In 1958 conditions in Detroit’s auto industry went from bad to worse. Unemployment reached staggeringly high levels, often over 15 percent, easily double the national rate. Rampant inflation intensified the problem. Well over 250,000 Detroiters were without work most of the year, and when the Big Three shut down for three months, more than 300,000 were jobless. Conditions were far different from those of 1955, when the UAW and automakers had signed their current contracts amid a production and employment boom. Those agreements were set to expire midyear, but in 1958 the union had no leverage to push for any proposals to combat joblessness. Automakers and autoworkers did agree that conditions in Detroit were dismal, and it was obvious that the prolonged loss of autoworkers’ income had serious ripple effects throughout the region’s economy. Secondary support networks were more important than ever for laid-off autoworkers, thousands of whom left the city. Detroit became a prime destination for investigative journalists, who tried to make sense of the economic devastation they observed. Still, some business leaders thought that autoworkers, benefiting from lavish UAW contracts, had it too good. Desperate times also brought a resurgence of scapegoating, particularly targeting married women with auto jobs. Since the UAW saw no point in striking—most of their members were out of work anyway—the Big Three let their union contracts expire, and walkouts followed in many auto plants as workers and managers sparred without any formal rules. In any event, contract settlements did not bring peace. Skilled workers were especially upset, as two-thirds of them were laid off by late 1958, and all of them felt disrespected by wage compression that had devalued their apprenticeships. There were no easy solutions to the crisis, and industry forecasts pointed to a grim future.
The national recession hit Detroit especially hard. The New Year began with over 120,000 jobless Detroiters, and Democratic congressman John Dingell, who represented a large section of the city, reported that unemployment was “the overwhelming concern” of his constituents. State unemployment funds for over six thousand Michigan companies were already overdrawn, and automakers planned massive new layoffs. By February, Detroit unemployment approached 200,000. As one national journalist noted, unlike in 1954, the auto industry was not poised to help the nation emerge from the current recession, which was “discouraging not only for Detroit but for the whole economy.”1 Nearly 10 percent of the city’s stores and offices went out of business. “It appears that our commercial fabric is falling apart,” lamented the city’s planning director, Charles Blessing, responding to a report that bankruptcies and blight wracked downtown Detroit and had “taken hold in almost every other section” of the city. “I can’t remember the last time I had a decent day’s intake here,” lamented Jack Haddad, who owned a supply store for factory workers on the city’s east side. “And I’ve been here a long time.” Haddad counted eighty-eight vacant storefronts in the few blocks north of his business. The recession also nearly bankrupted the UAW, which ran a deficit of over four hundred thousand dollars for lack of dues from unemployed members, who numbered 450,000 nationwide by mid-April.2
The industry’s instability affected how UAW officials approached 1958 contract negotiations. With unemployment rising rapidly, union leaders backtracked on their 1955 promise to push for the four-day workweek. Given automakers’ resistance to that demand, insisting on it would likely lead to strikes, and with poor market conditions any of the Big Three would probably be willing to hold out for a long time, during which UAW members would be ineligible for unemployment benefits. UAW leaders also still feared a public backlash against the notion of autoworkers being paid for the equivalent of forty hours while working far less, especially after the Soviet Union’s successful launch in 1957 of the Sputnik satellite, which prompted calls for all-out American effort to regain the upper hand in the Cold War. Nevertheless, the Rouge plant’s Carl Stellato and Dodge Main’s Pat Quinn remained strong supporters of the shortened workweek, in large part because their gigantic plants had been extremely hard hit by layoffs, and their memberships, with little to lose, were open to drastic measures.3
In this context, Walter Reuther proposed a system under which an automaker’s profits, before taxes, would be divided as follows: 50 percent for the company, 25 percent for hourly and salaried workers, and 25 percent for customers as rebates. Along with a substantial wage increase, Reuther argued, the profit-sharing program would boost purchasing power and lower the net cost of automobiles for consumers. The UAW leader also insisted on the necessity of both increasing SUB pay to reach 80 percent of gross income instead of 65 percent of take-home pay, and extending eligibility to fifty-two weeks instead of twenty-six. These changes, he argued, would move the program closer to the original goal of the guaranteed annual wage, would provide incentive for stable production, and would help maintain greater purchasing power in economic downturns. Within the UAW, a number of locals offered support for the profit-sharing plan, Carl Stellato and Pat Quinn continued to push for the thirty-hour week, and American Motors and Studebaker-Packard workers laughed at the notion of profit sharing, since their companies had not made money in years. In the end, Reuther’s plan won 90 percent approval at a carefully orchestrated UAW convention in January 1958.4
Auto executives blasted the UAW’s profit-sharing plan. GM’s Harlow Curtice charged that the union’s proposal was “foreign to the concept of the American free-enterprise system,” in that the UAW “would bargain, not only for employes it represents, but also for salaried employes, shareholders and customers.” Ford president Ernest Breech accused Reuther of an “appeal to class warfare” by insisting “part of management’s job be turned over to him so that he can increase still further the already dangerous degree of monopoly power he possesses.”5 The Free Press weighed in, editorializing that the UAW’s plan “underscores Mr. Reuther’s strong leaning to a Socialistic leveling.” The paper’s David Lawrence complained that the UAW “asks to have all the workers given the status of ‘owners’ even though they do not contribute a nickel to buy plant and equipment or risk anything, as do the investors who must take losses of dividends when business is bad.” The UAW, he claimed, “wants labor to share in the profits” but “has omitted to say anything about sharing in the losses.” This, he said, “comes nearer to wanting to confiscate somebody else’s property than anything union labor has ever proposed.” The News offered a similar critique, insisting there was “little likelihood that auto workers ever will achieve quite the degree of income security” that they sought. “Theirs is a risk-taking industry, whose annual billion dollar gamble with a fickle public taste has no counterpart anywhere on a comparable scale. As long as the industry retains this character, it would seem inevitable that workers must accept some share of the risks.”6
