From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 26, 26 June 1950, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Several articles have appeared in Labor Action pointing out the dangers of the five-year term agreed on by the United Auto Workers (CIO) in its new contract with General Motors. It would be especially useful for trade-unionists to think hard about one of these, which emerges with especial force from some recent developments.
The president of GM, Charles E. Wilson, made a speech on June 8 – after the signing of the contract – before the National Press Club which should give one to think furiously.
He seemed to be making a perfectly innocuous point, to begin with. As the New York Times reported:
Mr. Wilson said the central fact that made possible this “entirely different kind” of agreement was the union’s complete acceptance of technological progress as the key to higher living standards and a rejection of “the erroneous idea that machines take the bread out of the workmen’s mouths.”
Nothing wrong with that, is there? Except ... one may wonder at this point, even before Wilson inserts the knife, why the GM tycoon is claiming, by implication, that other unions do not accept this principle.
There was more of the same, all strictly limited by Wilson as applying to the new contract and, by the same implication, not to previous contracts or other unions:
The union, he said, has agreed not only to accept technological advances but has agreed to encourage them. With that kind of cooperation, said Mr. Wilson, General Motors expects to exceed the average gains in the productivity rate achieved by American industry in the last fifty years.
A last example:
Both parties [to the new contract] completely accept the principle of progress including the use of machines, mechanical power and better organization, better working conditions and better arrangement of the work in order not to waste human effort.
If the people of our country really understand this principle and stick to it and are willing to work for the things they would like to have ... I have no worries about our country being able to stand the costs of pensions, insurance and high wages.
All of this would make sense if GM had just made a contract with a union which had previously been denouncing or opposing the use of machinery, assembly lines, “mechanical power,” (!) and other new-fangled inventions. But it need not be pointed out that the UAW has no “Luddite” faction in it. One has to be a student of the rise of capitalism even to recognize the term.
In those earliest days of the new industrial revolution, there were workers who saw the machines as taking the bread out of their mouths and sought direct relief in “machine breaking.” It was, of course, no more useful than modern trust-busting in stopping the development of the inherent potentialities of the new economic system. There are remnants of the attitude today cropping up in isolated instances and in different forms – but never in the mass-production automotive industry and certainly not from Walter Reuther. Reuther, in fact, gained quite a bit of notoriety because of his flair for proposing schemes for greater efficiency in the use of plant capacity.
All that is breaking in an open door. The question is: What is President Wilson talking about?
We propose the following section of the same speech as the starting point:
... a continuing improvement in the standard of living of employees depends upon technological progress ... and a cooperative attitude on the part of all parties in such progress. It further recognizes the principle that to produce more with the same amount of human effort is a sound economic and social objective. That is neither the speedup nor feather bedding; it is just what it says.
The benefits of technology in raising the standard of living of a country can be dissipated through strikes, work restrictions, featherbedding, absenteeism and an artificially short work-week. Without a clear understanding regarding this matter we would not have had the courage to promise in advance a yearly increase in real wages.
So far, GM President Wilson explaining what he likes about the new contract. So far the edge of the knife is not too visible. Wilson didn’t intend it to be.
But without commenting any further ourselves, at this point, we present two other discussions of technological progress – this time from the labor press and not written with reference to the GM contract. The first is from an editorial in the Summit County Labor News of May 5:
The New York Times refers to it as “the newest production science in industry.”
Here’s what it means: By installing more automatic machines and taking full advantage of technological developments industry can reduce the number of its employes and still increase production.
Yep, that’s “automation,” and the Times says its sweeping industry.
That, of course, isn’t news to CIO unions whose members have become victims of “automation.”
They tell us that some of the newest gadgets are simply marvelous, from a technical standpoint, and some of them closely resemble “mechanical brains.”
That isn’t any comfort, however, to the man who’s been tossed out of a job by a machine. Try to tell him he’s making a great contribution to the advancement of industry and he’ll probably say, ‘“Yeah! But what am I supposed to use for money?”
The CIO has never been known as an organization that sought to halt technical developments – but it has been known, too, as an organization greatly concerned over the welfare of those who lose jobs through no fault of their own.
“Automation” is creating a problem – a problem that can reach serious national proportions unless something is done about it.
We’re not suggesting that there’s a simple answer or that we even have the answer. What we’re saying, however, is that those close to the problem had better start studying it immediately and come up with some solution.
This labor newspaper is proposing it as a problem for labor – which it certainly is. But note that the reference to the New York Times also brings out that it is equally a problem posed before the capitalist owners of industry – especially with regard to their labor relations.
