I’m not trying to overblow what this represented, but you could see the outlines of the thing. Faced with the third vote and a dire prediction of what could happen and how the work could go elsewhere in the Chrysler empire, a lot of black workers were conflicted. The most radical and conscious said, “I’m not going to knuckle under this even if it does bite me in the ass because I’ve got pride.” Those were a minority of individuals. Another group of people said, “Damn, if I blow this,” and they may have had kids starting college, “I’m going from a decent wage and benefits to McDonald’s wages and how am I going to do it.”

So a division shaped up in this mass meeting. You had a lot of white skilled workers there who were infected with more or less to varying degrees racism and imperial attitudes like a labor aristocracy. At the same time they felt that democracy and democratic rights were important and they didn’t want to be screwed over by elites and the union. This contradiction is the American attitude. The union bosses were forcing the vote that was going the other way.

A lot of the black workers were very solemn and saw this was a very bad situation and they would probably end up voting “yes” the next time around. Sections of the white skilled tradesmen were standing up and saying from a narrow and backward mindset that the UAW was Communist-dominated and everyone knows that in the Communist countries they say they are the saviors of the workers but they dominate them and allow them no rights. At one meeting one of the skilled tradesmen came up to me and said something like “we appreciate the stance you’re taking and trying to get the production workers to take a stand, but you’re going to learn the lesson that the things that are holding the union back is that the bureaucracy are a bunch of lawyers and the other thing is the black workers as a whole are holding this back culturally.” You could see the racist attitudes.

The background here is important. At this point the UAW is a big institution with a serious publications division, which at this time was being run by one of the leaders of the Communist Labor Party. I think he had left them at this point but he was a friend of Tom Hayden. There were other leftists from the anti-dogmatic trend of the Maoists in there. The UAW magazine would come to every worker’s home. It was against the death squads in El Salvador. It was heralding union rights in the South African struggle. It had a section for “cultural workers.” They were championing labor rights internationally.

It came out in this same period that at one of the down river plants a white gay skilled tradesmen came out as part of a gay counter-demonstration in struggle over the Cracker Barrel chain’s homophobic hiring practices. Other autoworkers from the Christian fundamentalist side saw him as the pro-gay side and gave him crap. The union bureaucracy intervened from its social democratic perspective at that time and warned the workers not to mess with this guy. One major union official went to a major gay rights march in Washington and the UAW highlighted it in their magazine. At the same time this leftist vibe is going on in the bureaucracy, when it comes to fight the company on the contract and the work struggle it wanted to attack the democracy of its own workers.

The larger context here is that the UAW bureaucrats were saying we can’t fight the single capitalists—which is a true statement—but then they would say we have to win at the ballot box and elect Democrats—it’s who controls the government they would say. They were doing all this leftist stuff—and it’s all necessary—but it’s along the lines of a liberal and social democratic basis. It tries to come down on any direct action and alienates the militant but backward sectors of the workers.

This all led to a conservative thing. Generally, in the 1980s everything got reduced to where we were told everything that came up in the factory would be resolved with votes for the Democrats. The union regime got more, even more conservative than it already was and workers felt even more powerless.

At this point I took the first opportunity for a buy-out. Our political work in the RSL was coming to an end and we were turning to the anarchist regroupment project represented by Love and Rage. I wanted to deemphasize the work I was doing and have the freedom to move around and put myself in more youthful and more radical places. Part of it was also escaping the drudgery of the work. As hard as the work was when I came in, there were political dividends, but these had disappeared and worn off.

I briefly ended up in the UAW in a third-tier sweatshop during the Love and Rage and Anti-Racist Action (ARA) days. At my age at that point I couldn’t keep up with the work though. I think ARA—doing a balance sheet of its positives and negatives—missed an opportunity here. It was part because of the overwhelming domination—although it wasn’t everybody—of the idea of the “rejection of work.” ARA missed an opportunity to have a piece of its people try and shift its focus from the punk and anti-racist skinhead scene and go into a belt of factories around here in Detroit that would be represented in industries nationwide to find similar situations.

