PART II

The Battle for Loyalty

CHAPTER 4

Is a Foreman a Worker?

Late in 1938, Clarence Bolds, a foreman with Kelsey Hayes Company in Detroit, convinced some of his fellow supervisors to follow in the footsteps of the company’s workers and create a small group to defend their interests. This was a brash move on the part of first-line supervisors, who had often been instrumental in the managerial struggle against unions, but Bolds was no stranger to the labor movement. The brother of an officer of the International Typographical Union—which organized foremen—he had long held positive views of unions. Although he had earned his position as a supervisor shortly after he was hired in 1929, Bolds had lent a helping hand to the AFL as it sought to organize automobile workers during the yeasty years of the New Deal.¹

A few months later, on the other side of town, Thomas Dwyer, a foreman with Packard Motor Company, decided to join the movement launched by Clarence Bolds, which was morphing into a fully fledged union. It is unlikely that the two men knew each other, and Dwyer’s political background differed from that of Bolds, as unionism had never played an important part in his life or that of his family. Dwyer’s career at Packard rather exemplified the profile of the modern foreman. Trained as an electrician, Dwyer was hired in 1905 and was offered a position as assistant foreman six years later. He supervised the electrical assembly operations, directing the work of some five hundred men. Six years on, he was promoted to the grade of foreman and oversaw several departments where workers were involved in electrical setup.²

In spite of the sharp contrast between these two supervisors’ backgrounds, by 1939 they were both part of a rising wave of unionization that that seemed to cut against the grain of the CIO’s growing difficulties. “New Allies in Guise of Foremen Keep Rallying to CIO Banner,” the Kelsey Hayes Picket proudly announced. To be sure, the United Foremen and Supervisors–CIO (UFS-CIO) was a very modest organization—it counted a mere twelve hundred members. But the American labor movement as a whole was still a foundling at that time, its hold on workers precarious. In the uncertain aftermath of the victories at General Motors and U.S. Steel, local labor organizers at the militant Kelsey Hayes factory saw in the victory of a handful of foremen over the determination of Chrysler management yet another sign heralding the promising future of American labor. Two years on, World War II opened a window of opportunity that helped foremen fulfill the hopes expressed in 1939. The UFS-CIO had disappeared by then, but two larger unions had come to replace it: the Foreman’s Association of America (FAA) and the United Clerical Technical and Supervisory Employees (UCTSE). Together, they combined for a membership of over 120,000, and by 1945 polls revealed that over 70 percent of foremen believed that unionism was an interesting and legitimate venue to defend their interests.

The frontier of managerial control thus became, during World War II, the crucible where the dynamics of labor relations were being reassessed and redefined. At issue in the foremen’s movement was whether one of the rights spelling economic citizenship—the right to organize and bargain collectively—should remain merely for manual work. Foremen’s unionism suggested that far from being a kind of “Fordist compromise” providing a social compensation for mindless, manual work in mass-production industries, the right to organize and bargain collectively should benefit anyone engaged in a working activity for wages or a salary, regardless of his or her duties. The social and political meaning of foremanship would thus be construed in light of the objectives of the policies underwriting the nascent American welfare state. As with all social laws since the Progressive Era, the legal definition of the worker—employee—would depend on the public policy pursued by Congress.

“Is a Foreman a worker?” Fortunepointedly asked in 1945. The question was paramount to representatives of corporate America, who adamantly refused to bargain with foremen’s unions and argued that foremen were managers who should not and could not be allowed to organize. Underlying this reading of the social world was the organizational logic of Fordism, in which foremen played a pivotal role. Foremen were the voice of top managers on the shop floor, and corporate executives forcefully maintained that they belonged with management and should not forsake managerial values such as individualism and competitiveness. Explaining that collective bargaining required two well-identified social entities, labor and management, top managers contended that foremen could not “sit on both sides” of the bargaining table. Their participation in unions, they insisted, would foster a divided loyalty— to the employer and to the union—that was incompatible with their role in the production process. “A man can’t serve two masters,” they often repeated, suggesting that the master and servant rule of fealty and loyalty to the employer had not been totally superseded by the Wagner Act and even justified excluding some workers from its purview.

This chapter traces the social dynamics of this renewed debate over worker loyalty. From the creation of the first foremen’s union in 1947 to the exclusion of first-line supervisors from the definition of “employee” in the Taft-Hartley Act, a window of reformist opportunity opened as a large number of political and social actors debated the norms and values that were to underwrite work in postwar America. The debate assumed national proportions, involving miners in Pennsylvania, chemists in Louisiana, labor leaders in Detroit, conservative senators from the South, Supreme Court judges, and many others. Yet the legal logic that underwrote the debate soon focused the eyes of the nation on one outstanding NLRB and later Supreme Court case, Matter of Packard Motor Company v. NLRB.³

The Social and Organizational Construction of Foremanship

In a well-known article on the UFS published in 1940, Ira B. Cross, a scholar with the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard, emphasized that foremen’s unionism seemed an absurdity to many people. The UFS was the first foremen’s union, and shortly after it had obtained a charter from the CIO in 1938, Cross explained, it opened an office in Detroit with the name “UFS” displayed on its front windows, eliciting many surprised responses from passers-by who wondered why on earth foremen and supervisors would need a union. “Truly,” Cross concluded, “it was a little difficult to understand.” Cross believed that the UFS was a temporary aberration to which sound management would quickly put an end, which is not surprising from a man trained under John R. Commons’s supervision in Wisconsin. Like Sumner Slichter, his colleague at the Harvard Business School, and most industrial pluralists, Cross had always taken foremen to be an integral part of management, and his surprise at the emergence of foremen’s unions was illustrative of the social identity of foremen in the 1930s.⁴

In point of fact, foremen’s unions were not a new development in the United States. After the Civil War, many skilled workers unions had developed the practice of organizing supervisory workers along with the rank and file, and by 1900 this had become the norm in the printing, building, and metal trades as well as in the railroad and the maritime industries. Notably, this practice had been endorsed in the formulation of the policy of the Railway Labor Act, which was adopted in 1925 to regulate and pacify labor relations.⁵ By contrast, in the industries that were part of what Daniel Nelson has called the “new factory system” that emerged in the 1880s, foremen’s unions did not exist. In such industries, first-line supervisors had a more limited but essential role: they were expected to “get out production,” that is, they were to be the managers’ voices and arms on the factory floor. As a result, in such industries foremanship was a cultural and organizational construction that had come to maturity in the 1920s with the rise of personnel management, a construction that put foremanship squarely within the contours of management and thus constructed foremen and employees as two different social groups.⁶

In Shop Managementin 1911, Frederick Taylor criticized the system of management in use in many American factories, lamenting the extensive powers and latitude granted to foremen. To Taylor, the managerial performance of foremen was poor at best, as it lacked method, rigor, and objectives. Indeed, while from the 1880s most American companies had acquired the facilities necessary to aim at new productive levels, managerial techniques had not yet adapted to the potential offered by the new scale and scope of enterprises. Many of these were still highly decentralized and largely depended on the authority of foremen whose autonomy turned the shop floor into a virtual local empire.⁷

The case of James R. Wilkins, who was hired at Packard in September 1909, is illustrative of the foreman’s empire denounced by the most famous advocate of rationalization. Wilkins was first taken on as a major parts assembler and was promoted to foreman five months later. His duties included going out on the street to hire the people he would supervise, training them, deciding on their wages (from 28 cents to 40 cents at the time depending on the performance of the laborer), and assigning them a job to do. Wilkins also determined both the methods of production and the general pace of the work. He used an expense account to pay his workers’ wages and for the tools and scrap material needed by them. Tellingly, a part of his own wages depended on his ability to save money on this fund.⁸

