Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

Three other imperatives shaped CIO policy: 1. To
maintain settler privilege in the form of reserving the skilled
crafts, more desirable production jobs, and the operation
of the unions themselves to Euro-Amerikans. 2. Any
tactical concessions to Afrikan labor had to conform to the
CIO's need to maintain the unity of Euro-Amerikans. 3.
The CIO's policy on Afrikan labor had to be consistent
with the overall colonial labor policy of the U.S. Empire.
We should underline the fact that rather than challenge
U.S. imperialism's rules on the status and role of colonial
labor, the CIO as settler unions loyally followed those
rules.
To use the automobile industry as a case, there was
considerable integration within the liberal United Auto
Workers (UAW-CIO). That is, there was considerable
recruiting of Afrikan labor to help Euro-Amerikan
workers advance their particular class interests. The first
Detroit Sit-Down was at Midland Steel Frame in 1936. The
UAW not only recruited Afrikan workers to play an active
role in the strike, but organized their families into the CIO
support campaign. Midland Frame, which made car
frames for Chrysler and Ford, was 30% Afrikan. There
the UAW had no reasonable chance of victory without
commanding Afrikan forces as well as its own.
But at the many plants that were overwhelmingly
settler, the CIO obviously treated Afrikan labor differently.
In those majority of the situations the new union supported
segregation. In Flint, Michigan the General Motors
plants were Jim Crow. Afrikans were employed only in the
foundry or as janitors, at sub-standard wages (many, of
course, did other work although still officially segregated
and underpaid as "janitors"). Not only skilled jobs, but
even semi-skilled production line assembly work was
reserved for settlers.
While the UAW fought GM on wages, hours, civil
liberties for settler workers, and so forth, it followed the
general relationship to colonial labor that GM had laid
down. So that the contradiction between settler labor and
settler capitalists was limited, so to say, to their oppressor
nation, and didn't change their common front towards the
oppressed nations and their proletariats.
At the time of the Flint Sit-Down victory in
February, 1937, the NAACP issued a statement raising the
question of more jobs: "Everywhere in Michigan colored
people are asking whether the new CIO union is going to
permit Negroes to work up into some of the good jobs or
whether it is just going to protect them in the small jobs
they already have in General Motors." (37)
That was an enlightening question. Many UAW
radicals had already answered "yes." Wyndham Mortimer,
the Communist Party USA trade union leader who
was 1st Vice-President of the new UAW-CIO, left behind a
series of autobiographical sketches of his union career
when he died. Beacon Press, the publishing house of the
liberal Unitarian-Universalist Church, has printed this
autobiography under the stirring title Organize! In his
own words Mortimer left us an inside view of his secret
negotiations with Afrikan auto workers in Flint.
Mortimer had made an initial organizing trip to
Flint in June, 1936, to start setting up the new union. Anx-
ious to get support from Afrikan workers for the coming
big strike, Mortimer arranged for a secret meeting:
"A short time later, I found a note under my hotel
room door. It was hard to read because so many grimy
hands had handled it. It said, "Tonight at midnight,"
followed by a number on Industrial Avenue. It was signed,
"Henry." Promptly at midnight, I was at the number he
had given. It was a small church and was totally dark. I
rapped on the door and waited. Soon the door was opened
and I went inside. The place was lighted by a small candle,
carefully shaded to prevent light showing. Inside there
were eighteen men, all of them Negroes and all of them
from the Buick foundry. I told them why I was in Flint,
what I hoped to do in the way of improving conditions and
raising their living standards. A question period followed.
The questions were interesting in that they dealt with the
union's attitude toward discrimination and with what the
union's policy was toward bettering the very bad conditions
of the Negro people. One of them said, "You see, we
have all the problems and worries of the white folks, and
then we have one more: we are Negroes."
"I pointed out that the old AFL leadership was
gone. The CIO had a new program with a new leadership
that realized that none of us was free unless we were all
free. Part of our program was to fight Jim Crow. Our program
would have a much better chance of success if the
Negro worker joined with us and added his voice and
presence on the union floor. Another man arose and asked,
"Will we have a local union of our own?" 1 replied,
"We are not a Jim Crow union, nor do we have any
second-class citizens in our membership!"
"The meeting ended with eighteen application
cards signed and eighteen dollars in initiation fees collected.
I cautioned them not to stick their necks out, but
quietly to get their fellow workers to sign application cards
and arrange other meetings.. ." (38)
Mortimer's recollections are referred to over and
over in Euro-Amerikan "Left" articles on the CIO as supposed
fact. In actual fact there was little Afrikan support
for the Flint Sit-Down. Onlyfive Afrikans took part in the
Flint Sit-Down Strike. Nor was that an exception. In the
1937 Sit-Down at Chrysler's Dodge Main in Detroit only
three Afrikan auto workers stayed with the strike. During
the critical, organizing years of the UAW, Afrikan auto
workers were primarily sitting out the fight between settler
labor and settler corporations. (39) It was not their nation,
not their union, and not their fight. And the results of the
UAW-CIO victory proved their point of view.
The Flint Sit-Down was viewed by Euro-Amerikan
workers there as their victory, and they absolutely intended
to eat the dinner themselves. So at Flint's Chevrolet No. 4
factory the first UAW & GM contract after the Sit-Down
contained a clause on "noninterchangibility" reaffirming
settler privilege. The new union now told the Afrikan
workers that the contract made it illegal for them to move
up beyond being janitors or foundry workers. That was the
fruit of the great Flint Sit-Down - a Jim Crow labor contract.
(40) The same story was true at Buick, exposing how
empty were the earlier promises to Afrikan workers.
87 This was not limited to one plant or one city. A