UAW leaders fought back. When asked why autoworkers only wanted profit sharing, without risk if auto sales slumped, the UAW’s Leonard Woodcock responded, “Workers have been sharing the losses of this industry for many years.” Indeed, short weeks and chronic unemployment always accompanied slow sales and brought economic losses, often severe, to production workers. Autoworkers could reasonably claim that they bore the largest share of risk in a volatile industry, especially since they often experienced repeated layoffs even when automakers prospered. Reuther also pointed out that under the UAW’s proposed profit-sharing plan, an average GM worker would have earned an additional $6,000 total from 1947 to 1956, while under the actual GM profit-sharing plan, executives split $635 million during those same years, with nearly $4 million going to Harlow Curtice. “We are somewhat at a loss to understand the kind of mental and moral gymnastics required to see nothing but good in a profit-sharing plan for executives and nothing but bad in the extension of this principle to workers and consumers,” Reuther insisted.7
Both management and union officials agreed, however, that Detroit was experiencing mass unemployment and that there would be no easy solutions. Government estimates indicated that every one thousand factory jobs created another seven hundred positions in the service sector. It was no surprise, then, that unemployment lines were populated by beauticians, shoe salesmen, gas station attendants, and grocery clerks in addition to tens of thousands of laid-off autoworkers. According to the MESC, jobless Detroiters and their families “have not been panicked by the situation. They have grown accustomed to periodic layoffs and prolonged strikes and are generally a resourceful lot.” Those directly affected by the roller-coaster ride of auto employment often felt otherwise. One jobless autoworker, for example, kept count of how often he had been forced to be resourceful. “In 16 years of working at these auto plants,” he wrote, “I have actually worked seven years, eight months and three days. The rest of the time I have been laid off, sent home on strikes, etc. This time I have been off nine months and have not made five cents.” He had heard enough about the postwar economic boom. “The so-called free enterprise system is a fake and a fraud,” he argued, “because we who have to depend on it for work to eat, are laid off more than half the time.” Adopting a different tone but telling the same story, B. E. Pierson remarked that although things needed to be replaced in his home, “I will make them do until I can be assured of some steady employment for at least a year—which I haven’t had for some time.” A Michigan Chronicle editorial offered a blunt assessment of working-class life: “In the ruthless wake of unemployment come mortgage foreclosures, repossessions, creeping hunger and naked terror. Here we have earnest, hard working people being nailed to an economic cross right now in the richest nation on earth.”8
Unemployed Detroiters had few options in the area. Defense contracts would provide at best a few thousand jobs but a year or two in the future.9 Detroit’s Department of Parks and Recreation announced that it could provide full-time work for twenty-six hundred unemployed residents planting trees, clearing brush, and performing other maintenance tasks, but it had no money in its budget and no hope of getting any. Since this downturn was, as some economists called it, a “hard goods recession,” women tended to have better employment prospects than men, especially if they were young and good-looking. “I, a woman of 55, cannot answer ads that state ‘attractive and not over 35,’” a laid-off autoworker with seventeen years of seniority complained. There were some openings for “top-notch typists,” “first-grade secretaries,” and clerical workers with experience at data processing. Beyond that, job listings were largely for highly trained engineers, accountants, medical technicians, and, given the baby boom, schoolteachers. Few unemployed autoworkers were qualified for any of these positions.10
As in previous downturns, many unemployed autoworkers questioned whether or not to remain directly connected to the auto industry. Mirko Bakic, a father of one with another child due, had worked as much as possible for seven years as a machine operator at Chrysler’s East Jefferson plant. His most recent layoff had begun in November 1957, and in March 1958 it appeared that he would not be recalled until late fall at the earliest. Bakic considered taking courses in electronics. Laid off in early January 1958, Floyd Mourer decided in February to try his luck as a taxi driver. But after a short time on his new job, his cab broke down. Citing poor business, his employer chose not to repair it. “I’m worried,” Mourer said, “because I have to take care of my mother.” After getting laid off in March, recalled L. J. Scott, “I didn’t know when I was going back or if I was going back. And that’s as poor as I’ve ever been in my life. I tried to get a job, car wash and everything. I couldn’t find a job nowhere.” The answer, Scott decided, was to become self-employed: “I’m thinking if I learn how to be a barber, I can get a job in any city that I go to, cut hair.” But he needed seventy-five dollars for classes to qualify for his license. He scraped together the tuition, mostly from deferred principal on his car loan, thanks to a generous bank. Then he was recalled to Pontiac Motor in November, about the same time that he received his barbering credentials. Like so many autoworkers, he hedged his bets, in his case by returning to the plant and opening a barber shop, handling both jobs for nine years. Meanwhile, James McGuire observed the massive layoffs and turmoil from his position in maintenance at the University of Michigan Lawyers Club, confident in his earlier decision not to return to auto work.11