Our second exhibit gets down to the point. It is from the weekly newspaper of the railroad unions, Labor , for May 27:
Why, in the midst of record production and general prosperity, is America faced by the problem of increasing unemployment?
As Labor has reported previously, that mystery has claimed the attention of business writers and government officials, including President Truman. Now comes the Federal Reserve Board, to point up the issue and present new evidence.
The board’s Monthly Bulletin observes that increasing “productivity” has been one cause of rising unemployment, and cites the huge profits which corporations piled up during the war as an important factor.
These large profits “have encouraged business to spend record amounts for new machinery and equipment of highly efficient design,” the Bulletin says. This has meant increased total production without a corresponding rise in the number of workers employed.
This was born out by a Commerce Department announcement a few days earlier that total national production has climbed back to the record level of late 1948 after last year’s decline.
But the number of unemployed has not dropped correspondingly.
The jobless problem is made worse by the fact that increasing population has brought a rise of about 1 million a year in the total of job seekers.
We’re at the question of unemployment, then – the peculiar kind of unemployment which exists at the present time and which bids fair to become worse, not better. It is not the kind of unemployment which existed in the Great Depression of the ’30s, and which was accompanied by the breakdown of industrial production – idle plants, idle machinery, closed banks and spider-webbed wheels. Just as during the ’30s we used to speak of starvation in the midst of plenty, so today we see mounting unemployment in the midst of maintained productivity.
If the ’30s are not back with us now, if the U.S. has avoided the crash into a recurrent depression, that is due – as we have analyzed many times before, and as even capitalist economists have pointed out in their own way, notably Professor Sumner Slichter – to the shoring up of the system by the cold-war economy. But this is not our theme now.
The fact is that due to the cold-war economy on the one side, and technological progress on the other, we see the rise of unemployment without the accompaniment of industrial crisis in the sense of the ’30s. It can lead to a crisis, depending on how far the government is willing to go in fostering the contemporary tendencies toward the dominance of production of the means of destruction in the economy. But whether it does or does not, in the next period or before the greater crisis of war overtakes, unemployment does not become any the less a horrid specter before labor.
The Summit County Labor News called on labor to “come up with some solution.” What solutions are there?
There is the basic solution, of course – as basic as is the tendency of capitalism to throw workers on the scrapheap as their place is taken by “automation.” Technological progress should lead to ever-increasing productivity and ever-rising standards of living. Produce more with less labor, says Wilson: but that can have two results not one. It can mean: (1) produce more; and it can mean: (2) produce with fewer workers. The fact is that, under this private-profit system, it has been doing both: raising productivity and throwing workers out of jobs. Both can mean greater profits for the machine owners, and both are done.
The basic solution is not machine-breaking. It is utilizing the greater productivity of the machine for realizing the potentialities of plenty for all. But this requires the elimination of the private-profit owners of industry and a socialist economy. The solution, in fact, is too basic for the backward labor movement of the U.S. today.
But there is also a solution on the trade-union level. It is the solution which the trade-union movement is going to have to “come up with” as the problem intensifies, as it has done before. It is: Spread the work! Shorten the work-week or work-day! Maintain production ichile keeping everyone employed at decent union wages!
It is this demand of labor, looming right on the horizon, which is the problem which GM President Wilson was talking about. Closely bound up with it is the problem of the speedup, especially in the auto industry.
And Wilson, as we saw in his speech, specifically swung the edge of his knife against such demands by labor which, from his own point of view and only for his point of view of profits, would “dissipate” the gains of technological progress – that is, “dissipate” some of the gains into the hands of the workers. The knife was swung against “an artifically short work-week,” and against strikes to counter speedup.
But there is nothing in the GM contract which stops the UAW workers’ fight against speedup, up to and including strikes and job action, assuming that the UAW leaders do not stand in their way. What the GM contract does stop – for five years, a half-decade – is any effort by the union to spread employment at the expense of profit. What the UAW cannot get from GM, since the contract cannot be reopened on these points, are any new provisions if and when the problem of technological unemployment becomes overwhelming.
As the labor editorialist said, labor has to “come up with a plan.” A black feature of the GM contract, side by side with the gains it registered and as the price of those gains, is that the UAW threw away – for five years – the main answer that labor has today.
This, to be sure, is only one aspect of the GM contract. It is for that matter, only one aspect of the dangers of the five-year term. But it points up the reasons why the five-year feature of the GM contract is a trap for labor, and not the trivial concession which the UAW leaders tend to make it out to be.
Last updated on 7 January 2024