, and if a new woman came in she got the hardest job every time.” Before long Beaudry was sent to Plant 9 to install spark plugs on a circular line called the “merry-go-round.” “I didn’t have no say about where they put me,” she recalled. “I was just lucky I had a job. And the union didn’t have anything to say about it, either. The only time a union rep could do anything about what job you got would be if it was a hindrance to your health, like maybe the fumes or something.” Beaudry’s low seniority caught up with her during another round of layoffs in late 1956. Thanks to her sister she got a job in the bookkeeping department at Community National Bank. Along with occasional shifts at Neisner’s, that helped Beaudry get by, although she worried that her layoff might last so long that she would have to hire in from scratch at Pontiac Motor. Edith Arnold also experienced frequent transfers. “They shoved me around thinking that I would quit,” she recalled. “I worked in every plant except the foundry. I was glad afterwards,” she insisted, but “I didn’t like it at first.” There was a silver lining to Katie Neumann’s transfer out of the Pontiac Motor foundry because of low seniority. Although her last job there—documenting the amount of scrap metal produced—was pretty good, tragedies in the department haunted her. She recalled a time when a coworker “had his fingers cut off. They wanted me to get that glove with the fingers in there, and I wouldn’t do it.” Another time, she remembered, when a repairman was working on a large machine, “somebody pushed a button, and the guy got smashed in it. And that was it. I was there that day, but I wouldn’t go to see it. That was one of the worst ones that I can remember.” In addition, she said, during these tough times there was a movement by some men to rid the foundry of women, or at least to send Neumann back to the tougher job of handling sand and molten metal. Layoffs and bumping forced the issue, and Neumann ended up at the gun plant, never missing an opportunity to tell her coworkers that “everybody should take and work in the foundry. They’d appreciate their job now.”
In the midst of these 1956 cutbacks, Don Hester staved off a demotion to the assembly line by successfully challenging the seniority of a fellow worker who was initially allowed to stay on vehicle repair, what Hester considered a “cush” job fixing minor problems that occurred during assembly. Bud Weber had been assigned to military work, on production of the “Otter,” an amphibious cargo carrier used by the U.S. Marine Corps, but when orders tapered off, he recalled, “They shipped me to the rocket job. I was just like an extra. Like a pinch hitter or something. They didn’t lay me off. They just moved me around.” He was afraid to refuse any transfers, assuming that management would respond, “Well, then, get the hell out of here!” The constant shuffling of jobs in this era affected Tom Agorgianitis’s home life. He had a son with serious health problems and liked to take over for his wife, Angie, when he came home from work. Continuous bumping often resulted in his having to change shifts for lack of seniority. If he worked second shift, he explained, “I’d be heading to work and the kids are there. Get back and they’re in bed. And the work falls all on the wife.” Still, he said, “the worst one that almost did me in was the third shift. You get that extra money,” he noted, referring to the modest increase in pay for working nights, “but to me it wasn’t worth it.” Job instability and insecurity marked the era then, although not always with layoffs.23
Even those who remained fully employed during this period had a difficult time making ends meet. Elwin Brown recalled that his family had no financial reserves. He and his wife “lived from paycheck to paycheck,” he recalled, despite being frugal. “I wondered if I was going to have enough gas to make it to payday.” Even with fairly steady work, Les Coleman remembered, “It was really kind of rough. Skilled tradesmen, they’re making more, but what can I say? I don’t recall ever having a lot of money. I didn’t buy any extras or anything. All my money went for clothes for the kids, school, things like that. It was quite a few years before I started living fairly comfortably. Probably in the ’70s.” Years later Ernie Liles insisted that things were not that bad. Still, during some layoffs his family traveled to the west side of Michigan to pick fruit, only to find that they “couldn’t ever make no money berry picking.” Other times they went back to Arkansas: “Sometimes we’d even go down there and pick a little bit of cotton.”24