In 1958 nearly every autoworker had to rely at some point on secondary support networks. Elwin Brown had always been able to manage through brief downturns, but this time, he recalled, “I got laid off from March of ’58 ’til November of ’58. That’s the longest period of time I was off.” At first he had no luck finding an alternate job, although he did claim unemployment pay. But just as those benefits were about to expire in August, Brown said, “the preacher’s son asked me, ‘Why don’t you go caddying with me?’ I caddied right up until the snow fell. That’s when I got called back to work. Right in the nick of time.” Although he ultimately made it through, he and his wife had been evicted from one apartment because they could not make the rent and had to move two more times, including from a friend’s place, because they had an infant daughter who made “too much noise.” Les Coleman was laid off for weeks, even though he was a skilled tradesman, and survived by working twelve-hour shifts at the Argus Camera Company in Ann Arbor, not far from where he lived in Ypsilanti. Emerald Neal was out of work for a year. “I did every kind of job you can think of,” he recalled. “Most of it was with a company putting up cyclone fences, and they didn’t have power posthole diggers. Hand operated—and the soil in this country is hard rock clay. We dug those things all day long. The guy sent us out on a job, no money to buy gas, didn’t pay us half the time.” Gene Johnson thought he had mastered his layoff routine, but with six children and out of work for eleven months, 1958 was especially tough. Although he went back, as usual, to driving a cab, for the first time he found it worthwhile to draw unemployment compensation, even though the amount was reduced to account for his taxi earnings. In 1958 he even received SUB payments, although he remembered that it “wasn’t very much at all.” While on layoff Margaret Beaudry worked as much as possible at her fallback location, Neisner’s. Her husband, Marvin, had steady work with Pontiac Motor because he was in charge of painting show cars, so their situation could have been worse. Edith Arnold and her husband, Don, were both out of work for a year in 1958, and she found a job in a junior high school cafeteria. “I worked out on the line during the lunchtime,” she recalled. “I had my own little cart—apples and cookies, and frozen ice cream bars.” She enjoyed the sociability of the job. “I could yak with the kids, and you get to know them, and they get to know you.” When she worked the cash register on the regular lunch line, however, things were different. “Little pats of butter were supposed to be two cents. And they got these little pats of butter hid—oh, those kids were slick—and then the manager comes along, she’s yakking at my shoulder, you know, ‘Hurry it up. Hurry it up.’ You can’t hurry up everything like that. I didn’t like that. When she’d leave me alone, I did fine.” Edith found it ironic that this was the type of job her husband preferred her to have, to shield her from the rough culture in an auto plant. Yet at the junior high, she recalled, she “heard more dirty jokes than I ever did in the shop.” It was worse than Pontiac Motor, she insisted, “by far!”12
Unable to find alternative jobs, tens of thousands of people left the city, mostly heading south, hoping to be recalled in the future. Indeed, layoffs in 1958 were so severe that displaced autoworkers often flooded their home communities, even though most of their relatives had long since moved north. The population of Harlan County, Kentucky, for example, rose from fifty-two thousand in 1957 to seventy thousand in 1958, mostly because of returning migrants from Detroit and Flint. The conditions that had forced so many to leave in the first place, they found, had not improved. If anything, during the national recession in 1958 there were even fewer opportunities in Harlan, which had long been dependent on coal mining. No matter how excited remaining relatives and neighbors were to see them, laid-off autoworkers taxed limited supplies of food and shelter. A quarter of Harlan County residents were already on some sort of government assistance, whether unemployment checks, Social Security, Aid to Dependent Children, or as recipients of emergency federal food rations, what locals called the “cheese program.” The Salvation Army had to close operations in Harlan because so many people needed help and so few could make donations. Those seeking refuge in 1958 often crowded into relatives’ homes and in many cases settled into old tobacco-curing barns. According to the local school superintendent, “Most of our people believed the optimistic speeches and headlines about the recession being a figment of the imagination. They stayed on up north, hoping for a job that wasn’t there. They spent what little they had saved and they came home completely broke, down to their last dollar.” “Many of these people lost their washers and refrigerators in northern cities and left them behind,” noted a Harlan resident. “The finance companies took them away.” There were still two daily round-trip buses between Harlan and Detroit in 1958, but only the southbound coaches carried many passengers.13
Despite all the contrary evidence, many business leaders insisted that the unemployed were “willingly idle” because they could supposedly live comfortably on unemployment benefits. As Gannett newspaper executive Frank Tripp put it, collecting handouts “from the state or Washington” was “the philosophy of a new labor bloc that 50 years ago would have been classified as leeches.” Tripp was certain that unemployed workers sat back in comfort and did not seek low-wage “miscellaneous jobs,” which, he said, “was the rugged way that past depressions blew themselves out … and brought prices down to levels that forestalled inflation.” Instead, he insisted, “shameless people, whose fathers would have starved first, offer themselves as vassals of the state, pawns of the politicians, dependents fed by neighbors, as truly as their mothers once fed tramps on the back porch.” The problem, he said, was that unemployed Americans were simply not hungry enough. “Aren’t we the lucky ones? Oh yes,” responded Mrs. T. White to charges like Tripp’s. “We are in this racket—not working and collecting unemployment compensation. My husband has repaired washing machines, screens, windows and even was paid $1 for fixing a doorbell. And besides we collect $49 a week compensation. In order to live it up like this,” she said sarcastically, “we have had to cancel our children’s doctor and dental appointments in order to be able to make our house payment (land contract). Ah, this is the life! Ever try it?” Of course many unemployed autoworkers had exhausted any unemployment benefits, and eligibility was soon to expire for thousands more. Others were on short weeks, earning less from being employed than they would have if they received unemployment benefits.14
