[Auto] Talking About Auto WorkOr Any Work Under Capitalism Means Talking About Constant, Brutal Violence

[_Happy boy]

Auto work is typically remembered as one of the best industrial jobs a worker could get in postwar America. Less remembered, however, is how absolutely brutal and violent life on the auto factory floor was — and still is.

 

he way we typically remember post–World War II industrial work like auto manufacturing might include it being repetitive, maybe unpleasant, but stable and well-paying, making decent lives possible for enormous numbers of workers in the United States. But that’s only part of the story. It also included incredible amounts of violence, as labor historian Jeremy Milloy chronicles in Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-80.

Milloy argues that violence on the factory floor saturated the entire production process of American and Canadian auto manufacturing, both in the work itself and in the interpersonal relations among workers and between workers and managers. The book is a strong challenge to prevailing nostalgic notions about the placid conditions of work at the height of twentieth-century industrial America — and raises questions about the omnipresent nature of violence at work under capitalism in any era.

Jacobin deputy editor Micah Uetricht interviewed Milloy for the Jacobin Radio podcast The Vast Majority. You can listen to the episode here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

MU
Before I read this book, I shared the prevailing views of mid-century American auto work: good jobs, well paid; maybe monotonous, but stable and decent. I have been thoroughly disabused of at least the notion that these jobs were somewhere between pleasant and benign after reading your book.

JM
That’s a historian’s job. We’re the “well, actually”-ers of humanities and social sciences.

My book fits in with another recent book worth checking out, Daniel Clark’s Disruption in Detroit, which argues that these jobs weren’t that well-paying. Many workers were laid off constantly. They were always doing other jobs. Work was precarious, in ways that workers today would recognize. The ideal is that you go and clock in at General Motors at age twenty, you work thirty years, you get that pension, you get the boat on the lake. It was a grind, but you put two kids through college, and it was worth it.

But it wasn’t worth it for a lot of people. These were violent workplaces. These were really terrible jobs, both in terms of monotony, being turned into a machine, being alienated from your job, but also for how dangerous they were. Your chance of being maimed or hurt, or having a heart attack on the job, or having a forklift flip over on you, or getting repetitive stress injuries — these were the different forms of violence workers had to deal with.

Researching the book, there were times when I was thinking about these workplaces and saying to myself, “How are people just letting this go on? How did people not decide to close these factories down to get a handle on these factories?” Because the levels of violence were so endemic.

Inside the Dodge Main plant.
MU
You emphasize that violence is inherent to the work process, independent from interpersonal violence happening on the factory floor. Can you describe that violence of the auto work itself?

JM
Much of the existing work on this subject focuses on interpersonal violence, painting violence as something that originates from workers’ psyches — they’re reacting to the unpleasant, dangerous work, or specific grievances with other workers, so from a psychological or industrial management point of view, employers ask, “How do you identify these kinds of violent people? How do you screen them out? How do you mollify them? How do you make sure that they don’t blow up?”

I used a materialist approach. I looked at what is happening with the labor process. My work traces the rise and fall of violence at Chrysler in Detroit over a twenty-five-year period. It’s not that Chrysler hired a bunch of bad people beginning in the mid-1960s. That’s not an explanation of why violence skyrockets at that plant. It’s because the labor process changed.

The labor process in auto has always had violence baked into it. There’s an enormous amount of injurious work, repetitive strain, risks of inhaling toxic fumes, risks of being maimed by a stamping press or a machine you’re using on the line. There’s a weight workers are carrying, the weight of that potential for violence against them.

But the key driver of stress is the line itself: How fast is it moving? How fast are the workers thus expected to move to keep up with it? That’s the central dynamic of auto work. And that hasn’t changed. It’s a violent dynamic, and one that has conflict at its heart. The employer is always seeking to drive that line as fast as possible, and the workers are trying to survive it, with some semblance of dignity and enjoyment.