At the beginning of the century, this combination of skill and power made the foreman the linchpin of the production system, surpassed in autonomy only by the contractor who was more typical of New England mills. Foremen were also intent on retaining these prerogatives, as Packard’s campaign to “Americanize” its workers during the Great War revealed. Like those at many other American companies in the mid-1910s, Packard managers tried to enlist the twelve hundred foreign workers working on East Grand Boulevard in public evening schools. But they soon realized that the foremen were unwilling to sign up the workers they supervised for fear of losing authority over them. In the end two-thirds of the “foreigners” did not sign up for the classes, a figure revealing the determination of the company’s foremen to oppose outside interventions on the shop floor.⁹

Yet even as Taylor commented on the inefficiency of foremen, the movement toward rationalization and planning that he had helped to create—which involved deskilling many elements of craft work and creating multitudes of semiskilled machine operatives to do the work once done by highly experienced all-around machinists—had also started eroding the fore-man’s authority. To be sure, Taylor’s own answer to this problem, “functional management,” never really took hold, but by the 1920s, a “new foremanship” had emerged in place of the old imperial one all the same. The rise of personnel management after World War I certainly had the greatest impact on foremanship. Indeed, to reach levels of mass production, companies needed a much more stable workforce, one that would accept, not escape, the rigid constraints of the assembly line. While few companies at first followed Ford’s lead in offering workers the compromise known as the $5 day, many realized the need to put an end to labor turnover and to rationalize and standardize employment procedures. As early as 1914, Ford, Packard, and Dodge divested foremen of the absolute right to hire and discharge and created personnel departments to assume these responsibilities, thus leaving foremen only the possibility to recommend such actions. Concurrently, as historian Alfred Chandler has shown, companies developed new hierarchical structures in which middle managers played a horizontal and vertical role at once, thus coordinating the departments of companies together. As a result, the tasks of planning and organizing production were devolved to engineers while the ever-more-important tasks of accounting and organizing the flow of materials were assumed by other middle managers. The organizational logic of throughput had taken many of the emperor’s clothes away.¹⁰

This was most visible at Packard in the 1930s, where several lines of foremanship existed (straw boss, assistant foreman, foreman, general foreman), but where foremen did not really influence the organization of work.¹¹ At the start of a program, the Process Department sent time engineers on the line to estimate the time necessary to perform each task (at Packard by the 1940s, each task was tried out three times) and assess the overall cost of the program for the Planning Department. Decisions to hire, promote, or discharge the men on the line rested with the Employment Department. At the beginning of every shift, foremen were presented with a “route sheet” that told them how much their line should produce during their shift. They were expected to decide how many men they needed to accomplish this objective, but they were not allowed to change the pace of work or the disposition of machines on the shop floor. Along with the responsibility to maintain productivity rates, they were supposed to maintain safety standards and watch the quality of the pieces they produced. In case of a deficiency, however, a special assignment man was sent by the Process Department to see what changes needed to be made.¹²

To be sure, one should not exaggerate the extent of this organizational revolution, as foremen retained their empire in many industries. The “new foremanship” was really a product of the mass-production system, and it developed in large companies that had achieved significant rationalization. In the aftermath of World War I, which had witnessed a flurry of union activity, the defeat of labor activism often meant a return to the nepotism and arbitrariness of foremen, both of which were clearly visible in the labor struggles that followed the adoption of the NIRA in 1933, particularly in the steel industry.¹³

In mass-production industries, however, the foremen’s fairly brutal methods could not really obtain. Foremen did retain a vital importance in the Fordist environment—while the techniques of work rationalization and control developed by Taylor and Ford engineers had curbed their prerogatives, foremen were also, paradoxically, expected to be the very agents of the process of rationalization on the shop floor, that is, they were to “get out production.” Yet there was strong resistance to these new managerial practices in the serried ranks of semiskilled operators who now labored in factories. As a result, top managers in large corporations such as Ford Motor Company and efficiency-minded economists such as Paul H. Douglas came very early on to see discipline and the handling of labor as the fulcrum of the new industrial system (tellingly, Ford even extended supervision to leisure time).¹⁴

This problem led Ford to create the $5 day—which gave workers a higher than market wage—and management consultants to suggest schemes of employee involvement, but it also led top managers to put a premium on the reconstruction of the foreman as a loyal manager. Indeed, if the Fordist system largely rested on the agreement of workers to the new mode of production, then foremen were to be firmly associated with management, that is, they were to be able to take the side of management and defend its policies when workers challenged them. This was particularly important because in the modern manufacturing system, the ratio of foremen to workers had largely increased. In 1938, at Packard there were 313 first-line supervisors for 8,200 workers, a ratio of one to twenty-six. At Ford, the ratio had gone from one to fifty-three to one to fifteen.¹⁵

The concern for efficiency thus led engineers and top managers to reckon with the despotic methods of foremen, and in the postwar era foremanship was reconstructed as a managerial activity, namely, supervision, that could be learned and practiced—notably, foremen were to be instructed in more democratic and scientific methods of management.¹⁶ The movement started with the creation of foremen’s clubs, which held management workshops, but it soon evolved into a more structured form. Foremen’s training programs and then foremen’s schools flourished in American companies in the 1920s and 1930s. The idea underwriting these programs was that while foremen’s prerogatives had been diminished, to be effective leaders foremen should be conversant with the methodologies employed by middle managers to establish production schedules, calculate costs, and compensate workers. They were also increasingly expected to understand safety procedures. Finally, foremen were expected to be personnel managers of their own—to “get out production” in the most efficient way, they were supposed to be able to understand and motivate workers, which implied a basic training in the psychological techniques developed in the wake of Elton Mayo’s research. Finally, with the arrival of the shop steward in his department, the foreman had to develop a keen understanding of the logic of labor law and more precisely of the impact of the labor contract on this work as supervisor.¹⁷

This evolution was obvious in the classes taught at the Foremen’s School that Packard had set up in the early 1930s. The school was run by a manager who organized a series of conferences, choosing the topics with the industrial relations manager of the company. The conferences were held during working hours and were attended by groups of twenty-five foremen. The following list of conferences organized in 1939–1940 is illustrative of what had come to differentiate foremen from the workers they supervised, namely, educational credentials.

Interestingly, this list of classes reveals that at the same time, the organizational evolution of American companies had associated foremen much more closely to management. While in the former industrial system the main division had been between craftsmen and the laborers they directed, in the emerging mass-production system the division that structured social groups on the workplace was the one separating planning and supervising from doing.

Table 4.1. Conferences Taught at Packard in 1939–1940

• Distribution and Reading Aloud of the New Contract • Discussion of the Contract • Fundamentals in Business • Getting Along Better with People • Safety Accident and Accident Prevention • Raw Materials in the Automotive Industry • Taxation—Income and Public Welfare • Men and Money in Business • Management in Business • Waste—General • Waste—Present and Future • Personal Improvement

• Organization—General • Principle—General Policies • Amendments to the Social Security Act • The Learning Process • Deputizing • Speech Habits • Foreman-Employee Relationships • Understanding Problem Employees Industry • Discipline • Developing Company Understanding • U.S. Constitution—Our Constitutional Rights • Morale • What It Takes to Be a Foreman • Increasing the Personal Efficiency of Executives and Foremen

Source: “Brief for Packard Motor Company,” Packard v. NLRB Supreme Court case file, 1947 (330 U.S. 485), 10–12.