The impact of unemployment on Detroit’s families could be assessed in part by how stay-at-home wives of autoworkers managed to run their households. The consensus of one informal survey was clear. To do their jobs, housewives reported, they needed their husbands to have “a regular five-day work week and some hope of a full work year.” Describing her husband’s recent work history as a grinder at the Plymouth engine plant, Mrs. Reginald Pelletier said, “Twice, in the past three months, he has had a five-day week. We are lucky when he now works three or three-and-a-half days.” In 1957 his pre-tax earnings had been forty-seven hundred dollars, well above what he made in 1956, but barely providing a toehold in the middle class, supposedly inhabited by blue-collar elites. What she really supported, she said, was the guaranteed annual wage: “Steady work makes sense to wives and children.” In a similar vein, Mrs. Bernard Hyden, whose husband had worked at Dodge for forty-two years, said she would trade any sort of wage increase or profit sharing for steady paychecks. What she wanted for her husband, she said, was “just work. I’m not greedy.”15
Many women, however, voiced conflicting views. “Cut a few cents off the hourly wage” if that would help “more men” get jobs, suggested a woman with fifteen years of seniority as a small parts assembler at the Rouge plant. “Let men retire with social security at 60 and give the younger ones a chance. I’d step aside to help.” In contrast, Mrs. John Smellie, whose husband worked at the Rouge plant, looked at women autoworkers as the cause of her distress. “Women were needed in factories during the war but they refused to come out afterwards when men needed the jobs,” she said, offering a widespread but obviously contentious view of the past. “Men with families deserve those jobs now. When has this country been troubled by as much juvenile delinquency as at present? Send working mothers back home.” Leona McCabe agreed. Referring to married women with jobs, McCabe remarked, “We have three on our street within a half block, no children and both working, the women in factories taking a job from a husband and father. Get these women out of the auto plants.” Polly Cowan, however, contended that the financial contributions from married women were essential. When she married her husband, Everett, she did not intend to work outside the home, but she took a beauty course while he was in the service, and they both agreed that she should work for a year to help them get established before they had children. Everett’s job at an auto supplier proved to be unsteady, including a ten-month layoff in 1958, so Polly continued to work and her income was often all the family had. “It isn’t really a question of deciding how to spend the money,” she said, referring to her wages. “It’s just a question of who has enough—to fix a nine-year-old boy’s teeth or a car the same age. Something’s always breaking down.”16
Some Detroiters viewed the challenges faced by autoworkers’ families with little sympathy. “I am one of thousands of small business men who are having a hard time to make ends meet,” wrote Mr. A. Dunn. “We receive no benefits when times are tough.” Unlike the significant amount of money he had spent starting his business, he remarked, “most workers have only to buy a pair of gloves twice a week for their investment and they make $5,000 working only 40 hours each week. Fifty per cent of their wives work so their income is at least $7,000 a year. Why don’t they put away a little for a rainy day?” Although Dunn’s hardship was most certainly real, his arithmetic hardly matched the experiences of Detroit autoworkers, many of whom would have been lucky to earn seven thousand dollars in two years. Moreover, most small business owners in Detroit ultimately relied on autoworkers’ spending.17
Nationally known for his doorbell-ringing, interview-based journalism, Samuel Lubell visited Detroit in April to assess the city’s unemployment crisis. He found that by wide margins, including 80 percent of those under age thirty, Detroiters feared unemployment and inflation more than they feared the Soviet Union. “With relatively little seniority or developed skills,” Lubell explained, “younger workers seem least secure in their jobs. They also have plunged deepest into debt to buy new homes and autos.” Inflation tended to be the bigger concern for older residents, who worried that they might not ever be able to retire. Many younger autoworkers hoped that those with higher seniority would leave their jobs and make room for the next generation. “They ought to make everyone over 50 retire, so younger fellows can get jobs,” a twenty-eight-year-old laid-off autoworker said. “That would give a man 25 years of work. That ought to be enough for anyone.” “You don’t know what it is like to be over fifty!” responded an older, unemployed worker. “No one will give you a job. They look at your hair and if it’s a little gray, you’re too old. If you’ve saved up a few dollars, how long do they last with prices like they are?” Lubell observed that “to many people the unemployment statistics still seem remote and impersonal.” But that was not true in working-class neighborhoods. As his reports were published, unemployment in Detroit rose to 265,000, over 17 percent of the workforce.18
Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop also toured Detroit that month to learn more about the recession’s impact. What he saw was “the cruel letdown of a vast army of industrial workers by the system they have been taught to trust implicitly.” In the Dodge Main union hall, Alsop saw a Southern migrant who faced repossession of his car and hoped for help. When a crane and elevator-hoist operator named Richard asked if there were any new leads on jobs, Local 3 vice president Pete Telisky replied, “Boy, you can’t buy a job in this damn town.” Richard faced mortgage payments of $75 a month to keep the house he had grown up in. That became impossible in 1958 with only $42 a week in unemployment benefits. Richard found short-term work as a janitor. His brother, now seventeen, had no luck. “They ain’t even hirin’ boys in stores,” Richard said. “We only got another 11 weeks of benefits to go, and after that there’ll be nothing but the welfare.” When he toured autoworkers’ neighborhoods, Alsop observed that their circumstances appeared “grimmer and more poignant, for one actually sees the furniture and the washers and the cars and the homes that are in danger. You see the children ‘who drink water now,’ and the harassed wives who ‘don’t know how we can manage much longer.’” Everybody, he observed, was “obsessed by the thought of the end of ‘the 26 weeks’ (of benefits), which all these people spoke of with a sort of defeated dread.” A couple named John and Jeannette were among them. John had eleven years of seniority and Jeannette had seven, both with Chrysler, and together they brought home $160 a week when they worked full-time. They had a mortgage on their home and had purchased furniture, a washer and dryer, and a television on credit. Then Jeannette was laid off in September 1957. Remaining optimistic, they borrowed $200 to pay for Christmas presents for themselves and their young son. Three weeks later, John was laid off. “If I’d knew that, I’d never of went so deep at Christmas,” he reflected. By April they were existing on John’s $43 a week unemployment benefits, with three months left. Jeannette’s had already run out.19
Alsop was torn by what he had learned. Most of those in dire circumstances had “been hard, steady workers,” he concluded, but in his view too many had also exhibited “almost total, lotus-eating improvidence.” One couple went ahead with their wedding despite the prospective husband’s layoff. They bought furniture on credit, hoping he would be recalled in time to make the payments. When no job notice arrived, the couple, expecting a baby, had to go on welfare. According to Alsop, “their whole wretched little apartment smelled of ruin.” In another case, before the recession a woman defied her husband and took a job because, she said, “you don’t never get ahead unless the woman works.” With two incomes, they committed to finishing their attic so that they would have an extra bedroom. But when she was laid off, their installment payments consumed half of their remaining income. Although Alsop saw these autoworkers as having engaged in “short-sighted folly,” he conceded that they were in the mainstream of an American culture “that measures achievement not by inner standards but by material objects.” He might have also noted that much of the 1950s boom, nationwide, was fueled by credit. The main difference in these cases was the unsteadiness of auto work. Even if conditions improved, Alsop determined, “half the things these people have gained will be lost in the interval,” because, as one Detroiter told him, “we just can’t meet the payments and feed the kids.” If conditions did not improve significantly, Alsop predicted, “the whole pattern of life of all these people will simply fall into squalid ruin.”20
However autoworkers were perceived, to automakers and industry analysts the cure for Detroit’s crisis was positive thinking by potential consumers. A Ford economist claimed that there were plenty of Americans with money to spend, but for some reason they were experiencing “hesitancy in making commitments,” which led to “excessive postponement” that increased “the depth of the decline unnecessarily.” A group of fourteen business leaders was so perplexed by the situation that they declared “a breakdown in the law of supply and demand.” Chrysler’s L. L. Colbert told members of Congress that the recession would end quickly if people would simply “wake up and decide they want to buy.” Industrialist Harold Ruttenberg insisted that UAW members, by themselves, could “reverse the current recession by getting into new 1958 cars and driving right out of it.” He seemed unaware that by mid-March some 230,000 Detroiters, over 15 percent of the area’s workforce, had no jobs. The only business showing signs of growth in the city was the MESC, which opened three new branch offices to handle the flood of unemployment claims.21 No improvement was on the horizon. Despite massive production cutbacks, the inventory of unsold cars dropped by only 10,000 during March, to 854,000.22 Meanwhile, Detroit’s unemployment total reached 275,000. “We are facing an industrial readjustment, a very painful one, on top of a national recession,” a Wayne State University economist remarked. “A good year for the automobile industry might bring us back to 10 per cent unemployment.” Benson Ford, the younger brother of Henry Ford II, saw high drama in these developments. “If there is no business like show business,” he said, “certainly this business of ours runs it a close second for glamour, excitement and adventure. There is no other business with anything like the same elements of risk, big stakes, feverish competition, ecstatic highs and gloomy lows.”23
In the depths of 1958’s gloomy lows, the UAW’s profit-sharing proposal disappeared from public discussion, and although the recession gave credence to the union’s demand for increased SUB payments, automakers seemed unwilling to divert additional money into those funds. With all Big Three agreements ending either in late May or early June, Walter Reuther backtracked on long-standing policy. If no settlements were reached, he announced, union members would have to work without contracts, something that cut against the grain of union principles. Since so few cars were being produced, the UAW president reasoned, “it would be insane to accommodate the auto industry by calling a strike now.” Better to wait for the new model year, he said, when “they will need us to make new cars.” Only then, he argued, might a strike provide leverage.24
Chrysler, Ford, and GM let their UAW contracts expire. For the time being, no production worker would be required to join the union, and companies would not be obligated to collect dues from employees. There would also be no grievance procedures. As one report warned, freed from the constraints of the contract, the automakers would “not stand for any funny business in the shops.”25 Trouble erupted quickly at Chrysler plants, and managers indeed suspended more than a hundred union stewards and local committee members for what the company called “flagrant insubordination.” As was common in tough times, many unionists thought the company provoked conflicts to cripple production while limiting unemployment obligations.26 Even though no walkout would qualify as an unauthorized wildcat strike—there was no longer any contract to violate—top UAW officials counseled workers to endure abuse and stay on the job, a decision that drew jeers. There were few Chrysler workers left to strike anyway. The major automakers eventually sidestepped disputes by shutting down operations for three months in order to reduce dealer inventories. Although technically Detroit autoworkers were not on strike for a new contract, by early July all of them were jobless.27
