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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Sol Dollinger and Genora Johnson Dollinger, Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers' Union (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000) |
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THIS VALUABLE WORK is really a collection of extended pieces by Sol Dollinger and Genora Johnson Dollinger. Each in its own way makes an important contribution to our understanding of the formative years of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and will be of use to both scholars and activists. |
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Part I is Sol Dollinger's history and participant's account of the left and the UAW from 1934 to 1948. Dollinger stresses the importance of thousands of union-conscious non-party workers in taking on some of America's biggest corporations. Although much of his work deals with the various left groups and faction fighting within the newborn organization, he never loses sight of the many extraordinary leaders thrown up in the heat of battle. He shows that "the auto workers' organizational drive was a great volunteer movement unparalleled in the history of labor." (54) He devotes special attention to Toledo (Auto-Lite and Chevrolet strikes) and Flint (GM Sit- Down). As the UAW began to grow he traces the fight against Homer Martin and then against the No Strike Pledge. Dollinger writes from a Trotskyist perspective and does not claim any evenhandedness. For him the combination of Walter Reuther, the Taft-Hartley Act, and the rise of McCarthyism meant the destruction of a cadre of unionists who had built the union "from the bottom up," and meant that the next generation of unionists would be unable to learn from them. Dollinger also devotes special attention to the beating inflicted on Genora Dollinger by Mafia thugs connected to the Briggs Manufacturing Company. The Reuthers showed little interest in this attack and were thus unprepared for the murderous assaults on Walter and Victor, probably from the same source, in the following years. Part III is made up of three brief articles on the making of "Babies and Banners," the dispute over who led the Flint Sit-Down strike, and Sol's final comments on the UAW, each valuable in its own way. |
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Part II is a 37-page reprint of a pamphlet by Genora Johnson Dollinger on her years in the auto workers' union in Flint and Detroit. It contains a wealth of information and insights from that era. She had the ear and eye for the telling detail. She notes how in the pre-union shops workers were never called by their names. They would just be "Whitey" or "Shorty" or some other nickname, working in an environment that stripped them of their personal identity. She also catches the oppressiveness of the GM plants, complete with lip readers who would spy on workers' conversations. These conditions make the resistance by men and women all the more thrilling. At a crucial moment during the Flint Sit-Down strike, when Genora was trying to rally women from the crowd watching the struggle, a lone women struggled to come forward. "A cop had grabbed her by the back of her coat. She just pulled out of that coat and started walking toward the battle zone." (134) Such was the heroism that won the strike. She is also keen on the changes that victory brought, how "the auto worker became a different human being." (144) She notes the changes in the home as well as the shop floor. Genora also shows the power of workers who are engaged in a culture of solidarity. When she began to play an active role at Briggs in Detroit, after she could no longer work in Flint, the company fired her before she had finished her probation. Eighteen thousand workers promptly walked out and forced the company to rehire her. That was union power. |
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There are some problems with this book. Sol Dollinger assumes a great deal of knowledge about the 1930s US left. If you did not know the difference between a Lovestonite and the Proletarian Party, he does not tell you. The latter parts of the book need to be read by someone who has seen the marvelous documentary, "With Babies and Banners." But what a good reason to see the film. |
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The Dollingers' book bears comparison to two other workers' memoirs that were published at about the same time. Jack Metzgar's Striking Steel (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000) focuses on his experiences as the son of a steelworker during the 1959 steel strike. Cheri Register's Packinghouse Daughter (New York: Perennial, 2001) recalls her life as the daughter of a packinghouse worker during the 1959 Wilson & Company, Albert Lea, Minnesota strike. Each book reminds us of the value of personal accounts. Of course, the Dollingers were mature activists while Register and Metzgar were teenagers. Yet the three works remind us that the 1930s were truly a decade of advances, while by the 1950s unionists were glad to be able to hold on to past gains and enjoy the fruits of their labours. Genora Johnson Dollinger celebrated the fact that workers could begin to send their kids to college in the 1940s and 1950s. Register and Metzgar are those kids. |
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But if these books portray a tale of working-class victory, Sol Dollinger's grim description of the triumph of the Reuther machine and the crushing of worker democracy tells a different side of the story. Workers' struggles are not like some sort of tide that must inevitably ebb and neap. Their forward gains are not preordained. Had working people been able to withstand the conservative winds of the 1940s, how much further might they have travelled down the road to workers' power, and how much better off might we be in this era of reaction? |
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Seth Wigderson
University of Maine at Augusta
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