What is most striking in this list of classes is that they were not simply designed at providing technical training through classes that had a professional-like flavor. Equally important was the exposition of the social meaning of foremanship. Conferences such as “Fundamentals in Business,” “Management in Business,” and “Men and Money in Business” ring like an in-house version of the efforts led at the time by corporate America to reestablish the legitimacy of capitalism in American society, while others dealt with values sustaining it, such as self-advancement, “Personal Improvement,” and the work ethic “Getting a Full Day’s Work” (taught in 1941). Finally, conferences such as “U.S. Constitution—Our Constitutional Rights” remind us of the contested debate over the meaning of Americanism and the American experiment that had developed in the 1930s. Obviously, Packard understood the need to have technically proficient foremen who would also be loyal purveyors of the values sustaining the conservative capitalist order top managers and executives had defended throughout the New Deal—foremen were to be capitalism’s noncommissioned officers.¹⁸

This construction of the foreman as a conservative man loyal and faithful to the organization employing him went along with the activities of the National Association of Foremen (NAF). Modeled after professional societies, the NAF was created in 1918 with the support of the National Association of Manufacturers to give foremen a patina of social respectability.¹⁹ As foremen were usually recruited from the ranks of skilled workers, NAF actions emphasized self-advancement and highlighted the social mobility that foremanship afforded any worker who was willing to learn and use his qualities. It published a monthly journal, Foremen’s Magazine, where articles on success, character, faith, and individual ambition abounded.²⁰ To promote the idea that foremen were the proud depositories of a specific know-how, the NAF also organized classes and lecture tours to reinforce the links between foremen and managers and foster a sense of identity among foremen. Key to its efforts was the propagation of the idea that foremen were an integral part of management, and that foremanship was incompatible with the logic of unionism. The main purpose of the foreman, the president of the NAF thus explained in 1927, is to “enable the securing of profit in industry”—a point of view echoed in Foremen’s Magazine that same year: “The Foreman’s job is economic, he must make a profit,” a general manager in a machine company explained.²¹ The NAF was largely dominated by conservative company executives, but even enlightened corporate managers such as Cyrus Ching and labor economists such as Don Lescohier believed that the foreman’s legitimate place in the labor relations system was with management. With adequate training, Ching and others argued, the foreman could contribute to the emergence of peaceful “employer-employee” relations.²²

At Packard, this construction of the foreman as a manager found echoes in several symbolical markers that emphasized the difference between foremen and the rank and file with whom they interacted and worked all day long. Unlike workers, first-line supervisors did not have to change clothes when they arrived at the factory and were allowed to wear street clothes. Except for those who bore the title of “assistant foreman,” they were placed on salary rolls, which brought them together with office employees and top management. A directory listing their names and positions was on display on the walls in every part of the huge Packard complex, a sign of individual existence and achievement in an environment that literally produced the working class by bringing hundreds of workers together every day. They usually had an office on the factory floor and could count on a secretary to type out the requests that they made to their superintendents when they wanted to make changes in the work process, require additional help, or discipline a worker.

Finally, foremen were not subjected to the same factory discipline as blue-collar workers—they could report to work late by as much as half an hour or obtain a short leave of absence and still be compensated. They were entitled to a one-week vacation after six months of work, whereas the workers had to wait for one year. Last, they were given “separation pay” if they were let go. Most important, these markers also pointed to important differences between the workers and foremen: their employment was generally more regular and stable. At Packard during slack periods, for example, when there was a model change, the foremen were kept on the job or their vacations were scheduled for that time and, most important, they took home a better paycheck.²³

“Foremen are born, not made,” explained a general superintendent of General Electric at the end of the 1930s in Foremen’s Magazine. The statement was rhetorical, but in calling on foremen to discover in themselves the potential for leadership, James A. Smith sought to appeal to one of foremen’s most distinctive social traits, their Protestant religion. Indeed, to fully understand the social meaning of the various class markers we have just pointed out, one needs to remember that while foremen were overwhelmingly native born or of older immigrant stock, they supervised a workforce that composed a motley social quilt. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the names of the leaders of the UFS and the FAA all had an Anglo-Saxon or Northern European ring (Bolds, Keys, Traen, Dwyer, etc.). Since the beginning of the century, the ethnic and religious gap that separated these Protestants from the Catholic immigrant workforce had been so wide that foremen kept themselves removed from workers, culturally and socially.²⁴

This combination of organizational and cultural forces resulted in a limited definition of “employee” on the factory floor, one that, as we have seen, John R. Commons accepted in his sociological and legal investigation of American capitalism. For while the term “employee” was still used in conjunction with all the hierarchical levels of a corporation (including white-collar employees, and managerial employees), when used alone, in the mass-production environment, the very term “employees” bore the organizational imprint of Fordism and referred to blue-collar workers. Most important, such was its social and legal meaning in labor relations. For if we may return to the foremen’s classes for a short moment, we can easily see that in the managerial logic of the company foremen were not part of employees in the mass-production environment. The conferences dealing with their relations to blue-collar workers are edifying in this respect: “Relations with Employees” (1943), “Understanding Problem Employees,” “Foreman-Employee Relationships.” That foremen were included in management was obvious in conferences such as “Developing Company Understanding” and “Increasing the Personal Efficiency of Executives and Foremen.”

Notably, the codification of labor relations through the contracts that had been signed between unions and companies in the wake of the adoption of the Wagner Act in 1935 on the factory floor had further reified the foreman/ employee distinction. Thus, in the contract that the UAW signed in 1937 with Packard, the union acknowledged the limits of its sociological terrain: “(d) The Union will not accept for membership direct representatives of the Management such as superintendents, foremen or supervisors in any class of labor, time study men, plant protection employees, confidential clerks and salaried employees.”²⁵ In union parlance, this practice soon became known as “stipulating out,” for in many contracts such as the one it signed with Packard, the UAW agreed to leave the white-collar world unorganized.²⁶

The very logic of this division of the social world in American factories was authority—it was intimately linked to the managers’ need for control, in that the superiority of managers over workers was essential in the mass-production system. Yet by the 1940s, these categories had been so entrenched that they actually provided the conceptual bounds of the debate over the social organization of capitalism. Thus Fritz Roethlisberger, a sociologist who had assisted Mayo at Hawthorne Works during his famous experiment, excoriated the scientific pretenses of Taylorism in his analysis of foremen’s unionism, but like Commons, he did not question the very categories to which this logic had given rise:

At the bottom of the organization are people who are called employees, who are in general merely supposed to conform to changes which they do not originate…. Directing them there is a group of supervisorswho are again merely supposed to uphold the standards of performance and policies decided by other groups … a group of technical specialists who are supposed to originate better ways and better standards through which the economic purpose can be secured and more effectively controlled by a group of top managementmen who in their evaluation of the workers’ behavior assume that the major inducement they can offer to cooperate is financial.²⁷

True to the ideas of pioneered by his mentor, Roethlisberger argued that managers erroneously believed that authority was to be wielded from the top down, through a hierarchical process that actually left no place for the sentiments and psychological needs of workers that the Hawthorne experiments had revealed.²⁸ This necessarily placed foremen in an impossible position— they might either seek to meet the expectations of top managers and expose themselves to an aggressive response on the shop floor, or try to secure the workers’ cooperation and risk failing to meet these objectives. As a result, Roethlisberger argued, the foreman’s loyalty tended to shift with the pressures that were brought on him, which could be explained by the fact that foremen were marginal to managerial circles and that many felt removed from them. Indeed, although they represented managers on the shop floor, they were totally excluded from the planning and decision making that characterized managerial work in modern factories, something that foremen would complain about throughout the 1940s.²⁹ In spite of the training they had received, foremen often entered into informal agreements with the workers and thus escaped the psychological difficulties of their marginal position.³⁰

Yet the foremen’s quest was not merely the stigma of a managerial pathology; theirs was a defection also endowed with logic, one that ultimately led to a reckoning with the social meaning of the category employee and pointedly showed that foremanship was indeed made, and could be remade.