In an unexpected twist, layoffs at Detroit auto plants became entwined with Cold War developments. B. B. James, a marine who fought at Iwo Jima in World War II, had hired in at Chrysler’s Mack plant in June 1951 and had survived the peaks and valleys of Chrysler operations since then, but was laid off in March 1956. James had used up his twenty-six weeks of state unemployment benefits by October. Because he was laid off before May 2, he had never qualified for SUB payments. There was little chance he would be called back to Chrysler, because his most recent job, building seat cushions in the trim department, had been moved to a different factory where his seniority was useless. His secondary support system for himself, his wife, and their two children included odd jobs and increased bitterness when he learned that five hundred Cold War refugees from the recent Hungarian uprising had been guaranteed employment upon arrival in the United States. It turns out that only a handful of those positions were in auto plants, but James would have taken just about any job by the end of November, and as a veteran he considered himself as worthy of assistance as any newly arriving Hungarian.25
The tens of thousands of disgruntled, unemployed autoworkers had their critics. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” one woman insisted. Her husband, she pointed out, had “held four jobs in the past 15 years.” Another local citizen was more sarcastic, recommending that “these ‘starvers’” look in the want ads. “In this section I found, in last Wednesday’s paper, at least 200 jobs offered to men, women, elderly couples, high school students, etc. As a man who has changed jobs several times in the last couple of years (twice the factory moved), I used that section several times. Sometimes I tried for weeks, but I finally got a job.” Assessing this flurry of letters, another Detroiter commented that the hostility expressed was “significant chiefly because it reflects the insecurity felt by American workers, even at a time of prosperity.” Indeed, two hundred jobs would hardly have made a dent in the ranks of the unemployed in Detroit.26
Those most likely to be jobless were African American, young, old, female, formerly employed by defunct parts suppliers, with low seniority, displaced by automation, or left behind by decentralization. In short, just about everybody was vulnerable. Even highly qualified job seekers had difficulties getting hired. “I can tell you why a young man of 19 with training in the mechanics trade can’t find a job,” explained Kenneth Filary. “No experience. All want ads call for experienced men, and how do you get experience if they won’t hire you? What good is it to go to trade school?” Many younger workers were frustrated with seniority systems that prevented them from gaining a foothold in the auto industry, and a number of laid-off older workers complained that the UAW did little to help them get back on their feet. Some even believed that the UAW, not automakers, laid off workers. UAW public relations director Frank Winn addressed criticisms from older union members, pointing out that significant union gains, such as seniority, transfer rights, health insurance, pensions, SUB pay, and vacations, benefited them most. Nearly half of all UAW members, he noted, were over forty years old and could not be ignored.27 But only the luckiest of younger UAW members, and few of those who were older but recently hired, were able to stay on the job long enough to enjoy any sort of security from these contract provisions. As always, unemployed Detroiters were left to scrounge for odd jobs or positions that paid, at most, half of what they had made when they worked in auto plants. Instability and insecurity continued to dominate the lives of autoworkers in the third most successful year in the industry’s history.
* * *
Business observers and autoworkers worried that 1957 could be a replay of 1956, when the national economy had boomed to record levels while at the same time certain sectors, like automobiles, experienced recession-like conditions. Indeed, according to the MESC, average auto industry employment in Michigan during 1956 dropped to about four hundred thousand, the lowest total in ten years and one hundred thousand fewer than in 1953. The situation seemed paradoxical. As John Stewart of the Detroit Board of Commerce said, “With national income and purchasing power throughout the United States rising faster in 1956 than in 1955, there appears to be no economic justification for either a rise as great as the 39 per cent recorded in 1955 or the 25 per cent drop in car and truck output in 1956.” While “all signs point to an upward trend in business and industrial activity in the Detroit area,” he noted, there were no guarantees given the counterintuitive relationship between economic indicators and the health of the auto industry. Although the board of commerce’s official position was that Walter Reuther and the UAW were the equivalent to, and maybe part of, a Soviet conspiracy to undermine the United States, Stewart did point out that “an even distribution of car and truck production over the 1955–56 period would have given each year record high output, with a steady high level of factory employment in the Detroit area.” This, of course, had been the premise behind the union’s guaranteed annual wage. In the real world, however, employment levels had been anything but high and steady.28