There was a huge belt of small factories in the suburbs that did parts manufacturing, which peaked during the Clinton boom years. They moved much of it either down south or overseas. These were filled with majority young workers of all races and many immigrants. Many were unionized, but they were third-tier secondary status. In the factory that I was at, I was part of an organized movement to reject the contract and the UAW came in and did the same thing they did at Chrysler. Only this time they said if you don’t vote this contract the “right way” come Friday then you will have a non-unionized plant. They said out in the Battle Creek area there’s a non-unionized plant and the flatbed trucks are going to load up the dyes and move it there.

We said look you’re supposed to organize against this and prevent it. And they said look, you are unhappy about the speed of the work, the forced overtime and the regime here. You’re not happy about wages, but if this was non-union you wouldn’t have the health and benefit package you have so quit crying and shut up. So there was a rebellion against the UAW, but ARA didn’t get organized in that. There was also racist issues that many of these immigrant and black workers were facing in the suburbs. When they came out to the suburbs or lived there they were harassed by police and racists.

NB: So you have a situation where management and the union chiefs are saying it’s either McDonald’s or this current job. Or they say well, if you won’t take a cut in this then the benefits are going. People today continue facing decisions like these alone or in small groups, unseen and disconnected. What’s the alternative? What else can people do?

Ermler: Well, I think the stuff that the UAW bureaucracy points out which goes back historically with the Left, the working class can’t win real changes if it confronts things as individuals and not as a class. It can’t keep staying within the confines of this whole collective bargaining law that had come into place since the CIO upsurge. Most workers are ignorant of the power they have collectively and there is a certain cynicism that says, “My union keeps selling me out then they all must be on the take,” and they don’t realize it’s a political problem. There’s people who aren’t crooks. It’s that union leaders have bad political interests and perspectives. They put together coalitions that say they are going to beat the Republicans.

We have to confront people as a class, the labor movement, workers’ organizations, have to be championing demands that people on the outside can have possibilities opened up for them and we have to be raising that programmatically. People have to say resistance, no matter how militant, has to be generalized with more sectors coming in. Workers have to be reminded again that this is against a whole set of labor laws and the union leaders don’t want to fight this. Union treasuries can be fined and bankrupt and pensions can be attacked.

We also don’t have the type of people that might risk more than a few days jail—a symbolic thing. The whole course of the last decades and decades hasn’t bred that kind of people. We have to get back to thinking in terms of the mass strike and general strike, which is “illegal.” We have to realize that we don’t have any organizations that can help implement that now so we also have to tell people that you got to build these by starting small and federating with other people. This should be mixed with the education about the larger questions. And this has to be done in the context of building a base that isn’t easy and takes time. There has to be union organizing among the majority of workers who aren’t unionized in this country.

There needs to be demands on the ruling class to cough up money—say of the war budget—and put it under union control. A strong movement needs to demand from local capitalists that there needs to be investment in this area and re-training when needed. These must be administered not by management or the rulers but it has to be separate money not taken from workers’ wages. It has to be administered by union and community representatives. Of course, in a period of transition these people aren’t going to be revolutionaries, but this process can show the outlines of what a self-managing society can be and open up those possibilities. We need to talk about the idea of metropolitan councils. It’s the idea of the central labor council, but actually radical that aims toward revolutionary workers’ councils.

I’ve had workers say to me because they have respected what I have done on the job at various times and they ask this same question, “What do you think should be done?” And you lay it out and they say, “Well, I don’t see that happening.” And you tell them there needs to be long-range planning and they say, “Well, that’s a lot of work.” People’s job and family are on their minds. We could be in a situation where people are going to keep retreating until they say enough is enough and then we are going to see something. I don’t know when that is coming or what form, but it will have to be on a new generation to a large degree. But only this is going to reverse the defeat and deal with the present attacks on workers.

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