Most unemployed workers had some version of a story like that of Maria and Fernand Pelo, who struggled to provide for their family of five after both were permanently laid off from a metal shop in January, capping a year of unstable employment. Six months later their unemployment checks—which together had provided $63 a week—had run out, but Fernand managed to bring in $60 a week from a temporary job. They had been scrimping for a long time. Layoffs had been so frequent in 1957 that, despite both being so-called full-time employees, they had earned only $3,200 total for the year. In 1955, when times were good, they had lived it up. “We were both working steady and bringing home pretty near $120 a week,” Maria recalled. “But we spent it all as fast as we made it. We went to shows and ate out a lot. We even took a trip to Niagara Falls.” The family’s finances tightened when their son Joe was born with medical problems involving his leg. “That cost us $1,000,” Maria said. “I was sick, too. That took another $1,500.” They were unable to save, but they were also debt-free. “Now we can’t keep up with anything,” Maria lamented. By early July the couple was two months behind in rent for their $65-a-month, four-bedroom, unfurnished apartment. They still owed $100 on a television they bought when times were good, and they needed $45 to keep the encyclopedia set they had purchased for their children. Medical bills continued to pile up. Fernand had cut his arm and had caught pneumonia, racking up $250 in hospital charges. When their three-year-old son, Michael, got sick, doctor bills and medicine cost $175. Uninsured after losing their jobs, they still needed to complete payments to the physician who delivered their five-week-old baby, Carla. “We had to let the Blue Cross expire in January,” Maria explained. “They told us it would cost $66 in advance to keep up the policy. We just couldn’t do it.” Despite their troubles, Maria said, they considered themselves fortunate. “Just about everybody in this neighborhood is laid off,” Maria observed. “We feel luckier than lots of people. We aren’t going hungry.” Their grocer was also their landlord, and he was willing to be patient for them to pay off their debts, but it was difficult for the Pelos to make headway. “I paid $9 for a pair of shoes for my oldest boy,” Maria said, “and they lasted only four weeks. Since Christmas I’ve had to buy him three more pairs of shoes.” Although the couple did not own a car, bus fare for Fernand’s commute added up. Maria considered looking for a job, but it had to pay enough to be worthwhile. “When I’m working I have to pay $10 a week for a baby sitter and $10 for taxes,” she noted. “Then there are union dues, bus fare and lunch money. And I’d need more clothes.” All things considered, she concluded, “You don’t make much.”28
Given the rampant inflation in 1958, many UAW retirees, nearly thirty thousand of whom lived in the Detroit area, also had great difficulty paying bills, especially since cost-of-living adjustments did not apply to pensions. Retirees wanted that to change, and top UAW officials had promised to do their best. Thousands of UAW retirees gathered outside GM headquarters to add pressure. “I have to live on $98.50 a month,” explained Stanley Kujawski, seventy-one, who began work in the auto industry in 1906 and retired from Packard in 1955. “That’s my combined pension and social security—for my wife and myself. My wife’s been sick for the last eight years. We have to just sit at home.” Many retirees, along with thousands of other laid-off Detroiters, planted gardens. The city’s Parks and Recreation Department created 740 plots, 40 by 50 feet each, in eight municipal parks, specifically to ease the unemployment crisis. Most gardeners, however, like retiree Anthony Lichvar, raised vegetables in their yards. “I’m out here nearly every day,” Lichvar said. “My wife and I get about $90 a month on Social Security and every penny counts.” Barney Gornowicz tended a 35-by-125-foot plot next to his house. Gornowicz was raised on a farm in Michigan’s “Thumb” and had continued to grow crops, no matter the state of the auto industry. His family agreed, though, that his homegrown produce was especially valuable in 1958. Unemployment in Detroit hit the three hundred thousand mark about the time they picked their first sweet corn of the season.29
While those without jobs struggled to get by, those who were called back after model changeovers engaged in what one GM official called “guerilla warfare.” The triggers were generally local—for example, discipline deemed unfair by workers, disputes over the order of recalls, or the pace of new jobs—and were usually confined to a single nook or cranny in a particular plant. But as always, each conflict quickly resulted in wider-scale layoffs and led to charges of treachery by each side. Although it was unlikely that top UAW officials orchestrated the uprisings, as some charged, they certainly did not mind the appearance of a coordinated effort if it would help with contract bargaining. Chrysler’s Mound Road engine plant was shut down in early August when workers maintained they were understaffed during early production for 1959 models. Angry about having to work overtime while many fellow employees were laid off, forklift truck drivers at the company’s new Twinsburg, Ohio, plant walked out a week later, affecting all Chrysler operations. Strikes took place as well at Chrysler’s Mound Road, Nine Mile, and Warren plants, and at Ford’s Wixom factory. Later that summer the number of strikes increased, mostly because management refused to observe seniority during recalls. When Pontiac Motor was hit, GM’s Semon Knudsen accused the UAW of “jeopardizing the jobs of 23,000 innocent employes.” Likewise, the Detroit News referred to rank-and-file UAW members as “pawns in Walter Reuther’s struggle to force upon the nation his doctrinaire approach to political and economic policies,” part of the union leadership’s quest “to become the mahatmas of a perfect society.”30
