American Automobile Workers, 1900–1933 by Joyce Shaw Peterson

Abstract

166 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE not highly skilled, “they relied on their ability to compromise the potential of the new technology. For mass production workers, this ‘veto’ could be as effective as the strongest union” (p. 94). This fact did not escape the attention of the work force. In February 1937, rubber workers who took part in a sit-down strike at Goodyear shouted at the plant superintendent: “You may manage this plant, but you don’t control it” (p. 215). Michael Nuwer Dr. Nuwer teaches economics and labor relations at Potsdam College of the State University of New York. American Automobile Workers, 1900-1933. By Joyce Shaw Peterson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Pp. xiv + 231; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $39.50 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Since it contains all the elements of modern mass production— minute division of labor, assembly-line production, sophisticated machinery, and a machine-tending labor force—automobile manufac­ ture is in many ways the prototypical 20th-century industry. This study of the men who made the automobile can, therefore, tell us a great deal about the industrial worker’s experience of modern industry. The book is based primarily on a very imaginative use of such materials as the Wayne State University oral history collection, letters by workers to Henry Ford, a mass of studies undertaken by welfare agencies and “sociological departments” of auto manufactur­ ers in the 1920s, and interviews conducted by the author. One may voice a good many quibbles, yet it is a work of much merit that should be read by anyone interested in the social history of American technology. At the heart of the book is an important thesis: “deskilling,” which many have tried to trace through the 19th century, in reality began after 1908, as a result of the rapid expansion of automobile produc­ tion accompanied by changes in the productive process. As Joyce Peterson demonstrates, it was something that actually happened to many artisans during their working lifetimes. Workers accepted this because of what Peterson portrays as a kind of Faustian bargain whereby they traded away their traditional pride in work and their control over work processes in return for relatively high wages, plentiful jobs, and a gradually improving standard of living. The Depression, ending industry’s ability to offer its superior compensa­ tions, dealt a fatal blow to welfare capitalism and created conditions that led workers into militant union building. That workers were not entirely content with their bargain was indicated by the prevalence of such devices as work slowdowns, absenteeism, frequent change ofjobs, and deliberate abuse of tools. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 167 While some such behavior should be expected as a reaction to boredom, Peterson seems inclined to emphasize its widespread occur­ rence and to interpret it primarily as a deliberate effort of workers to counteract the paternalism of their employers and exert control over their own jobs—union aims, which to Peterson indicates the need for industry-wide unionization. There is something approaching the teleological in Peterson’s vision of the union as the grand goal toward which all events are leading and which provides a measure for the evaluation of earlier behavior. Sometimes her commitment leads to questionable conclusions or to misplaced emphasis. Certainly the effort to forestall a union was an important consideration for management as it contemplated the introduction of various welfare provisions, but so was the need, born of a serious labor shortage, to combat absenteeism and rapid turn­ over. Even more seriously, where Peterson argues that scientific management and mass production combined to leave decision making in the productive process entirely with management, restrained only by its occasional paternalistic willingness to grant handouts, others have pointed out that the net result of the changes brought about by management in the dual hope of forestalling unionization and combating a variety of labor supply problems was less control by management over the decision-making process. Sanford M. Jacoby, for example, in a work encompassing a broader scale in terms both of industries and of time, concluded that it was really only an illusion of freedom that management was able to preserve, not the real article (Employing...