The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (90 page)

Against this backdrop of discontent, an inexorable process of polarization unfolded—Ford workers became receptive to unions as a way to redress their grievances, and their employer vowed to stop them. Throughout the 1930s, the UAW struggled to gain a toehold at the company, and the spectacle riveted national attention on Dearborn. The first stage of the contest began shortly after the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when Ford workers at plants in Pennsylvania and New Jersey walked off the job, decrying wages and working conditions. They tried to associate with the American Federation of Labor, but Ford refused to recognize the union and crushed the insurgency. Later in 1933, the NRA Compliance Board recommended prosecuting the company for violations of Section 7A of the NIRA, which protected employees who sought to organize and bargain collectively. The Justice Department concluded that the case would be difficult, expensive, and controversial, however, and declined to prosecute.

In 1935, two developments shifted the terrain for this ongoing labor battle. First, congressional passage of the Wagner Act guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain collectively and established the NLRB to administer and enforce this law. The same year saw the founding of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) by John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, and other representatives of industrial unions. A short time later, the UAW affiliated itself with the CIO, thus setting the stage for a new unionization push at the Rouge. It began in the spring of 1937. A few months after the Battle of the Overpass came an NLRB ruling that found Ford guilty of violating the Wagner Act for interfering with unionization and firing workers who tried to organize. The struggle settled into a contest of wills over the next two years. As the company resisted, the UAW crusade bogged down. The union split into two contending factions—one associated with the CIO and the other with the AFL—each of whom tried to organize Ford workers.
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Throwing up breastworks to halt the union's drive for support, a determined
Henry Ford marshaled all of his power and resources. He had always opposed unions, even in his earliest days as a reforming industrialist. Though declaring laborers needed better wages, he argued in 1916 that unions “mean [class] war, and I don't believe in war. Perhaps labor unions are necessary when the people haven't got any other defense against special privilege. But I think when we get the facts before the people, special privilege will die out.” Ford believed that union labor was not needed at his factory because “we recognize human beings and their right to just wages.” He continued to denounce unions in the 1920s. He often added an anti-Semitic slant to his earlier critique. Unions were organized not by laborers but by “these Jew financiers. The labor union is a great scheme to interrupt work. It speeds up the loafing,” he told
Collier's
in 1923.”It's a great thing for the Jew to have on hand when he comes around to get his clutches on an industry.”
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Thus Ford's hostility to unionization during the Great Depression was no sudden occurrence, but the end point of a long opposition. Yet an interesting question lingers
—why
did Ford reject unions, especially in light of his lifelong advocacy of high wages, shortened work hours, and other reforms for workers? In fact, his position was a complex one based on the same trio of convictions that fueled his criticism of the New Deal.

Ford's antiunionism sprang from a traditionalist ideology of rugged individualism. Even amid the severe dislocations of the Great Depression, he saw American society as a place where the individual stood on his own two feet, deployed his labor and talents to his best advantage, and competed. Unions defiled this vision. As an employer, he claimed that “a man could
ask
him to do anything, beg him, but he couldn't drive him.” Unions also violated the individual integrity of the worker. “A man loses his independence when he joins a labor group of any kind, and he suffers as a result,” Ford stated. Workers who joined unions lost a measure of their freedom because they paid dues to an organization and got little in return beyond political maneuvering and attempted coercion. Committed to the values of an earlier age, Ford remained convinced that the employer-employee relationship was an agreement between consenting individuals. “The main thing to consider, after all, is freedom,” he stated in 1937.”That's the foundation of America. The men in our plants are free, and they are better off for it.”
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Ford's individualist mind-set appeared even more clearly in his refusal to recognize such distinctions as “capital” and “labor.” The notion of class differences involving power relations had no place in his worldview. He condemned “this habit we have of talking of ‘labor’ as if it was a class apart from others, as if ‘labor’ and ‘business’ were two antagonistic opponents,” he declared. “Most of the business men of this country came out of labor.
Where else can they come from? I belong to ‘labor.’ It is all I have done all my life.” Since Ford saw no distinction between workers who put forth a good effort and businessmen who sought to make a product efficiently, sell it at a low price, and pay high wages, bargaining between employers and employees made little sense. ”We're all workers together, the men and I,” he contended.
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Ford also believed that unions elevated class concerns above the primacy of the consumer. Modern mass production provided material goods efficiently and cheaply, he said, and they were entitled to the fruits of abundance. Consumers subsumed labor, since all workers purchased commodities. According to Charles Sorensen, who understood Ford's philosophy better than anyone, his boss opposed unions because, “when labor has the power to dictate wages and what it will give for the wage received, it claims for itself the first benefit of mass production. The consumer is forgotten.”
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Ford's pronouncements throughout the 1930s continued to boost consumer interests. He repeatedly argued that interest groups of any kind, whether financiers or labor unions, hindered providing goods at reasonable prices. “There are thousands of things that could be produced cheaply today for the comfort and convenience of the common man except for control manifested by finance and organizations of one sort or another,” he wrote in a 1937 antiunion article. In fact, he argued, the impetus for high wages came not from unions but from businessmen who realized that, “if we don't do our part to create a market by paying good wages, we can't sell our goods.” In his view, the employer and the employee shared the same goal of spreading material prosperity and paying sufficient wages to promote consumption. “I have never bargained with my men, I have always bargained
for
them,” Ford wrote in 1933. “It would be strange to set my men and me trying to get the better of each other. I think we have made better bargains for them than any could, or than they could make for themselves.” By paying his men well, Ford had made them good consumers, and now unions threatened to interrupt the flow of abundance.
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Finally, Ford's populist streak led him to believe that unions had emerged in the 1930s as creatures of Wall Street forces who were determined to control the modern corporate state. He felt that labor organizations, much like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, were being manipulated by financiers to undermine independent, progressive businesses such as the Ford Motor Company. “Wall Street wants to stabilize things at some level,” Ford stated. “They have industry pretty well controlled on the management side and if they can control labor, through the unions, they think they will have it stabilized. The unions were created by Wall Street—by capital—to bring about that control.” Independent companies like his disrupted this
process of corporate consolidation. If Wall Street could force them into union agreements, production could be regularized, competition stifled, and high profits guaranteed for even lackluster companies.
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In a 1937 interview with the Detroit
News,
Ford aired his views on the Wall Street manipulation of the union movement. “Financial interests in New York have always controlled a large part of American industrial management,” Ford asserted. “But control of management is not enough for them. They must control labor also, else their whole scheme fails. They must have someone who can get the employees under command just as the managers are.” This small group of financiers sought to control both employers and workers so they could set prices, dividends, and wages. “There is no mystery about the connection between corporation control and labor control,” Ford concluded. “They are simply the two ends of the same rope.” Thus Ford saw the great contest of the 1930s not as one between capital and labor, but between producers and nonproducers. On the one side stood independent, service-minded businessmen and workers; on the other, the allied forces of big finance, government bureaucracy, and labor organizations. At stake was the well-being of the American consumer.
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Ford's opposition to unions made for a vigorous ideological debate. But in light of the abuse of workers at his plants, it was indefensible. His high-minded depiction of enlightened businessmen and dedicated workers joined in a happy alliance of producers was a fantasy that did not reflect the reality of the Rouge under the domination of Harry Bennett's service department. Crucial questions remain unanswered. Did Henry Ford order the oppressive practices in his factories prevalent by the 1930s? Did he know about them and cynically look the other way? Or was he unaware of the ways in which Ford workers were driven, fired capriciously, intimidated, and physically assaulted?