Packard Foremen and Unionism

In point of fact, Packard Motor Company was an unlikely candidate to become the legal epicenter of a large-scale labor struggle. Created in 1900 in Ohio by James Ward and William Doud, Packard had none of the features that made companies such as General Motors, Ford, and Republic Steel the tuning forks of labor relations in America. At the beginning, the company represented barely 4 percent of a competitive market in which forty to fifty manufacturers produced some four thousand cars a year, and very early on investors pushed the company’s top managers to move the company to Detroit, where expansion would be easier. There, Packard quickly came into its own as a high-end car manufacturer whose stylish cars were prized by Tsar Nicholas II, the shah of Iran, and many other people of means. Between 1906 and 1912, the Packard 30, priced at $4,000, sold more than nine thousand vehicles. Later on, when the hard times ushered in by the 1929 crash restricted the automobile market, the company decided it should expand its purchase on American consumers—capitalizing on its image, in 1935 it introduced the Junior Line, with cars that cost less than $1,000, a very successful move. Indeed, production moved from six thousand cars a year to fifty-two thousand. By the end of the 1930s, Packard employed over eight thousand workers in its factories on East Grand Boulevard.³¹

This rather secure economic standing explains why the foremen’s collective movement did not arise at Packard. The spark was provided by an automobile parts maker, Kelsey Hayes Wheel Company, a seedbed of rank-and-file militancy where Eastern European production workers had displayed particular energy in claiming the economic citizenship now protected by the Wagner Act. In this pursuit they had benefited from the radical, socialist culture of a local union cadre composed of prounion foremen such as Clarence Bolds. Having witnessed the birth of West Side Local 174, Walter Reuther’s original turf, some of these foremen endeavored to join the new UAW-CIO as early as February 1938, but the union rebuffed them. However, in November, when the company cut back on the compensation of its first-line supervisors and moved them from a salary to an hourly rate, Bolds and others decided they could not accept this 10 to 15 percent pay cut and needed to organize all the same. Kelsey Hayes was mostly trying to adapt to the economic downturn that affected the industry of that year, but its decision to target only supervisors stemmed from the commitments it had made to rank-and-file workers in the contract signed with the UAW, which forced the company to look higher in the hierarchy of its employees to find the flexibility it needed. Caught between the anvil and the hammer, the foremen decided to create a bargaining unit of their own in November, and in spite of CIO infighting over the foremen’s status in labor relations, they found enough support from Adolph Germer and Homer Martin to obtain a CIO local international union (LIU) charter in December, namely, United Foremen and Supervisors LIU 918.³²

The CIO charter had a notable impact on the fledging local—very soon, all 150 supervisors at Kelsey Hayes were organized, and the local proceeded to expand in the Detroit area. By June 1939, it had close to one thousand members and had signed its first collective bargaining contract with Universal Cooler in Detroit. Bolds and his comrades were tirelessly canvassing the city and giving speeches to groups of foremen, and soon they had a foothold in some of the bigger companies of the city such as Ford, Chrysler, and Murray-Ecorse. Most important, the movement was starting to spread along the geographic ramifications of the automobile industry. In August 1939 the CIO agreed to grant a new charter, LIU 984, to a group of foremen at Electric Auto Lite in La Crosse, Wisconsin, who also staged the first foremen’s strike—one that was indicative of some of the political, legal, and social dynamics of the foremen’s movement even as it was a its incipient stage. The company refused to bargain with the foremen, but the rank-and-file workers—UAW members—decided not to cross the foremen’s picket line. As a result, the company obliged the foremen with an informal agreement and a wage increase.³³ This social pressure was necessary because the Wagner Act made no mention of foremen— Section 7a applied to “employees”—and the NLRB, following the tenets of industrial democracy as developed in Wisconsin by Commons and his students, had always believed them to be associated with management. Doing so, it was able to find that employers committed an unfair labor practice if foremen impeded organization drives.

No such solidarity between workers and foremen occurred at Packard, however. The group of foremen who began stirring toward unionism in 1939 was rather small—about 15 men out of the 340 first-line supervisors employed by the company—which shows that to many foremen, it remained at least unclear whether joining a union was the best way to improve their working conditions. But the company took a firm stand all the same and either demoted them to production work or encouraged them to leave. The cases of Thomas Dwyer and James Beyerley, two veteran supervisors, are illustrative: one month after he joined the UFS, Dwyer was called into the office of his superintendent and told he would have to take a pay cut from $260 a week to $200. Dwyer refused and tried to get a job through the Employment Department of the company but had to struggle for forty-five days before he was given one. Beyerley, a former arc welder, was given a job as an hourly production worker.³⁴

Packard was not alone in adamantly opposing the UFS. In November 1939, as the UAW was working to translate the benefits of a long and bitter strike at Chrysler into a collective bargaining contract, Dodge Company fired several dozen foremen who had joined the UFS. The foremen petitioned the NLRB, arguing that the company had committed an unfair labor practice. When the board officially accepted to hear their case, the foremen’s movement made the headlines, with Chrysler accusing the UAW of violating the principles of collective bargaining by trying to “sit on both sides of the table.” Soon, it appeared to CIO leaders that the foremen’s local was a liability to the UAW, and in August 1940 the decision was taken to disband it.³⁵ The AFL’s comparative hospitality to the foremen’s culture had not been passed on to the new confederation that its most militant cadre had helped to build. In fact, with a few exceptions, foremen and CIO workers would never make common cause.

The lack of CIO support notwithstanding, two years later, in October 1942, a group of Packard foremen created the fifth chapter of a new union, the Foremen’s Association of America (FAA). The development of the FAA was largely reminiscent of the tentative rise of the UFS—unlike CIO unions, both were built from the bottom up with little funding and very limited organizational capacity. The FAA originated in the creation of a “fellowship club” in August 1941 at the Ford River Rouge Plant, where many foremen were wary of the impact that the company’s recognition of the UAW breakthrough would have on their own position in the company. Although it was at first limited to the foremen of the Aircraft Building, the success of the club was such that it was easily transformed into a bona fide union in November 1941, with over twelve hundred members.³⁶

The FAA’s road to viability was equally rocky at first—Ford managers had no intention to bargain with the FAA and dismissed 170 foremen in May 1942 to thwart the growing union. By that time, however, the FAA represented 3,700 out of the company’s 18,000 first-line supervisors and threatened to stage a strike if the men were not promptly reinstated. In November, the company gave in, granting its supervisors a 15 percent increase and creating a Foremen’s Personnel Office to handle the grievances arising from what it still adamantly considered to be the lower rungs of its managerial hierarchy. By then, the FAA was developing at a very fast clip and had gained a foothold in many of Detroit’s bigger companies such as Briggs and Chrysler. The case of Packard foremen was illustrative of this impressive rise—while the UFS had only made a very limited inroad at Packard, the FAA could count on the support of most first-line supervisors when the chapter was created, so much so that it was confident enough to ask the company to agree to an official NLRB election. Held in February 1943, the election was a ringing victory, with only 2 foremen voting against the FAA and 486 casting their vote in favor of it.³⁷ Two months later, the FAA was poised to present twenty similar petitions to the NLRB, a sign of the quickening pace of its development.³⁸

Packard’s decision to agree to an election, even one that had to be held outside the premises of the company in city voting booths, reflected the changing social and political context in which foremen made their claims to collective independence. Like many Detroit concerns, Packard had shifted to war production in 1939, when it started producing the marine engines that were mounted on American PT (patrol) boats. In addition, in 1940, Packard workers began work on Rolls-Royce engines, which were used on a number of American, British, and Canadian war planes. The first marine engine was built early in 1940, but the company could produce them serially only in 1942. Indeed, aircraft engines required small-batch production and skilled workers, which meant that untrained semiskilled workers could be employed in this process only if provided with machine tools, dies, and jigs that took a long time to produce. Catering to the military’s cost-plus orders was difficult enough for the company to decide that it needed to stabilize its relationships with first-line supervisors. Indeed such was the logic that led Ford to negotiate, if not to officially bargain, with the FAA.³⁹

