Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [100]
them as the signposts of a new ‘team system’” where workers took control of production. Genora compared this condition with the old assembly line speedups of pre-union eras. She was incensed that Lee accused some of the “old guard unionists” of resisting this “company-union power sharing” and saw this “new” system as a ploy to “appropriate workers’ knowledge to create profits for the bosses.” Lee called this point of view “warmed-over academic Marxism,” which only further infuriated Genora. She told would-be readers that she was one of the “old line” radicals who still thought Marx “has a lot to teach us.” Our troubles and woes were caused by “the class struggle in America between capital and labor. This precept guided us and made it possible for us to win the greatest genuine revolution in labor relations [the UAW victory in 1937] that this country has ever witnessed. From it came the great benefits that permit Brother Lee to speak so condescendingly of our efforts. We made possible the good wages and benefits that he now takes credit for.” Corporate America was “pitting one plant against another; one UAW region against another UAW region; one local union against another local union” and community against community as each fought to retain its local industries and keep CEOs from packing off to Mexico. The “newly found” practice of team work became a contest. If one plant did not match the productivity—and profit level—of another, its workers were laid off or the plant closed entirely. Marx said a century before that when workers are laid off, they do not generally find a new profession that paid them as much as the one they had been required to leave. For Genora, this remained as true in the twentieth century as it had in the nineteenth. Under Lee’s “team work,” Genora penned, seniority ceased to exist. Many of the production jobs demanded young and strong novices. Thus Lee and his colleagues, Genora charged, “made it possible for workers in their early 40s to be discarded by the corporation without recourse and without pension benefits.” It was a pity, she felt, that the union had joined with the corporation in altering workers’ benefits—especially after so many years of struggle to attain them. Present day UAW leaders, from Bieber to Lee, Genora believed, wanted unions with no problems, “roses with no thorns.” Workers of the past had run the gauntlet to achieve success. They believed that their sacrifices would create humane workplaces for those who followed them. Modern-day workers had little or no “historical sense” of “how and why the union built guarantees into the union contracts.” Genora suggested that Lee collaborate with Roger Smith, chairman of the board at GM, to keep any more plants from being built in low-wage countries. Those plants already moved to foreign parts should be disassembled, brought home piece by piece, and American jobs should be restored in America. She closed her article by asserting, “It is sad to see the great institution of labor, which we old radicals made possible with our sweat and blood, destroyed by this new breed of sanctimonious, class-collaborating union leaders.”49 Genora had not been quite so worked up since the lambasting she gave Henry Kraus back in 1986.
In August 1989, Genora and Sol got what they considered stark confirmation of the views Genora expressed in her unpublished article for Searchlight: they returned to Flint for a sit-down commemoration, only to find plants standing idle and empty, the old Chevrolet sign missing, and “forlorn and worried looks on the faces of men and women in anticipation of further industrial decline” because of a union that had been “diminished in strength and vitality.”50
“Runaway” plants were located in Mexico, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. How could this have happened, Genora wanted to know, without protests from the current union leadership? Were the union, the company, and the workers all in collusion to dismantle American industry? Were we observing the demise of industrial unionism in America? So it would seem, at