Chrysler was especially eager to rebound after a disastrous 1956. To that end, the company engaged in a wholesale reengineering of its plants and a reconfiguration of jobs within them, which included the elimination of 20,000 positions. Rumors of such a massive cut had been widespread among Chrysler’s workers, but with so many of them laid off in 1956 it had been impossible to count how many jobs were gone for good. It was clear in early 1957, though, that the cuts were real, and with so much disruption, conflicts were bound to arise. At the DeSoto Warren and Wyoming facilities, local union officials reported that they had “3,000 people with up to five years [seniority] still laid off,” while the 5,400 workers on the job were “putting in nine-hour days.”29 It did not seem fair that some worked overtime while others were still jobless. Adding to insecurities, no Chrysler employees received word that their positions were among the 20,000 eliminated. Instead, laid-off workers waited, often in vain, for recall notices. Although most workers on the job willingly or grudgingly accepted their revised assignments, a sizable number engaged in wildcat strikes. Indeed, top union leaders reported that “there are more strikes pending over production standards in Chrysler Corp. plants than in the rest of the UAW combined.” In one example, Dodge Main trim department employees on the first shift walked out but received no support from national leadership. UAW vice president Norman Matthews acknowledged the justice of the trim department workers’ complaint, but he denied authorization for a legitimate strike because more than 22,500 people would be laid off within a day if it continued. Most UAW members still suffered from the hardships of 1956, and many were upset with any missed paychecks, even if those in other departments or plants had been treated unfairly. Few Chrysler workers in 1957 had ever experienced stable employment, and a large and increasing number of them had low seniority and no long-term connection with the UAW. Behind with their bills, many of them were not interested in hearing lectures about the union movement of the 1930s or the importance of maintaining solidarity with workers across town.30
Inflation had much to do with workers’ reluctance to embrace calls for solidarity that meant sacrificing wages. As Leo Orsage of Local 600 remarked, “You can’t win because prices outrun wages every time.” Orsage did not oppose wage increases; instead he wanted the federal government to “curb this menace” by controlling prices, as it had during World War II. “We auto workers are reduced to a treadmill existence,” he said. “Many find it hard to keep body and soul together. Some hold two jobs. Quite a few have to send their wives to work to help support the family. Children start working before they finish school.” Twenty-eight-year-old Stanley Vasko also focused on his family and his budget. In 1954 Vasko bought a small house in a new working-class development in East Detroit. A GI loan provided the down payment, and savings went toward secondhand furniture, a refrigerator and stove, windows, interior painting, and landscaping. All of this seemed affordable during the 1955 boom, but in 1956 Vasko was laid off for a total of five and a half months, and unemployment compensation was the family’s main source of income. “You can’t call it a living,” Vasko said. “You just stay home and spend as little money as possible.” Vasko had steady work in early 1957, but it would have to continue for many months, perhaps years, before he could overcome his debt and inflated prices to get ahead.31
Consumers like Leo Orsage and Stanley Vasko were expected to propel the next auto boom. America’s “new middle class,” according to Columbia University marketing professor Ralph Alexander, consisted of those making from $4,500 to $15,000 a year, an increasing number of whom, he said, were “semi-skilled and unskilled workers.” They would not be looking for luxury models, Alexander reported to the National Association of Automobile Dealers. “They are just removed from the lower-income class and therefore are less used to finer things. They are less impressed by elaborate-looking automobiles and they have no false pride about where they buy their cars.”32 Alexander’s data seemed convincing. By calculating annual earnings from hourly wage data, one could indeed place a large number of autoworkers in the “new middle class.” But this arithmetic exercise bore little resemblance to reality. If Stanley Vasko earned his $2.32 hourly wage forty hours a week throughout the year, without interruptions, he would barely creep over Alexander’s $4,500 middle-class threshold. Five and a half months of missed paychecks in a year obviously affected that equation. Inflation, as described by Leo Orsage, also had a negative impact on working-class purchasing power. And the twenty thousand workers permanently laid off by Chrysler were obviously unlikely candidates to buy a new car. If blue-collar workers purchased new cars, or in many cases even used ones, they risked repossession of their vehicles and poverty for their families. Miriam Hewlett, a Detroit recorder’s court official, saw about five thousand such cases a month. “These families get so far in debt they don’t know where to turn,” she explained, “and when it gets to be too much for the husband, he walks out. … I wish Dr. Salk would invent a vaccine for this car craze.” Easy credit, she insisted, “has to be stopped somehow.” Yet easy credit was the only way that those on the lowest rungs of the new middle class—indeed, those throughout most of the middle class—could seriously contemplate purchasing a car. “We are supposed to be living in an age of prosperity,” observed Circuit Court Commissioner William Krueger, “but it isn’t reflected in court.”33
