The postwar boom in the United States is generally held to have lasted for a little over a quarter century after 1945. Detroit autoworkers, however, experienced the first fifteen years of the boom, its supposed heyday, as an era of job instability and economic insecurity. Materials and parts shortages, war, extreme weather, strikes (often in other industries), wildcat strikes in the auto industry, overproduction, lack of demand, decentralization, and automation combined to make the years from 1945 to 1960 anything but increasingly prosperous and comfortable for these supposed blue-collar elites. There was nothing seasonal or predictable about the industry’s volatility, as model changeovers could be accomplished in less than a week in the post–World War II era. Everyone from workers themselves to auto executives knew that full-time work was only temporary. Whenever autoworkers experienced anything like sustained employment—for example, in 1953 and 1955—auto production overwhelmed the number of customers, leading to recession-like conditions that were often limited to the auto industry and hit Detroit’s working-class communities ferociously.
As it turns out, the very concept of “autoworkers” is problematic. There was no consistent body of people who could be classified as autoworkers during these years. Instead, people periodically entered and left auto work, often with little control over the timing. There was always high turnover in entry-level positions, and there were huge waves of hiring, especially in 1950, 1953, and 1955, that churned the population of autoworkers. The mass migration of job seekers to Detroit, especially when times were good but also when those making the journey thought the Detroit economy should be booming, prompted intense debates as to who was an autoworker and who was a Detroiter. During the Korean War, when unemployment skyrocketed in Detroit, the city’s board of commerce insisted that most of the jobless were recent migrants, that they should not count as unemployed autoworkers, and that they should leave the region.1 But two years earlier when the auto industry needed additional workers, Detroit’s manufacturers advertised for them out of state, and tens of thousands of people responded by moving to Detroit and getting jobs in auto plants. Were those new employees officially autoworkers? Were they Detroiters? Did they view themselves as a floating labor force, to be summoned and discharged as auto manufacturing needs shifted? Or did they hope to make new, permanent lives as autoworkers in southeastern Michigan? What about the hundreds of thousands who had migrated to the city during World War II? At what point did those recruited to the auto industry become Detroiters and autoworkers? Were previously rebuffed African Americans, women, those over forty, and the moderately disabled, who were prized by automakers during the 1953 production upturn, actual autoworkers, or were they “fringe” populations to be hired and laid off as needed?
Heated debates over these questions persisted throughout the 1950s, especially during the downturns that followed each period of high production and massive migration. In 1956, for example, automakers insisted that those hired in 1955, and even in 1953, had been “temporary” employees and were not to be counted among Detroit’s increasing jobless totals. Chrysler explained that most of those laid off were either newly hired and still in their ninety-day probationary periods or had low seniority. Many of them had only recently moved to Detroit, the company claimed, so the layoffs were not as severe as they seemed.2 Yet few of the recent migrants or resident “fringe” workers thought of themselves as expendable. Once hired in the industry, most hoped to continue as autoworkers, whether or not the experts thought they should. Many of them spent as much time during the 1950s on, or looking for, secondary jobs—cab driving, waiting tables, posthole digging, cutting hair, and so forth—as they did in auto plants. It is not clear to what extent these workers, especially the emerging majority of younger ones, considered themselves to be primarily autoworkers at all during the 1950s. The categories of “autoworker” and “Detroiter” were obviously fluid and contested.
Although no one during the 1950s thought the auto industry was stable, a rough consensus exists today that these were prosperous times, especially for whites, when Detroit’s autoworkers entered the middle class by virtue of their rising wages and benefits. How could there be such a discrepancy between autoworkers’ actual experiences and what later generations have come to believe? Perhaps most significantly, aggregate economic data and wage figures in contracts do not necessarily tell us much about the lived experiences of ordinary autoworkers. Indeed, because there was a constantly fluctuating population of autoworkers, the aggregate data over time do not necessarily refer to the same people. Most importantly, as much as the Detroit Board of Commerce tried to convince the public that autoworkers’ rising wages resulted in record incomes, their claims lost credibility by failing to account for chronic layoffs. As much as aggregate economic data show increasing prosperity over the course of the postwar boom, autoworkers had to pay bills in real time. Frequent layoffs often made this difficult or impossible, no matter how much their hourly wage rates increased.
There is a tendency as well to read history backward. If at some point autoworkers could afford to purchase new cars and own a cabin “up north,” the thinking seems to go, then they must have been able to all along. But that was not the case. Few autoworkers in the 1950s were able to purchase new cars, and far more took advantage of Michigan’s overcrowded state parks than their own properties, especially since they struggled to keep up with mortgages or rents.3 Although those UAW members who survived the massive dislocations of the 1970s and 1980s—oil crises, foreign competition, outsourcing, and others—might have appeared to be prototypical post–World War II autoworkers, with their high wages, solid benefits, and financial protection against layoffs, they were the ones who, through interviews, emphasized most clearly that the earlier postwar years had been unstable and insecure. The dominance of the postwar boom framework is so strong that it took quite a few interviews to figure this out, in part because most retired autoworkers spoke with pride, for good reason, of their credited years of service that were used to determine pension eligibility. It was easy to assume, for example, that when someone mentioned thirty-six years of credited service it meant thirty-six continuous years of steady employment, when in reality for most people the number hid numerous, sometimes lengthy layoffs.