If the words of GM officials and the News editors were to be believed, production workers would have felt liberated without the burdens of contract provisions regarding workloads and job security, but there is no evidence that workers would have been happy to accept management’s unilateral control over crucial workplace decisions. Indeed, at Pontiac Motor Local 653, president Charles Beach declared that his membership was on strike “because of the cluttered-up grievance procedures over which the management failed to bargain in good faith.” UAW executive board member Leonard Woodcock insisted that local members needed no encouragement from top union officials to be upset. With free rein to do as they pleased, he argued, managers assigned skilled workers to sweep floors, forced workers to carry on when a burst pipe had flooded their department, and, just as in the 1920s, prohibited conversations between employees and allowed only limited water breaks during the August heat.31
In mid-September Ford broke ranks, as it had done in 1955, and signed an agreement with the UAW. This came only a few hours after Ford workers began a no-work-without-a-contract strike that would have paralyzed the company’s preparations for the 1959 model season. The settlement called for no wage increases for production workers, although the productivity-based annual improvement factor (2 ½ percent or six cents an hour, whichever was greater) and the cost-of-living clause were maintained. Together, these provisions resulted in an immediate nine-cent-an-hour increase for unskilled and semiskilled employees. Skilled workers received an additional eight cents an hour in their base pay—hardly enough, in their view, to counteract the wage compression that they criticized so harshly. The duration of SUB pay eligibility was extended to thirty-nine weeks, up from twenty-six, and benefits were set at 65 percent of take-home pay for the entire period instead of only the first four weeks. Those who were already retired received a modest boost to $2.35 per month for each year served, up from $2.25. Workers left behind by decentralization or automation were to receive a maximum of $3,000 severance pay, depending on length of employment, with the top amount going to those who had put in at least thirty years.32
The Ford settlement hardly brought labor peace. Upset with their eight cents an hour, skilled workers at the Rouge vowed to shut down the plant, and the next day only fifteen hundred of the morning shift’s thirteen thousand workers showed up. In addition to concerns about wage compression, tradesmen feared that their training no longer guaranteed job security. At this point nearly two-thirds of skilled workers in the auto industry were laid off. Additional disputes over job classifications and seniority provisions rocked specific departments. Such local issues always had to be resolved before national contract agreements took effect, but this time discontent seemed especially severe. Nevertheless, after a week, pressure increased from unskilled and laid-off skilled workers to end the Rouge strike. Local 600 president Carl Stellato empathized with the disgruntled tradesmen, telling them that he was also “not entirely happy” with the settlement, but he insisted that high unemployment had forced the union to do the best it could with its “back to the wall.”33
Contracts with Chrysler and GM followed quickly. The UAW-Chrysler agreement was essentially the same as Ford’s, with a significant exception. A plant-wide and area-wide seniority system for metro Detroit went into effect, under which Chrysler workers with at least twelve years of seniority were placed on an “area” roster. When openings or recalls occurred at Chrysler plants, jobs would be given, on an alternating basis, to those at the top of the area list and those with the most seniority at that particular facility. This was good news for those with high seniority, of course, who chafed at being laid off while those with less time in at other plants were on the job, but the plan undercut prospects for younger workers as so many of them had feared.34
The concerns of skilled tradesmen took many by surprise. Long thought to be the most stable and lucrative positions available in auto plants, the skilled trades now suffered from decentralization and mass unemployment, much like other auto jobs. Big Three production remained so low in 1958 that repairmen and millwrights had little to do. Tools and dies did not wear out when they were not in use. Likewise, plumbing and electrical work were largely unnecessary in idle factories. Whereas there had been a chronic shortage of skilled workers during the 1955 boom, there was an excess in 1957 and 1958. For years, advance work on future models had been outsourced by the Big Three to Detroit-area tool and die firms, which in turn subcontracted parts of each order to even smaller job shops. In 1958 non–Big Three skilled tradesmen, when employed, generally earned about $3.52 per hour, which was between $0.35 and $1.00 more per hour than their “captive” brothers who were employed directly by the auto companies. The system broke down completely in 1958. Tool and die shops had sprung up around assembly plants on the coasts and near St. Louis, a natural progression with the decentralization of auto production. In addition, an increasing number of tool and die jobs were outsourced to European firms, with the finished products shipped back to the United States, in sections, to be reassembled. Wages for skilled workers in Europe were often less than a third of those in the Detroit area. As a result, in late October only thirty-five hundred of eight thousand unionized skilled workers outside the Big Three had jobs.35
Skilled tradesmen had conflicting ideas about what should be done. Many of those who were military veterans questioned what they had fought for overseas and why they had invested four years in specialized training if it brought no advantages. Others, however, advocated reducing their own wages to keep their jobs. Any skilled tradesmen who demanded wage increases, an unemployed tradesman said, must “have rocks in their heads. They have already run nearly all the tool and die work out of the city due to high wages.” To him, the arithmetic was clear. “Which is the better income,” he asked, “to receive $3.50 an hour and work four months a year or $3 and work 10 months a year?” Of course, as another skilled worker pointed out, a wage cut would not necessarily ensure sustained, predictable employment. “Under a system of supply and demand such as ours,” he replied, “low wages are not a cure for unemployment nor are they a guarantee for a full year’s work.” High wages helped compensate, he said, for “the feast and famine conditions in these shops.” For much of the industry’s history, of course, these skilled positions had been coveted by those excluded from them. By 1958 no women and only a handful of African American men had broken through the barriers, an injustice that many had fought to overturn. High unemployment among white skilled workers in 1958 was no excuse for continued racial exclusion from apprenticeships, but extensive joblessness created a climate in which white tradesmen felt more protective than ever of what they considered to be their hard-earned positions, gained through long apprenticeships that were decreasing in value.36