In addition, the institutional ground had shifted in June 1942 when the NLRB handed down its decision in the Union Collieries case, which involved the bargaining rights of foremen in the mining industry, the other seedbed of foremen’s unionism. Taking stock of the growing unrest among supervisors, the NLRB ruled that foremen were “employees” with full bargaining rights protected by the Wagner Act.⁴⁰ The case had a strong impact on the unionization of mining foremen, which had been somewhat hesitant, leading the United Mine Workers to affiliate the heretofore independent Mine Officials Union of America (MOUA). In point of fact, this NLRB policy was to be short-lived—in May 1943, the nomination of a new member at the board led to a reversal in the Maryland Drydock case. This latter ruling helped C. E. Wilson, GM’s chief executive, to avoid an election involving over four hundred foremen, but it did not thwart the development of the FAA, for the 1942 ruling in Union Collierieswas influential enough to encourage foremen throughout the country to begin stirring toward organization. Indeed, as 1944 dawned, foremen’s unionism was no longer limited to the automobile industry—the FAA was making quiet but important inroads in the rubber, steel, aircraft, oil, and aluminum industries.⁴¹

Yet there was something paradoxical in the FAA’s rise, as its ability to recruit an ever larger number of members was rarely translated into collective bargaining contracts. Except for the official agreements reached with United Stove and Ford in 1944, the FAA was unable to obtain recognition from corporate managers. Packard embodied corporate America’s opposition to the FAA. Following the consent election won by the FAA, the company refused to bargain with the FAA because it sought to represent general foremen, who headed departments. After the NLRB’s decision in May 1943 in Maryland Drydock—which took foremen out of the purview of the Wagner Act—the company had no incentive to acknowledge the legitimacy of the FAA, and Packard managers were content with suggesting that should the Packard chapter disaffiliate from the FAA, bargaining would become possible. When irate foremen struck for three consecutive Sundays in October, the company went as far as setting up a representation scheme whereby one foreman was designated to present any foreman grievance to members of management, who also pledged to communicate with the foremen through this representative. But no bona fide collective bargaining was in order.⁴²

By the end of 1943, the FAA thus found itself in a difficult position—its raison d’être was the quest for a measure of collective independence, but such independence could accrue only from collective bargaining agreements. The lack of contracts did not mean that the union was powerless; indeed, its strength lay partly in the indirect influence it exercised over foremen’s working conditions. Thus the FAA prided itself on having pushed Packard managers to grant foremen some wage increases, overtime pay, and better vacation pay. At many other concerns such as Hudson and U.S. Rubber, the union obtained similar results. Considering the cultural forces weighing against foremen’s unionism in the mass-production industries, however, such results were meager and might have placed the organization on the road to oblivion as much as on the road to social respectability.⁴³

Underlying the FAA’s predicament was the fact that since the New Deal labor relations had been fully institutionalized, turning the notion of “employee” into a legal category carrying enormous weight in the ability of men and women to fight successful collective struggles at work. Faced with adamant and bitter opposition from corporate managers, the FAA could not expect to enhance its strength in factories as long as the federal agencies dealing with labor relations refused to admit the legitimacy of foremen’s labor struggles. This meant that foremen needed to persuade the NLRB that they should be classified as “employees” or, alternatively, to push the National War Labor Board (NWLB) into categorizing foremen’s strikes as “labor disputes” within the meaning of the War Labor Act of 1942. Since neither recognition was forthcoming, the only way for the FAA to challenge these socio-legal norms was to resort to strikes, even though there was less legitimacy in those collective actions during the war than at any moment in peacetime. But the FAA, after all, had never been asked to sign a no-strike pledge— ironically, such a pledge was a measure of success for CIO unions. Historians have largely documented the negative effects of this pledge on militancy, but by 1944 the FAA precisely needed the official, legal legitimacy that New Deal policies had bestowed on CIO unions. Lacking this official sanction, the FAA had to be content with publishing “We Don’t Want to Strike” notices in newspapers.⁴⁴

The FAA thus entered the political and institutional arena by challenging the social consensus that underwrote the war effort. Starting in July 1943, when six hundred foremen walked away from their jobs at Murray Ecorse in Detroit, tensions simmered and production was often hampered even if workers did not refuse to cross the foremen’s picket lines or to work without supervision (which was often the case). In May 1944, the FAA shifted gears by organizing a twenty-day walk out at six different concerns with thirty-three hundred foremen participating. At Packard, more than nine hundred foremen were on strike, but the company still refused to bargain with the FAA. The cost of these “showdown strikes” was immense, with almost seven hundred thousand man-days lost. Moreover, Packard became the first indirect victim of the strike, as Military Procurement Officials announced on May 13, 1944, that they would not accept products manufactured without supervision, leaving the workers of the company idle for several days.

The strikes generated a large-scale controversy, and a bevy of proposals ranging from “work or fight” orders to legislation prohibiting foremen’s unionism, but the FAA had made its point. By the end of May, as the New York Times explained, it had forced the foremen’s issue in the political scene. At the end of 1944, the NLRB accepted a petition from the FAA in the matter of Packard, and the NWLB was conducting extensive hearings on the foremen’s issue. Meanwhile, the union kept growing, and counted over thirty-two thousand members in 1945 as the war’s end drew near. The NLRB and the Supreme Court yet had to pass final judgment on the meaning of the term “employee,” but foremen’s unionism seemed to be established.⁴⁵

By the mid-1940s, it was obvious to many observers that notwithstanding the efforts led by the NAF and other associations promoting supervision as a managerial activity, many of its practitioners did not feel as if they fully belonged to the managerial world. “The Foreman Abdicates,” Fortune explained in 1945, while the New Republic explained that the “Foreman Goes Union.” By that time, the notion of defection dominated explanations of the growing foremen’s movement. In an account of the movement ending with a bit of corrosive wit, Factory Management and Maintenanceargued that unless management took drastic steps to keep its foremen, “some of them will be singing ‘Solidarity Forever.’”⁴⁶ Yet such fears spoke less to the political meaning of the foremen’s movement than to the essential role they played in mass-production industries: more than anything else, the FAA introduced a disjunction between the technology of managerial practices and the culture sustaining them.

The Logic of Exit

The efforts made by corporate managers to construct first-line supervisors as managers in the 1920s and the 1930s were certainly not exerted to no avail, but their effects were blunted by the reformist impulse of the New Deal and the logic of social citizenship that laws such as the Wagner Act purveyed. Insecurity and instability came to characterize the social position of foremen, who increasingly saw themselves as the “forgotten men of industry,” and the particular context of the war provided them with a choice and an alternative to the identity that corporate leaders had been seeking to bestow upon them.

In a booklet providing practical guidelines to the growing number of shop stewards, the UAW explained in 1940 that they should stand firm with the front line of management, for “with the coming of the Union, the foreman finds his whole world turned upside down. His small dictatorship has been overthrown, and he must be adjusted to a democratic shop government.”⁴⁷ Indeed, in many ways foremen had been the very target of the project to democratize American factories since the Progressive Era, when reformers such as William Leiserson had traced the outlines of an “industrial jurisprudence” whereby factories would be run. Many of the rules that were thus adopted further eroded the authority of the foreman, but even when they did not do so, he found that he could execute them only by interacting with the shop steward.