Given Detroit’s decline, there is also a fair amount of nostalgia for a time when it was thriving, as the Arsenal of Democracy or the Motor City. This sense of the past is often fueled by middle-class perceptions of life in the region. The layoffs that frequently devastated working-class neighborhoods had far less impact on wealthier residents, as evidenced by solid sales at upscale department stores during this period. When I have presented versions of this research to metro-Detroit audiences, the argument generally has resonated with former autoworkers or those from blue-collar families, who recall these years as turbulent, while others have often been less convinced because that’s not the way they remember things. Once a skeptic challenged my right to conduct this research, because I am not a native Detroiter and could not possibly understand how things really were, while another time a man whose family operated a bakery across from an auto plant in the 1950s noted that, because of how persistent layoffs affected their business, they always considered auto work to be part-time employment. My thesis was not news to him.4
Of course scholars have also reinforced the notion of a postwar boom for autoworkers. This has often served as the basis for criticism of Walter Reuther and top UAW leadership for abandoning militancy, workplace control, and broad social reforms in favor of larger paychecks, improved benefits, and entry for autoworkers into the consumer culture of the American middle class. More recently, as unionization rates have plummeted in the United States and income inequality has grown considerably, the 1950s have been seen as, if not the good old days, at least a time when collective bargaining gave industrial workers leverage to improve their lives.5 Business-oriented scholars are more likely to see this period as the time when unionized autoworkers became so wealthy and powerful that they drove the industry overseas.6 When looking at actual autoworkers and the availability of work in the industry, it is apparent that the boom was elusive. Autoworkers were indeed among the highest-paid blue-collar workers, if measured by hourly wages. People who were repeatedly tempted to return to the industry knew this to be true, confirming what can be found in contracts and from national wage data. The problem was a lack of steady work—sometimes, ironically, as a result of persistent worker militancy, whether through wildcat or authorized strikes, in either the auto industry or supply networks, especially for coal and steel. Despite unstable employment, Detroit autoworkers in the aggregate earned countless millions of dollars in this period. Almost all of it went directly to local shop owners, professionals, and landlords, in spasmodic torrents of “trickle-up” economics. Although businesses in working-class neighborhoods suffered from the volatility of the auto industry, wages and salaries from auto work appear to have helped create relatively stable employment and predictable incomes for many in the middle class. There was a postwar boom, but autoworkers were not the main beneficiaries of it.
What could the UAW have done to make auto work more stable and members’ incomes more secure? Since it is widely believed that this is exactly what the union did, if more so for white men than for African Americans or white women, this question forces a reconsideration of the period, and there seems to be no ready answer unless one is willing to embrace counterfactual scenarios as plausible. As long as we think that the UAW was able to get most of what it wanted through negotiations in the early postwar years, it stands to reason that if the union’s priorities had been different, instead of gaining higher wages, fringe benefits, and stable employment for its membership, it could have achieved other goals, such as greater control over the work process, or racial and gender equality. If we realize that UAW leadership was unable to achieve its highest negotiating priority in the fifties, stabilized employment and incomes through the guaranteed annual wage, then the era looks quite different. Instead of imagining hundreds of thousands of autoworkers rising steadily into the middle class, we see them being tossed and turned in a volatile industry, rarely able to make meaningful headway before the next round of layoffs, with many of them, disproportionately African American but lots of them white, chucked out of the industry for good, largely because of automation and decentralization.
Given how desperate autoworkers were for steady employment and wages after the 1954 recession, it would have been politically impossible to hold out for a full-fledged GAW in 1955, when times were good. And no other options existed besides the dead-on-arrival proposal of thirty hours of work for forty hours of pay. The GAW was always politically fraught, especially during the Cold War, as business leaders charged that the UAW wanted a planned economy and big money for autoworkers for as little work as possible. Despite gaining only an initially meager supplemental unemployment benefit plan instead of the GAW, UAW officials trumpeted their accomplishments in this period, and no doubt union members would have been in far worse shape without contractual gains. Automakers would certainly have preferred lower wages, no pensions, no health benefits, lower unemployment benefit premiums, and no ability for workers to file grievances. But union leaders were unable to compel automakers to rationalize production schedules to meet the most important needs of the industry’s workers. Moreover, the UAW had little influence over the pace of automation and decentralization. Even if there had been steady employment in the fifties, autoworkers would have been on the lowest edge of middle-class status. Nevertheless, they were pilloried by automakers and business leaders for ruining the industry with their greed. So despite having a strong union, the best-positioned blue-collar workers in the nation—perhaps other than steelworkers—experienced job insecurity and economic instability during the heyday of the postwar boom.
Research projects in history rarely end up exactly where one thinks they will, and given the emergence of the dominant theme of insecurity and instability, this book ended up being more about access to auto work than about the lives of individual autoworkers. That was unexpected, especially since it was the interviewees that pointed the research toward those themes. It is worth mentioning in conclusion that despite experiencing such instability and insecurity, the people interviewed for this book did not necessarily consider these years to have been the worst of times. Most were not eager to relive them, for sure, but a sense of pride came through in having persevered through and having conquered tremendous challenges. In most cases, UAW membership in the fifties played a significant role in their lives, in part with negotiated wages and benefits, but more so by securing access to livelihoods through grievance procedures. Many would have been fired at some point early in their auto careers if not for successful union intervention, and this was often the first realization for relatively new hires that the UAW had a presence in the plants beyond claiming dues. During the fifties most of these interviewees were too preoccupied with trying to scratch out a living, raise kids, deal with marriages, and keep hopes and dreams alive to consider that they would someday be viewed as having ridden the crest of the postwar boom to comfortable, middle-class status. If they had paid attention to such talk at the time—for example, from leading economists or the Detroit Board of Commerce—they would have found it laughable. Indeed, interviews suggest that many younger autoworkers in the 1950s, at least those who managed to survive the industry’s turbulence, did not experience stability and security until the 1970s, when they had high seniority, the postwar boom was over, and those with low seniority were most affected by that decade’s volatility.7