Worker Differences Surfaced on the Picket Lines

Although UAW President Leonard A. Woodcock emerged from bargaining talks with Chrysler negotiators two weeks ago singing "Solidarity Forever," the words couldn't have been further from the truth.

His chant of the union's anthem made a nice show for the press, but he seemed to overlook the obvious factionalism among workers on the picket lines at several of Chrysler's Detroit area plants.

Solidarity House may have been an appropriate term for the UAW's headquarters once, but the name is not quite so applicable now.

The day after Woodcock announced the terms of the tentative settlement between union leaders and management, the conflicts between workers of different racial and ethnic backgrounds and varying ages became more intense.

While George Johnson, the picket leader at the central gate of the Hamtramck plant, charged that Chrysler had no respect for the union any more, picketers on the line at the gate next door were arguing that they had no union. The validity of that assessment is questionable, but it is clear that workers are not unified.

Race relations on the picket line were one indicator. For the most part, blacks walked with blacks and whites with whites. Until recently, the union's black-white ration was about 60-40. But in the last year, a large influx of Arabs into the assembly plants has changed the importance of this ration.

Although both the union and the corporation sidestep the issue when questioned, saying that they have no statistics at their fingertips, the presence of Arabs has created new problems in the factories. At the Hamtramck plant, black and white picketers said that the Arabs have been arriving for work at the plant at the rate of 500 a month.

Detroit's new Arab population is large. Many of the new assembly plant workers advertise their ethnicity with buttons that read "Detroit Arab Yemini Association."

Outside of Ford's gigantic River Rouge plant in Dearborn, about five miles west of downtown Detroit, there is a small square with a few luncheonetres and several bars, all of which advertise Coca-Cola. At least two of them display prominent signs indicating that they specialize in imported Arab foods. Arab tongues are the rule on the street corners.

Many of the whites and the blacks on the picket lines outside the Chrysler plants expressed resentment toward their Arab co-workers, largely because most of them don't speak English, and partly because their terms at the Plants are short. They say that their Arab counterparts usually return to the Arab homeland with American dollars.

But racial strife continues between blacks and whites. Several whites charged that foremen and stewards (floor supervisors) are lenient with blacks who make mistakes. White workers say they think the foremen are too scared to "come down hard" on the blacks.

And there is also a problem between the young and the middle-aged. There are no older people on the line, because even before the new pact, assembly line workers were able to retire at age 56 with full pension benefits.

The older workers in general are much more willing to take what they get in the contract and leave it at that. This is partly because they have developed an affinity to the plants: Most of the older, UAW-represented workers manning the picket lines have been at the same plant for most of their lives. And the older workers see in their youthful colleagues a certain intransigence with which they associate indifference toward the plant, the people with whom they work and the future of the union.

So when Ronald Tucker, a young black worker at the Hamtramck plant declared that he wanted to "tell the world that they're [the union] selling us [the workers] down the river," several older picketers turned to each other and laughingly noted that "he's only been here [at the plant] four months."

There are many women on the line at the Hamtramck plant--the oldest of Chrysler's Detroit area facilities--and three currently hold the position of foreman. The UAW contract with the company does forbid women from lifting heavy items, which severely limits the number of jobs they can have. So most of the women who work on the line are in the trim shop, paint shop, or final shop.

But Viola Scott, a lanky young black woman who has worked for Chrysler for six years, builds transmissions. Scott has strained her back several times while bending over and hunting for parts.

"When I first came here in 1948," Marie Bullington remembered, "they [the men] treated you like a queen. Now they figure you're here to make a living just like they are." Bullington, who checks the cylinder numbers and puts locks on the doors of the cars, said that she was "really scared" when she first came to the Hamtramck plant, but that her apprehension wore off rapidly.

Most contract disputes polarize labor and management while they strengthen the bonds between employees within the union. But in some ways, the strike of UAW-represented blue collar workers against the Chrysler corporation seems to have tightened the relationship of the union and the employer at the expense of enunciating the conflicts between employees on the assembly line.