Even before the Japanese kicked the hell out of the domestic auto industry in the seventies during and after the Arab Oil Embargo, the GM brass knew they were going to get an ass kicking. So what did they do about it? Nothing. They actually laughed about it.
“What the hell are we going to do about it?” asked the GM CEO at one meeting.
“Yeah. What the hell are we going to do about it?” asked Darius Delaney’s grandfather at the same meeting.
“Nothing,” was the unanimous decision.
“Fuck the Japs. We kicked their ass once and we’ll kick it again,” vice-president Harold, plant manager John Dunham’s father-in-law, of Cranston, Ohio, fame said.
And they went on to discuss their pay packages and bonuses. After that business, they discussed the declining productivity of their plants. “Walter Reuther said he would take care of that,” GM Chairman Roche said. That is what Roche had told Sylvia Porter in an interview in 1969. That sure had been fun, getting interviewed by Sylvia. He always remembered his exact words concerning increased productivity: “This, labor itself must decide to do. Labor must be realistic in recognizing its obligations to increase its productivity. This is the key solution to the problem of inflation.”
But Walter Reuther had died in a plane crash on May 9, 1970, on the way to Black Lake, the site of the UAW education retreat being built in the woods in Michigan, up by the Mackinac Bridge. The Walter and May Reuther Family Education Center provided many decades of first rate union education programs as Reuther had intended.
Leonard Woodcock, Walter’s replacement as UAW International President, and a member of Richard Nixon’s original Enemies List, had pretty much told Roche he was full of shit. “You clowns start managing the company and we’ll hold up our end. We need to modernize, to build a variety of cars. And oil is not going to get cheaper. You’ve seen these Toyotas? They get thirty-five miles to the gallon. You should talk to DeLorean. If he can ever get that Vega off his neck, he’s got some damn good ideas about small, fuel efficient cars.” John DeLorean, designer of the Pontiac GTO, and later head of the Pontiac division and then the Chevrolet division of General Motors, walked out of his big GM office one day and never came back. Some said he was fired and some said he smoked too much dope and just wandered out of his office and never returned. In any case, he would leave the company in 1973, and GM would still have only the rusty, warped-block Vega with which to fight Toyota.
GM’s solution to lagging productivity and the Toyota problem was to crack the whip, make the workers work harder. Good, old-fashioned hard work would solve all their problems. But the union saw differently. The sporadic wildcat strikes continued, and in 1972, the Norwood, Ohio, plant would hit the street for 174 days, the longest strike in GM history. Lordstown in Ohio, one of the newest GM plants, the one which made the lowly Vega, hit the street on a regular basis. And of course there was the Cranston stamping plant, until recently a sore spot for GM.
After its wildcat strike in 1970, which occurred only days after the national sixty-seven day strike, the Cranston plant, under the watch of GM brass and the International UAW, started building its reputation as one of the most productive plants in the nation. Milt Jeffers’ job had been spared when it was found he had the blowjob pictures of Harold, the GM vice-president and father-in-law of John Dunham. John, by the way, would later go on to be a vice-president in charge of the Quality Work Life Program, originally called the Department of No Drinking on the Job. John had never wanted another drink after his 13 electroshock therapy treatments at Cranston General Hospital in 1970. The big men the UAW had sent to town made a deal with Milt—they wouldn’t kill him, and he would give them the pictures.
Just after Thanksgiving in 1970, a dozen hourly and salaried Cranston employees started a bowling league together, the first joint union/management bowling league in the nation. They called it the “Crazy Bowling League,” ostensibly named after a fellow named Craze who had died in Vietnam, but for those in the know, the league was named after the revelation in the local loony bin that insanity was the state of auto industry employees, union and management, everywhere.
There had been a preacher, Oakley Wilson, in the Cranston General psychiatric ward the day that the plant manager and shop chairman had arrived together for treatment. He watched in amazement as the men hugged and cheered in the loony bin lounge, as they shared the revelation that they were all equal because of their insanity. Oakley had just had his thirty-ninth electroshock treatment for alcoholism, and he vowed to stay straight this time around. He had wrecked nine cars, been divorced four times, and jailed six times in the last decade. Oakley had had enough.
When Oakley got out, he turned in a suggestion and arranged meetings with the plant manager and shop chairman, who also had paper trails certifying their insanity, and pointed out the dollar savings if they just started treating drunks for alcoholism instead of depression, saving the Cranston plant alone millions every year by eliminating the electroshock therapy program at Cranston General Hospital. When they had trotted the plan out at a GM board meeting, the projected savings were about a quarter billion dollars over five years nationwide. Thus it was that Cranston set up the first program to treat its insane employees for alcoholism instead of insanity. The program sounded complicated, but was really very simple. The local hospital president and the local psychiatrists were upset, but they quickly learned that there was money to be made out of treating drunks. Cranston became known as a progressive plant. In Cranston, a drunk was called a drunk.
And while Cranston might have figured the insanity thing out first, the rest of the nation was not far behind. There was another contract coming up, and the issues were quickly becoming about the human beings who worked in the plants. The fight was already on as the Norwood strike showed. The union would be pushing to humanize its plants, and the company would be pushing to wring more money out of every worker. A collision of sorts was inevitable. And what all the differences finally boiled down to was the issue of “voluntary overtime.” The men in the plants had been working seven days a week, 12 hours a day for years. The issue could just as easily have been over alcoholism, since that was the result of working seven days a week. But alcoholism was still confused with insanity, and the union didn’t want its workers labeled drunks or lunatics either one, so they settled on “voluntary overtime" as the issue.
Ever since Walter Reuther had led the charge to convert America’s manufacturing might from domestic to wartime in 1941, the UAW commanded respect from people in high places. Wrote Laurence G. O’Donnell in the Wall Street Journal before the 1973 contract, “…union leaders are already talking about the need to ‘humanize’ factories, enrich jobs and spread the workload over more workers. Indeed, it seems certain that life in GM’s…plants—the pace of work, the monotony, the authority of management—will be a central issue in the contract talks. And in the meantime, it seems certain that workers will continue militant resistance to management’s efficiency drive.” Even the wise Mr. O’Donnell didn’t know the contract was about the workforce being drunk and crazy.
Over the next decade, the UAW tamed General Motors. Safety training, education, and the treatment of alcoholism and substance abuse, to name a few workplace improvements, were addressed through contract negotiations.
General Motors became a driving force for civil rights. Where before, the hiring was solely at the discretion of local plant management groups, the corporation set guidelines concerning hiring. No matter that the impetus was the federal government and the United Auto Workers, General Motors began hiring women and minorities in numbers sufficient to comply with federal law.
But even as it became a good corporate citizen, General Motors failed to address the issues which would gradually erode its market share. The company was slow to challenge its foreign competitors with new products. GM did not address, as the UAW urged, the viability of national health care, furthering its disadvantage to foreign automakers, all of which had the help of their governme
nts in providing health care for their employees.
The Cranston plant boomed. It became the largest, most efficient stamping plant in the world. So what did General Motors do with its most productive factory? It shut the fucking place down!
Part III
November, 2008
The End