Although automakers tried their best to emphasize only positive news, they ultimately conceded that conditions were dire. As GM president Harlow Curtice admitted to shareholders, “For the second successive year, the historical spring rise in sales has failed to materialize.” Industry publicists offered the hopeful theory that the spring selling season would arrive in the fall. For all of its hoopla about its revamped factories, Chrysler had barely kept pace with its 1956 production numbers, in part because of the poor quality of its products. Ford tried recruiting potential purchasers with a “motorized circus,” which performed in stadiums across the country, while company vice president Walker Williams lamented that the industry’s “greatest problem is distribution—the sale of what we can so easily produce.” Statistics bore out that analysis. Total auto output for the first six months of 1957 was the second highest ever for that period, trailing only 1955, yet nearly eight hundred thousand unsold vehicles still sat on dealers’ lots.34 No matter what happened in the near future, long-term industrial employment trends in Detroit indicated decline. According to MESC data, the number of manufacturing jobs in Michigan had peaked in 1953 at 1,266,000. Just over half a million of those were in the auto industry, with anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 of them held by recent migrants to Michigan. In 1957 Michigan’s total manufacturing workforce was actually smaller (1,075,000) than it had been during the 1954 recession (1,088,000). Between 1953 and 1957, total employment in Michigan’s auto industry shrank by 153,000, to around 400,000. Whereas in 1953 there had been slightly more manufacturing than service-sector jobs in Michigan (1,266,000 to 1,215,000), the order quickly reversed, and by 1957 industry overall employed 200,000 fewer people. Of course these snapshots did not capture the complexity of employment in Detroit—there had been plenty of peaks and valleys in those four years—but they supported the conclusion that opportunities in the auto industry were diminishing in the mid-1950s.35
The last five thousand autoworkers to lose their jobs at Packard—on average over fifty years old with twenty-five years of seniority—had immense difficulty finding manufacturing employment and looked for alternatives. Thaddeus Slubowski took out loans to start his own delicatessen after spending more than twenty years with the company. He was proud, but nervous, about taking this leap. Almost all of the one thousand women who left Packard headed to the service sector for the types of positions—clerical, sales, waitressing, and so forth—traditionally reserved for them. Walter Lumpkin, who had twenty-eight years of seniority, began selling food door-to-door and hoped for steadier income as a janitor. Louis Rokoczy found a job delivering mail. As a skilled worker Rokoczy had earned an hourly wage much higher than what the post office offered, but he found that carrying the mail was more consistent and less stressful work. No longer affected by sporadic layoffs, his annual income as a mail carrier approximated what he had earned at Packard, and his wife, Gertrude, made up the difference with a job at a bakery. Many unemployed autoworkers, however, were too old to be considered for new jobs. The unstated rule seemed to be that women over thirty-five and men over forty-five had only a small chance of being hired. “If they get interested, they ask your age,” explained a former Packard assembly-line worker. “They’re polite enough after that. They just tell you that there is nothing doing today.”36
Automakers blamed high wages for the industry’s woes. Ford vice president T. O. Yntema argued that more consumers would be in the market for new automobiles if not for persistent wage inflation, caused by union contracts, which he termed “Public Enemy No. 1.” The UAW, he declared, “threatens operation of the free market system.” American Motors Corporation president George Romney echoed this view. “The excess power of unionism,” he complained, “has accelerated wage increases to the point where they now exceed the ability of American industry to meet them through increased efficiency.” This, he said, was America’s “number one problem.” If only autoworkers earned less, the argument went, more people could afford to purchase new cars. That line of reasoning had merit. Most Americans were indeed hit hard by inflation and were saddled with debt on installment purchases, mainly for furniture, appliances, and new or used automobiles, not to mention homes. The result, as a study by the National Thrift Committee and the insurance industry showed, was that the “average American family” was “90 days from disaster.” Lowering inflation might help, the report suggested, but it might not be enough. “Many families have little or no reserve in the form of savings, to tide themselves over an emergency that suddenly cuts off current earnings,” reported one of the researchers. This caused “marital strains between husbands and wives, plus anxiety and tension among children,” not the confidence in the future necessary to boost new car sales.37