The evidence is mixed, and the conclusions are often ironic. Charles Sorensen, one of Ford's greatest admirers, claimed that his boss knew about everything that went on at the Rouge. He argued that “one of the great myths about Henry Ford” was the notion that Bennett had duped the owner and created a tyrannical organization behind his back. Sorensen said flatly, “Bennett never had any real power other than that delegated to him by Henry Ford. He was a ‘yes man’ who did as he was told, and promptly.” On the other hand, Keith Sward, one of Ford's sharpest critics, described as “credible” the assertion that he remained ignorant of the labor abuses at the Rouge. Although he refused to absolve Ford of blame, Sward offered the possibility that Bennett and others had done things in Ford's name that he would not have condoned.
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As for Ford, he never directly addressed the issue. Circumstantial evidence
suggests a conclusion somewhere between the extremes: that Ford was partially aware of the abuse of labor, but failed to comprehend its scope because of his advanced age, his uncritical regard for Bennett, his blind hatred of unions, and the extra-company projects that were taking up most of his time. Whereas one can figure that Ford would fire employees for failure to work, it is harder to believe that he would approve goons' punching workers who were waiting in line for their paychecks.

Disputes with his own managers further twisted Ford's view of labor conditions in the company. A significant group of company executives, led by Edsel Ford, believed that unions were inevitable in the modern world and wanted to negotiate with the UAW. For Henry Ford, ever jealous of his own power and prerogatives, such opposition only strengthened his resolve to fight unionization. Regarding Edsel, of course, the personal reinforced the political. Long suspicious of his son's conciliatory personality, Henry found Edsel's views to be another confirmation of weakness. A furious Ford senior kept his son on the margins of the labor struggle. As his emissary, Bennett plunged ahead with an antiunion strategy based on harassment of organizers, intimidation of workers, and encouragement of factionalism within the union ranks between partisans of the CIO and those of the AFL. This strategy worked for a while.
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By 1940, however, the UAW-CIO began to gain the upper hand. Announcing a major campaign to unionize Ford, it lined up significant support among company workers as tensions again escalated. Moreover, General Motors and Chrysler had signed contracts with the union. Sitdown strikes at GM plants in Flint and Cleveland in 1936 had spread to other facilities, and when the governor of Michigan (with the backing of President Roosevelt) hesitated to enforce an injunction to evict the strikers, resistance collapsed. In February 1937, GM agreed to recognize the UAW as the collective-bargaining agency for its workers. At Chrysler, sitdown strikes had also crippled the company until Walter Chrysler had agreed to negotiate with John L. Lewis. In April, Chrysler declared that the UAW would be the principal bargaining agent for its workers and granted wages, hours, and working conditions similar to those at GM.
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The Ford Motor Company found itself increasingly isolated. It suffered a legal setback in early 1941, when the Supreme Court refused to review a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which had supported the NLRB by holding that the company must reinstate some two dozen employees fired for union activity. A few weeks later, the UAW-CIO organized a massive strike at the Rouge, with thousands of picketers assaulting nonstriking workers who attempted to go to their jobs. Ford and Bennett continued their obstinate opposition. With the governor of Michigan
and Edsel Ford serving as mediators, however, an agreement was finally reached to hold an election on unionization under the auspices of the NLRB. On May 21,1941, workers received a ballot on which they could choose a union affiliate or no union at all. The result was clear—the UAWCIO won about 70percent of the total vote, the AFL about 27percent. Less than 3percent of the workers voted for no union at all. By mid-June, a formal contract had been drawn up between the company and the union, but Henry Ford refused to sign it. In a meeting with Sorensen and Edsel, he vowed to close down his plants rather than submit to unionization. When Sorensen suggested that the government might intervene if Ford would not sign, the old man replied angrily, “Well, if the government steps in, it will be in the motorcar business and it won't be me.”
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