Richard Bone, a foreman with Packard, acknowledged the extent to which the arrival of the shop steward had ground down his authority: “There is never a move I make in the department that the steward doesn’t know it. We talk things over, seniority, raises, movement of men. If the night shift is short of a man, he even allows me to put an extra man in there, running, say, three men on two machines.”⁴⁸ Indeed, in a context in which every job was listed in a classification and given a specific price, there was little the foreman could do to redistribute his men around the shop without the steward’s approval. Very often, however, this interaction was difficult. Foremen had to contend with the workers’ recurrent complaints that the line was too fast or that they were underhanded to carry the job. In response, however, a foreman could only show the steward the “route sheet” he had been provided, and which he was merely trying to follow. Adding to this friction was the constant absenteeism of many workers, which foremen deemed to be their biggest problem. The contract that the company had signed with the UAW allowed workers to take up to three days off without warning their foreman. Workers were also allowed by contract to request a pass to go home early if the steward agreed, and the foremen’s authority in such cases was so limited that they routinely issued up to twelve passes every day. Hence conflicts between foremen and time-study engineers recurred, with the former accusing the latter of being oblivious to their manpower difficulties.⁴⁹

In reducing or opposing the authority of foremen on the shop floor, shop stewards inevitably challenged their fragile social identity as managers. Top managers, moreover, compounded their difficulties by issuing trouble-making orders to test the militancy of the workers. When the orders were resisted, managers were not reluctant to fire a foreman or two to emphasize that the mistake was theirs. This no doubt cut against the grain of managerial unity, and first-line supervisors felt even more stranded from the true managerial circles in their dealing of grievances. Not only were they excluded from the negotiations of collective bargaining agreements, but unless they were able to solve a grievance informally with the steward, each complaint triggered a grievance procedure involving the Labor Relations Department, one that did not involve the foremen and often ended with rulings that were the opposite of the position they had defended.⁵⁰

We would be mistaken, however, to see the foremen’s response to this “industrial jurisprudence” only through the lens of their decreasing authority and prestige on the shop floor. Most important, foremen witnessed every day the benefits that workers derived from the communal logic of unionism and the importance seniority had acquired in their lives. For now the process whereby workers were demoted, discharged, and promoted to better-paying jobs followed closely the requirements of seniority, giving workers a sense of entitlement that foremen sorely lacked. Thus Prosper Traen tried several times to promote a worker endowed with skills he deemed superior, to no avail. Even the utility man, who was expected to be an all-around worker able to help with minor technical problems, was chosen on a seniority basis.⁵¹

By contrast, theirs was a more fragile situation. As Robert Turnbull explained, “My idea of a union is to see that a fair standard of wages is provided.” Indeed Packard foremen grievously lamented over their compensation system, which ensured no status. While many foremen, like white-collar employees, were on salary, their compensation ranged from $250 per month for assistant foremen to $300 for foremen, although there was no tangible difference in the work they performed. Compounding this lack of uniformity, some assistant foremen were on an hourly rate, which barely put their earnings above of those of the workers they supervised, who received overtime pay. In some companies, workers refused to take orders from supervisors who did not make more money than they did.⁵² Finally foremen protested against their rates of pay, which were not commensurate with the hours they spent on the shop floor on weekends.

At Packard, foremen further complained that there was no rule governing promotions or demotions, which were decided by top managers alone. Unlike rank-and-file workers, foremen could not expect to be notified by managers about the reasons of their change in status. This was particularly irksome to them because it was common for managers to decide to put foremen on an hourly rate when production slackened, which made it easy to temporarily let them go. By 1944, as the war’s end drew nearer, fear of such demotions prevailed among them.

The spread of unionism throughout American factories thus indirectly highlighted the infirmity of foremen’s position in industry and their limited cultural authority.⁵³ Ernest Gordon summed up the problem rather well: “When I ask for a raise all I can get is another alibi every time. The best one was when there was talk going around the shop about the Foremen’s Association. I was told that nothing could be done now, but that there would be a ‘utopia’ for foremen soon.” Packard foremen typically complained that managers did not take their grievances seriously and refused to consider them, and by the late 1940s, Packard foremen had come to the conclusion that they needed a place where, as they put it, “redress,” could be obtained.⁵⁴ In may 1944, a few days before they went on strike, they sent a letter to the industrial relations manager, a letter that reveals the extent to which they had accepted and integrated the idea that employment should provide a status governed by contract: “All the other employees of Packard Motor Company belong to organizations affiliated with the CIO and enjoy the privilege of collective bargaining, and the opportunity to protest against discrimination. They also have the opportunity to protest against unfair labor practices and the enforcement of unjust and unfair practices. All these things are denied to the petitioners in their present state of disorganization, and they are desirous of obtaining the same privileges.”⁵⁵

Notably, foremen interpreted this industrial jurisprudence through the political language that had animated much of the 1930s, namely, security.⁵⁶ To be sure, foremen had not participated in the social struggles that had shaped the political meaning of reconstruction of the country after the crisis, but the logic of security, although it had stirred the masses of workers into political action behind the banner of the Democratic Party, did not have a purely working-class cast making it appealing only to manual workers. Speaking on the radio to expose the objectives of the FAA, Robert H. Keys thus explained that the Wagner Act had been adopted to help the workingman “get an adequate wage, raise his standard of living, and gain for himself and his family a reasonable degree of security.”⁵⁷ Indeed, the ideology of security was exposed by Franklin Roosevelt as an American project designed to retrieve the original design of the founders—the promotion of general welfare—and its very malleability had allowed companies to endorse it and try to harness its political potential. Thus, in 1936, Alvin McCauley, the president of Packard Company, had published an article in Factory Management and Maintenance claiming that the company could provide security through its paternalistic policies: “We work toward worker security,” McCauley claimed.⁵⁸

The ubiquitous nature of the language of security and the fact that it had been adopted by corporate America suggest why it was possible, in the 1930s and the 1940s, for first-line supervisors to resort to the very collective actions that they had been trained to fight for a long time. The association that the New Deal had created between security and unionization offered a framework within which the foremen could make sense of their situation. Tellingly, by the mid-1940s foremen defined unionism in those very terms. James Beyerley, who had joined the UFS union in 1938, explained that he had done so because “it looked like a pretty good organization so I joined it. I needed protection the same as anybody else,” while Thomas Dwyer explained, “My meaning of unionism is security, is job protection and you cannot get away from it in my case.”⁵⁹

While the New Deal had produced an alternative to the individualistic ethos promoted by corporate America, it was actually the experience of mobilization that tipped the scales and allowed the rapid development of foremen’s unions in the automobile industry. In this respect, one event largely symbolized their lack of representation to foremen: the company’s decision to produce a company magazine, Work to Win, in order to shore up its workers’ motivation to reach production goals. The magazine was created after managers met with representatives of the CIO, while foremen, although they were expected to reach those production goals on the lines they supervised, were totally left out of the process.⁶⁰

The impact of the war on foremanship was particularly significant because of the intersection of two elements: the statist policies adopted to contain labor conflicts and the swelling ranks of first-line supervisors. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, as the United States started gearing up toward full-scale war, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9017 to create the National War Labor Board (NWLB), a tripartite body with members representing corporate America, labor, and the public interest. An obvious heir to the National War Labor Board created in 1918, the NWLB was charged with the mission to facilitate the war effort by preventing labor struggles while the NLRB continued to implement the Wagner Act. To that end, the NWLB conducted hearings and had the ability to dictate the contents of collective bargaining contracts.

The statist structure set up to mediate labor relations thus mirrored the traditional construction of the groups out of which American society was composed—workers, businessmen, and the general public. In this respect the absence of representatives of foremen’s unions revealed the difficulties that lay ahead as they sought recognition. By contrast, the CIO and AFL derived important benefits from their contribution to labor peace. After Pearl Harbor, unions had agreed to a no-strike pledge, but had traded militancy for a policy of union security that allowed them to recruit a large amount of new members.⁶¹ The unions’ leverage on working conditions, however, was not totally neutralized by this trade-off—in July the NWLB announced an increase of 15 percent to make up for the inflation that had eroded workers’ purchasing power since January 1, and in October Roosevelt issued EO 9240, which forced businesses with war contracts to pay workers overtime (i.e., time and a half pay) for all the hours worked during federal holidays and to grant them double pay for the work done on any seventh consecutive day.⁶²

Thus, while workers were forced to put their militancy in abeyance during the war, the quest for security—even with unsatisfactory results—could be pursued through an interaction with the federal government. Except for foremen paid on an hourly rate, however, first-line supervisors did not gain the same benefits because they lacked representation in the NWLB. Indeed, foremen actually fell within the orbit of the Treasury Department’s Stabilization Unit, which did try to grant them a salary increase but apportioned it to their earnings. Foremen whose yearly income was below $2,400 received a 15 percent increase, 10 percent if they earned less than $4,000, and 5 percent if they earned less than $7,500.⁶³ The difference in the two schemes thus worked to create important discrepancies: in spite of the wage freeze, workers could increase their earnings thanks to the large amount of overtime work that mobilization required. By contrast, foremen’s earnings were, indeed, frozen. At Packard, even hourly rated foremen were galled by the tiny difference separating their earnings from those of the men they supervised—an hourly rated foreman would receive between $1.30 and $1.50 an hour, while a job setter might receive $1.40 to $1.45.⁶⁴