The expense of operating an automobile also dissuaded many Americans from purchasing new ones. The editors of Changing Times magazine calculated the annual cost of owning and operating a new car, assuming five thousand miles of travel, to be $575. They concluded that “only an above-average income family can drive its car 10,000 miles annually without seriously lowering its standard of living,” and warned that anyone who earned only $5,000 a year—the outer reaches of income for a fully employed autoworker—should stay out of the new car market. Any upswing in sales, then, would have to come from middle-class professionals, a growing but still relatively narrow slice of the American population, who earned considerably more than these so-called blue-collar elites.38
If confidence in the future indeed had anything to do with salvaging the auto industry, it took a blow in November when the United States was officially declared to be in a recession. Unsurprisingly, given that news, business boosters were apoplectic when Walter Reuther declared that the UAW would push for sizable wage increases in 1958 negotiations with the Big Three. Raises were necessary, Reuther argued, to boost purchasing power “and restore needed economic growth.” Autoworkers, he said, should have increased earnings with shorter work weeks to allow more people to have jobs. “We don’t lack capacity in the auto industry,” he noted. “We lack customers.” In response, National Association of Manufacturers president Milton Lightner insisted that union gains since World War II had wrecked the economy. To Lightner, it took a lot of gall for Reuther to deny this reality and “justify demands for still higher wages and fringe benefits” while claiming that the union had “only the interests of the nation at heart.” The UAW, in turn, blamed auto companies for the high cost of new cars, charging that automakers had led a “campaign to raise prices to swell massive profits,” a practice that remained “unchanged in the face of mounting unemployment and declining purchasing power.” The union claimed that GM set its prices for 1958 models to ensure healthy profits even if the company operated only 180 days during the calendar year.39
The positions were strident because auto production was slowing and economic forecasts remained ominous—seventy thousand autoworkers, including fifty thousand at Chrysler, received layoff notices the week before Christmas. “Normally we hand out about 1,200 checks daily,” commented Herbert Rosenbloom, assistant manager of the MESC’s Schaefer-Schoolcraft office, in mid-December, “but we are getting many more people in this week because of big auto layoffs.” Neighborhoods surrounding MESC branches were overrun with parked cars blocking driveways, preventing customers from shopping at local businesses, and trapping delivery vehicles. “The only real solution,” sighed an MESC spokesman, “and it’s an impossible one—is full employment.”40
Automakers and boosters emphasized that, despite everything, 1957 was the fourth-best year for production and the fourth time that the industry had produced more than six million cars. Ford highlighted its first victory over Chevrolet in their annual competition. Chrysler trumpeted its 20 percent market share for the year along with record sales and earnings six times greater than they had been in 1956. Free Press editors claimed that total auto industry output for 1957 did “not exactly support” any “sour picture of the Country descending into the economic doldrums.” Maybe official statistics showed that there was a recession, the editors conceded, “but it still takes a vigorous economy to support that kind of motor car production.”41
Throughout 1957, conditions in Detroit continued to run counter to national trends, especially for autoworkers. Despite a national recession that began in the last quarter of the year, on the basis of gross national product, total employment, and overall industrial production, 1957 outpaced 1956 to become America’s newest “best year ever.” Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks declared in late December that “no new year ever started with the economy on such a high plateau as today.” In contrast, according to the MESC, Detroit experienced “continuing serious unemployment, high payment of jobless benefits and concurrent reduction of manufacturing employment to the lowest point since 1949.” To the extent such things could be determined in the midst of wild daily, weekly, and monthly fluctuations, the MESC calculated that average auto industry employment in 1957 was 395,000, well below the peak of 503,000 two years earlier.42 In effect, autoworkers in Detroit had been in their own regional recession since 1955.