Books reissue describes building the union at Ford

Brother Bill McKie, Building the Union at Ford, Phil Bonosky, International Publishers, NYC, $8.50, reissued 2000.

International Publishers has reissued Phil Bonosky's tribute to the work and life of Bill McKie, a Communist and founder of the United Auto Workers with Brother Bill Mckie.

Mckie came to Detroit from Scotland to visit his daughter in 1927. In Scotland he had been a militant member of the Sheet Metal Workers Union. Now at the age of 50 he was hired as a maintenance sheet metal worker. The description of the way 6,000 men shaped up and offered their labor at $6 a day is heart breaking.

Bonosky describes the way Harry Bennet, Ford's Chief of Security, protected Ford's citadel by keeping out of the plant anyone who sympathized with the idea of unionism. Bennet made a practice of getting hardened convicts paroled to his custody and hiring them to terrorize the workers.

McKie found a copy of "The Ford Worker," a four-page mimeographed sheet, which was published by Communists and financed by the small contributions of Communist and militant workers in the plant. The paper was distributed by the wives and sisters and children at the Ford plantgate.

McKie found the Communitst Party bookshop and later, at a meeting, he met Philip Raymond, a Communist and secretary of Local 127 of the Auto, Aircraft and Vehicle Workers of America - a forerunner of the UAW.

Bonosky's book describes the awful conditions with men on the production line being afraid to even go to the bathroom. When it came time to change shifts, the workers coming in just stepped onto the line and took over from those who were getting of work. The line never stopped.

Ford's policy of hiring African Americans got him lots of good publicity, but they were all confined to work in the foundry - the dirtiest jobs in the plant.

On Aug. 28, 1934, the Daily Worker carried an article describing conditions at the Ford plant - signed "a Ford worker."

McKie was fired right after the article appeared and was blacklisted all over the automobile industry. At 60 years of age and unemployed, he joined the Communist Party. One of the big factors in McKie joining the Party was the murder of Joe York, local head of the Young Communist League, and Joe Bussell, Coleman Leny and Joe De Blasio during the Hunger March twenty-three other workers lay seriously wounded - 70,000 people came to march in the funeral.

The demands of the march were: jobs for all laid-off Ford workers, payment of 50 percent of full wages, a seven-hour day with no reduction in pay, no discrimination against African-Americans as to jobs relief and medical services.

Bonosky describes McKie's involvement in the strike at the Briggs plant, which supplied parts to Ford - and the fact that Ford had to close down because of lack of parts. This was a tremendous lesson for the unorganized Ford workers because it showed that Ford could be shut down by its workers, in spite of all the terror and blacklisting that Ford practiced.

McKie knew how to fight for the workers on the job. He fought for and won a public hearing over the death of a Ford worker due to the improper use of cyanide. The worker had died because cyanide powder was all over the workplace.

McKie was a living forerunner of today's AFL-CIO policy of running labor candidates for public office. In 1935 he ran for city council, along with labor attorney Maurice Sugay and Fay O'Camb of the Metal Polishers Union. Bill came up with 8,588 votes and politics in Detroit was never the same after that.

When John L. Lewis headed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), McKie was ready and played a leading role. He had personally signed up more than 2,000 workers into the union and had recruited 200 workers into the Communist Party.

Bonosky says that the AFL-CIO was at the core of FDR election victories and represented the power behind the Wagner Act and the early National Labor Relations Board and was the force that finally put through social reforms, including old age pensions, unemployment compensation and health benefits.

McKie spotted weaknesses in Walter Reuther later to become president of the UAW. The famous Battle of the Overpass - where Reuther and Richard Frankensteen were worked over by Ford's goons - was part of the struggle to organize Ford and became part of labor history and ended up as a complete rout for the union at the time. Reuther and Frankensteen went to the overpass against McKie's advise.

Later Reuther was a part of the group who caved in to the anti-Communism of the McCarthy period and helped in the expulsion of left-led unions from the CIO.

First General Motors and then Chrysler was organized. Then in February 1941, the Supreme Court upheld NLRB findings that the Ford Motor Company was guilty of unfair labor practices. The workers stampeded into UAW headquarters and signed up by the thousands.

In April 1941 the Ford plant workers went on strike and, 10 days later, faced with the unshakable unity of the Ford workers, Ford threw in the towel and agreed to accept the results of an election to be held on May 21. At that election 58,000 Ford workers voted for the CIO.

McKie went back to work at the age of 63. He retired from Ford at 74 with a pension of $90 a month. In his "retirement" he spoke out against the Korean War and called for the outlawing of the atomic bomb. He died in 1959.

As we draw lessons from McKie's life, I think that we should examine very carefully our thinking about today's leadership of the AFL-CIO. Bonosky says in his afterward that the saga of Ford and the organizing of the auto industry has its heroic chapters as well as those not so heroic as when McCarthyism invaded the trade union movement.

The fact is that today's labor movement and much of its social democratic leadership have abandoned Walter Reuther's policies of anti-Communism and red baiting. The removal of the anti-Communist clause from the AFL-CIO's constitution is no accident. It happened because the leadership of the AFL-CIO saw that clause as being divisive to the labor movement as a whole.

Objectively, the leaders of the AFL-CIO are leading the workers in the militant struggle against globalization, for the defeat of the far right in the elections, for the election of 2,000 labor candidates in the year 2000. They are organizing the unorganized, defending the rights of immigrant workers and are changing the leadership of the AFL-CIO to reflect the racial composition of the unions.

The UAW today is faced with problems of loss of jobs, the growth of the maquiladora industry on the Mexican border and the need to organize the workers in the shops that manufacture parts for the auto industry.

The question of a shorter workweek is still the order of the day as forced overtime takes its toll on the health of auto workers. The fact is that with all the advances that the UAW is responsible for in the conditions of auto workers, the workers in the industry are still among the most exploited.

- Roy Rydell