Contributing to tensions, thousands of autoworkers were upset that they were still laid off while others who had already been recalled were receiving overtime hours. “I think this is shameful,” wrote the wife of a still jobless Chrysler worker in November, noting that her husband had been laid off since January. “Why can’t the work be held to 40 hours and get more back to work?” asked a Detroiter. “I have a neighbor who was laid off in August, 1956, and is still out. He has 17 years seniority at Ford and is a good worker.”37 Hundreds of laid-off Dodge Main workers picketed their plant, demanding that fellow union members refuse overtime assignments as long as any of them remained unemployed. At that point fewer than half of Dodge Main’s pre-recession workforce of eighteen thousand had been recalled. Local 3 president Pat Quinn felt the pressure. He informed those on the job that the laid-off workers’ protest did not constitute an official picket line and that it therefore could be crossed to report to work. He also conceded that “many of those laid off will never be called back because jobs have been eliminated.” Angry protesters continued to picket area Chrysler plants, sometimes successfully shutting down overtime operations but more often watching fellow union members go to work. Frustrated and heavily criticized UAW leaders had no authority concerning overtime hours in any plants. “It is morally wrong and socially indefensible for the automobile companies to schedule overtime work beyond that absolutely required,” Walter Reuther remarked in the midst of the controversy. He urged auto companies “to call back as many as possible of the unemployed even though their re-employment may be on a temporary basis. In this way, the benefits of economic recovery from the 1958 recession will be more widely and equitably shared.” Company officials responded that they were only doing what union leaders had asked them to do earlier in the year by offering full-time jobs to as many workers as possible and laying off the rest rather than scheduling two or three days of work for a larger number of employees.38
By almost any measure, 1958 was a terrible year for the auto industry. Production was down almost two million vehicles from the weak total for 1957, and the MESC concluded bluntly that “the job picture was grim.” “I don’t think I’ve had three solid month’s work all year,” said Dodge Main employee Robert Weatherburn, fifty, in December. “A normal year, I’ll make about $5,000. But I’ll be lucky if I make half that this year.” “This is the worst year I’ve ever had,” concluded fellow Dodge Main worker Ray Czarnecki, thirty-three. “My son came up to me the other day and said, ‘That’s all right, Daddy. When we get rich, we’ll have a lot of things.’ Even kids can feel it—I mean the pressure.” Confirming the level of hardship in the area, a University of Michigan study determined that 70 percent of blue-collar Detroiters had experienced unemployment or short work weeks in 1958 compared with a national average of 41 percent. Nearly a quarter of working-class Detroiters had lost at least fifteen hundred dollars in expected pay, compared with a national average of 14 percent. The only income category in which Detroit led the nation was the percentage of its jobless residents who had received unemployment benefits. A postmortem on the 1958 recession showed that nearly 60 percent of Detroit’s laid-off autoworkers believed they had little chance of ever being recalled to their former jobs or of finding anything that paid comparable wages.39
Even the most optimistic predictions for the future seemed grim. On the basis of interviews with seventeen bankers, businessmen, and government officials, the Detroit Board of Commerce maintained that more than 1.2 million more cars would be produced in 1959, payrolls would increase by 11 percent, and unemployment would drop to only 150,000, assuming that 25,000 people either dropped out of the work force entirely or left town. This was the most favorable forecast. Others saw little chance for a meaningful recovery. Many auto jobs, it seemed, were gone forever. Chrysler now employed half as many Detroiters—70,000—as it had at the peak of the 1955 boom. Ford’s national workforce was down 28,000—to 106,000—from the start of the 1958 model season, with much of that decline at the Rouge plant. According to Fortune labor editor Daniel Bell, “What the 1958 recession has done is to emphasize, particularly to the young, that workers do not have middle-class security. Companies severely hit rarely laid off the white-collar worker,” he noted, “but blue-collar workers were laid off in great numbers—and quickly.”40
The Free Press blamed Detroit’s woes on the UAW, noting that autoworkers in England earned wages only one-third as high as American union rates, in Germany about a fourth as much as their U.S. counterparts, and in Japan about 14 percent of the American standard. “If America’s cost disadvantage continues to increase,” the editorial warned, “we must anticipate an accelerated flight of American capital and much more ‘sourcing’ of parts and products abroad.” To the editors, the problem was clear: American autoworkers had been living the high life, and it had to stop. “If we continue the present pattern of inflationary wage increases,” they predicted, “the final consequence must be to price ourselves not only out of foreign markets, but out of our own markets as well.” The goal, according to Ford’s Ernest Breech, was to preserve the “American Dream” from “being stung to death by the wasp of wage inflation.”41 From the vantage point of most Detroit autoworkers, who had experienced unsteady employment at best for several years, who were behind on rents and mortgages, who had difficulty feeding and clothing their children, and whose furniture and used cars were at constant risk of repossession, these were cruel charges.