Most important, EO 9240, which created a temporary exemption to the Fair Labor Standards Act by giving workers overtime pay for the seventh consecutive work day, did not apply to salaried foremen, whom it defined as “managers.” As a result, the discrepancy between the status accruing from a wage job and the one based on salary was obvious—hourly rated foremen received time and a half for work above forty hours a week, but the salaried foremen received overtime up to ten hours each week. In the same fashion, the Treasury’s Salary Stabilization Unit rejected Packard’s bid to pay its foremen a 5 percent increase for night work (equivalent to what the workers had received), agreeing only to a bonus of 5 cents. Clearly, mobilization had made the ability to claim the “employee” status even more crucial to first-line supervisors.⁶⁵

Meanwhile, the war effort transformed the social landscape of American factories. Historians have largely documented the cultural and social consequences of the war on the American workforce. The war opened the gates of American factories to millions of African Americans and women who had until then been kept at bay from industrial jobs, paving the way for a new assessment of racial and gender roles in American society.⁶⁶ Notably, the same forces provided a large number of workers with an opportunity to move into the ranks of foremanship, workers who in many cases were beholden to the social culture of the new unionism. The history of foreman’s unionism at Packard reveals the importance of this element in the rise of the FAA, as thirty-six of the forty-seven foremen who signed the request of certification by the FAA in October 1942 had been foremen only since 1941. One of them, E. Gordon, begged congressional investigators to “remember the foreman was once a soldier of labor. Let’s give him a fair break.”⁶⁷ In 1943, at General Motors, 42 percent of the nineteen thousand foremen had worked in that capacity for less than one year. The cultural meaning of foremanship was already in flux before the war, but the quickening rhythm of mobilization, by transferring thousands of workers across management lines, had replaced the slow pace of cultural change.⁶⁸

Counteracting as it did the logic of industrial democracy and collective bargaining that had animated reformist circles since the early days of Progressivism, foremen’s unionism was bound to raise interest in the social and organizational position of foremen. Chief among these commentators was C. Wright Mills, who a few years later took stock of the set of transmutations that had affected white-collar classes in America since the turn of the century and did not fail to remark on the changing status of the foreman, whom he referred to as the “managerial demiurge.” Mills did not share the faith of human relations scholars such as Fritz Roethlisberger in the managerial system—even with a psychological spin on it—but rather lamented that the white-collar workers to whom he was devoting his attention exhibited none of the political awareness and political organization necessary for their maturation into a political movement. The politics of white-collar workers, Mills regretted, were those of the rearguard, as they were bound to follow either business or labor.⁶⁹

The Meaning of a Voice

But Packard foremen, like tens of thousands of their fellow travelers, were no rearguard. Rather, they were at the front lines of a transnational movement that promised to shake the social classes on which Fordism rested. In France, for example, in the aftermath of the adoption of the Accord Matignon—the French Wagner Act—in 1936 the logic of unionism spread to the ranks of foremen and engineers, thus questioning the long-held idea that salaried workers who did not sell their manual labor could not claim the status of “employee.” The Accord Matignon, it was thought, had been adopted for the travailleurs, that is, the working class.⁷⁰ French foremen and engineers were not necessarily intent on joining the ranks of the communist-led Confédération Générale des Travailleurs, but they were determined to be officially recognized as “salariés” (employees) nonetheless.⁷¹

The trajectory of Robert H. Keys, the president of the FAA, is largely illustrative of the common travails of American and French foremen. Keys was removed from the radical militancy of the men who had presided over the incubation of the UFS at Kelsey Hayes a few years earlier. A member of the NAF, Keys was educated at Detroit’s High School of Commerce and at the Ford Trade School. Trained in Ford’s nonunion culture, he was hired at Ford as a machine operator in 1935 and was promoted to foremanship six months later, at a time when foremen were overwhelmingly agents of managers in the struggle against the insurgent UAW. When Ford signed a collective bargaining contract with the UAW in June 1941, it also granted a modest wage increase (65 cents) to foremen—obviously with the intent of lessening the impact of the arrival of the CIO in the citadel of antiunionism. Yet even to moderate men such as Keys, the lesson was unmistakable—the foremen had indirectly benefited from the CIO, gaining an increase they would not have gained by themselves. The logic of organization beckoned, and from then on the youthful Keys, who was twenty-nine years old, applied his skills and energy with brio, presiding over every minute aspect of the development of the organization while he juggled congressional testimonies, the publication of the Supervisor, and the promotion of the FAA in weekly radio broadcasts.⁷²

But the man who stood at the origins of what top managers would soon call “industry’s most pressing problem” preached a kind of neo-business unionism, and the most salient aspect of the foremen’s movement and the way it was promoted is that on the whole foremen did not try to pass as workers joining the labor movement. Keys did offer a scathing criticism of the rugged individualism that still underwrote American businessmen’s attitudes toward unions and welfare. But this critique did not stem from a growing proletarian consciousness. While foremen tried to act collectively on their subordination, their quest for collective independence first rested on the belief that any improvement in their employment would come with the ability to speak as a group. In what was a nascent industrial pluralism, Keys argued that the individualism that was still purveyed by managerial thought was a mere anachronism. In modern society, when individuals had lost all ability to influence their environment, collective action was inescapable, but foremen argued that their organization and motives were no different from those of bankers, dentists, or lawyers. “This is an age of collective pressure which in turn has resulted in the modern, acceptable methods of collective bargaining used in industry,” Keys argued in one of his weekly radio broadcasts, echoing the declarations of members of the Packard chapter to members of Congress or the NLRB.⁷³

Indeed, Packard foremen, along with the members of the FAA in general, strove to be identified as an objective, intermediate social category between management and labor, which they referred to as supervision. Emphasizing its independence was certainly a wise policy for an association accused by businessmen of being a CIO stooge, but the phrase also included an organizational and social endeavor, the importance of which has gone unheeded, and which was encapsulated in the association’s motto, “leadership, fidelity.” First, organized foremen strove to demonstrate that leadership was not a quality inherent in successful businessmen, but a specific know-howthat combined a working knowledge of mechanical engineering and an understanding of the human dimension of work on the assembly line. Criticizing Taylorism and its defenders for their inadequate understanding of worker’s motives, Keys called for the creation of tripartite factory boards including labor, management, and supervision and repeatedly explained that only the recognition of supervision as a technical activity would make it possible to reach the production levels required to win the war. Squaring the movement that he led with the Americanism inherent in the participation in the war effort, Keys argued that foremen were essential to the arsenal of democracy precisely because they had no stakes in the labor-management struggle—their raison d’être was the increase in production, not the battle over profits and conditions of labor.⁷⁴

In that sense, the organized foremen’s movement was clearly a legacy of the new foremanship that had emerged in the 1920s. Tellingly, key members of the FAA such as Clarence Bolds, who had originated the movement at Kelsey Hayes, had previously belonged to the NAF. Neither Keys nor Packard foremen, however, could have spoken on behalf of supervision if the phrase had been only a rhetorical construction—it also reflected a shared experience in the factories in which foremen had organized. As Theodore Bonaventura explained, the FAA generated an important sense of belonging. Foremen called themselves “Brother”; they read a journal—The Supervisor—that was full of pictures and anecdotes that fostered their sense of identity; and the various chapter leaders organized picnics, talks, and other events that bestowed a broader social dimension on the foremen’s struggle for status. Furthermore, the FAA nurtured a social bond that had put an end to the foremen’s individualism—an evolution reflected in the motto “fidelity.” While rivalries between foremen had been very common in mass-production industries, now a spirit of cooperation suffused relationships among foremen, which meant that dealing with technical or manpower problems was much easier.⁷⁵

