Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

Afrikan janitors at Chevrolet No. 4 plant learned that GM
was going to lay them off indefinitely. During 1940 and
early 1941, while settler workers were being rehired for war
production in great numbers, Afrikan labor found itself
under attack. (43)
Those Afrikan workers employed in industry
could not defend their immediate class interests through
the CIO, but had to step out of the framework of settler
unionism just to defend their existing jobs. In the Summer
of 1941 there were three Afrikan strikes at Dodge Main
and Dodge Truck in Detroit. The Afrikan workers at Flint
~hevrolet No.4 staged protest rallies and eventually won
their jobs. As late as April 1943 some 3,000 Afrikan
workers at Ford went out on strike for three days toprotest
Ford's hiring policies. The point is that the CIO opposed
Afrikan interests because it followed imperialist colonial
labor policy - and when Afrikan workers needed to defend
their class interests they had to do so on their own,
organizing themselves on the basis of nationality.
It was not until mid-1942 that the CIO and the corporations,
maneuvering together under imperialist coordination,
started tapping Afrikan labor for the production
lines. As much as settlers disliked letting masses of
Afrikans into industry, there was little choice. The winning
of the entire world was at stake, in a "rule or ruin" war.
As the U.S. Empire strained to put forth great armies,
navies and air fleets to war on other continents, the supply
of Euro-Amerikan labor had reached the bottom of the
barrel. To U.S. Imperialism, if the one-and-half million
Afrikan workers in war industry helped the Empire conquer
Asia and Europe it would well be worth the price.
The U.S. War Production Board said: "We cannot
afford the luxury of thinking in terms of white men's
work." So the numbers of Afrikan workers on the production
lines tripled to 8.3% of all manufacturing production
workers. Now the CIO unions, however unhappily, joined
the corporations in promoting Afrikans into new jobs -
even as hundreds of thousands of settler workers were protesting
in "hate strikes." The reality was that settler
workers had government-led, imperialist unions, while colonial
workers had no unions of their own at all. (44)
During World War I1 the CIO completed integrating
itself by picking up many hundreds of thousands
of colonial workers. Many of these new members, we
should point out, were involuntary members. Historically,
the overwhelming majority of Afrikans who have belonged
to the CIO industrial unions in the past 40 years never joined
voluntarily. Starting with the-first Ford contract in
1941, the CIO rapidly shifted to "union shop" contracts.
In these contracts all new employees were required to join
the union as a condition of employment. The modern imperialist
factory in most industries quickly became highly
unionized - whether any of us liked it or not.
The U.S. Government, depending on the CIO as a
key element in labor discipline, encouraged the "union
shop." The U.S. War Labor Board urged corporations to
thus force their employees to join the CIO: "Too often
members of unions do not maintain their membership
because they resent discipline of responsible leadership."
(45) While this applied to all industrial workers, it applied
most heavily to colo~lialabor.
The government and the labor aristocracy were
impatient to get colonial workers safely tied up. If they
were to be let into industry in large numbers they had to be
split up and neutralized by the settler unions - voluntarily
or involuntarily. In the Flint Buick plant, where 588 of the
600 Afrikan workers had been segregated in the foundry
despite earlier CIO promises, the union and GM expected
to win them over by finally letting them work on the production.lines.
To their surprise, as late as mid-1942 the majority
of the Afrikan workers still refused to join the CIO.
(46) The Afrikan Civil Rights organizations, the labor
aristocracy, and the liberal New Deal all had to "educate"
resisting workers like those to get in line with the settler
unions.
The integration of the CIO, therefore, had nothing
to do with increasing job opportunities for Afrikans or
building "working class unity." It was a new instrument of
oppressor nation control over the oppressed nation proletarians.