Most important, then, foremen could simultaneously embrace collective bargaining and reject the larger political principles of unionism, that is, the idea that the working class should come together to push for social and political change. Prosper Traen, the leader of the Packard chapter, exemplified this avowed political moderation. Indeed, Traen had not been part of the small cohort that had joined the UFS in 1939. A native of Belgium, Traen immigrated to the United States in 1913 and worked in Illinois coal mines before hiring on at Packard as an assembler in 1926. Promoted to foreman in 1932, Traen supervised chassis assembly when the UFS was created, but declined to join. Like James R. Wilkins and other veteran foremen, his was a concern for security that could be expressed only through a union that remained independent from the rank and file, a concern that had grown more acute with the war effort in the production needs it generated. Pointedly, Traen referred to the FAA as “a labor movement, just like any other labor movement.”⁷⁶ Like the engineers who, in the words of the American Association of Engineers, wanted to enjoy the protection of the Wagner Act but were intent on avoiding “the amalgamation of the professions in a ‘labor front,’” Packard foremen and their fellow FAA members claimed that theirs were by no means radical motives. Indeed, they pithily claimed the right to organize for the purposes of collective bargaining not because this right was theirs as members of the working class, but because it accrued to employees. The nineteenth-century origins of the term thus had a strong echo— because “employee” was devoid of radical political connotations, it enabled the FAA to claim a white-collar right to organize and formally question the link between unionism and class. “Who is an employee anyhow?” Keys asked. “Isn’t he a man who works for wages or salary in the service of an employer, just as the dictionary defines the word?” Notably, mine supervisors, in the first legal cases stemming from their movement, offered a similar justification, saying that the Wagner Act applied to “employees,” not “workers,” and was therefore more inclusive.⁷⁷

The FAA defined management as the process of formulating policies: since their duty was only to carry out the managers’ orders, supervisors were indeed “employees.” While this legal reasoning was plausible, it nevertheless cut against the grain of the history of the progressive quest for industrial harmony and the tenets of the sociology developed in Wisconsin. As we have seen in the previous chapter, in the minds of reformers the right to organize was first and foremost linked to the subordination of blue-collar workers providing their brawn. Not only did the FAA come to contradict this logic with the idea that the recognition of the existence of supervisionwas essential to the success of industrial democracy, but to justify the union rights of supervisors they had started shifting the terms of the debate. In the end, the FAA argued, foremen should not be deprived of the right to organize because they enjoyed it as citizens. Ultimately, their quest was one for the full enjoyment of the privileges and liberties protected by the Constitution—free speech and free assembly foremost among them.⁷⁸

This claim is not surprising if one remembers that many workers interpreted the Wagner Act in the very same terms. It also reflected the growing appeal of the language of rights in a political context dominated by conservative attempts to grind down labor unions’ influence in the American political economy. Tellingly, the bills explicitly depriving foremen of bargaining rights that were debated in Congress as of 1943 were only part of a larger assault that was most active in southern states, where labor laws were being whittled down one by one. Yet in seeking a constitutional justification for their definition of employee, foremen tacitly admitted that the weight of values and assumptions that underwrote the definition of the worker in labor relations was a formidable obstacle.

The Fight for Loyalty

The contract that the FAA signed with Ford Motor Company in 1944 came as an early crowning glory substantiating the theory that the foremen’s movement was a viable one. However, Ford’s decision to come to terms with his foremen’s new collective persuasion was by no means indicative of the way corporate America intended to deal with the FAA and other supervisory unions. Whether they were directly affected by the growing unionization drive or not, on the whole executives and top managers in large companies responded to it with utmost anxiety and a forceful determination to preserve both the power and the identity of management as a social and cultural group. Indeed, the movement was spearheaded by C. E. Wilson, although the FAA had had far less success at GM than at other places. Moreover, the briefs filed by companies like Packard or Chrysler, the testimonies brought in Congress, and the pamphlets published to blunt the growing appeal of foremen’s unions reveal a significant degree of cooperation: the evidence cited in exhibits, such as local union journal articles and specific events during local strikes, was often the same. Ironically, it was through an obvious association and group logic that the automobile industries and the mining industries were defending individualism in Washington. The irony notwithstanding, it was at their behest that Congress began considering the Smith Bill in 1943, which purported to explicitly limit the sociology of the category “employee” to blue-collar workers.⁷⁹

Packard’s brief in the NLRB case that grew out of the company’s refusal to bargain with the FAA exemplified this strong resistance and the arguments on which it rested. First, the brief denied that the term “employee” in Section 2(2) of the Wagner Act might be construed as covering foremen, and reaffirmed the idea that only two social groups existed in the factory system: “Historically there has always been management and workers,” the brief stated. “The persons in the Management group are the ‘employers’ and the persons in the worker group are the ‘employees.’” Pointedly, the company’s lawyers argued that the words “worker” and “employee” were both used in the language of the law, particularly in the statement of policy, and that the social and political history of collective bargaining left no doubt as to the objective pursued by reformers. Wagner himself had defined his design as “the ideal of employers and workers meeting together with friendly and open minds.” Nor did the rationale for the Wagner Act seem to offer any justification for an extensive definition of employee: how could a law adopted to improve the purchasing power of workers be construed as covering those who did not need it?⁸⁰ Packard managers were certainly not so naive as to think that this call for original intent would be enough to sway the NLRB. The board had decided once in favor of foremen in the Union Collieries case in 1942, then had reversed itself, and might change its position again. Rather, managers cried foul because they hoped that Congress would support their restrictive interpretation of the term “employee.”

Indeed, the foremen’s strikes, along with the wildcat strikes in which manual workers engaged, nursed a conservative backlash that was to lead to the Taft-Hartley Act. As early as 1943, the more conservative membership in Congress and the increasing difficulties of the NLRB seemed to have reshaped the political landscape in a way that made it plausible to successfully oppose the redefinition of employee that the FAA and other supervisory associations were advocating. To that effect, during the congressional hearings held that year, CEOs and conservative lawyers such as Walter Gordon Merritt painted a bleak picture of constant turmoil should foremen be allowed to organize: they would either remain independent and feud with a rival organization or collaborate with them, and discipline would be lax and degenerate into a kind of “mob production.” In either case confusion would dominate the industrial scene, and instead of winning the war, the United States would know a fate similar to “once free France.”⁸¹

The argument that the fall of France in 1940 stemmed from the debilitating social reforms of the Front Populaire is indicative of the reactionary political outlook of the men who were most active in the struggle over the meaning of employee. Unlike the CEOs and top managers who contributed to the war tripartite boards—mostly members of the Business Council and the Council for Economic Development—men such as C. E. Wilson estimated that restoring managerial authority was most urgent, and they did so precisely because they were as yet unreconciled to the idea that unions were legitimate organizations within the walls of American enterprise. Thus, in 1943 the Detroit Free Press estimated that if the foremen were allowed to organize, then the “debate over the closed shop would be settled for good,” a consequence to be avoided by all means. In the same fashion, the brief submitted by Packard reveals the animus that corporate America still directed at labor unions: “The first objective of union leaders is to engender and foster in the employees a feeling of unavoidable hostility against an employer. This is accomplished by unsupported accusations of unfair treatment, improper charges and is apparently based on the philosophy that an untruth or a series of untruths repeated often enough will finally be accepted as the truth.”⁸²

Such candor in a brief officially filed with a federal agency is indicative of the bitterness that then dominated managerial circles. In the case of Packard, as in most cases, this bitterness stemmed from the changes that mobilization had wrought on the shop floor. Not only had unions gained a secure foothold in American factories thanks to the Roosevelt administration and the NWLB, but they had managed to challenge managerial authority in many ways. What with the shortage of manpower and the ambitious U.S. production goals, companies such as Packard had found that they could not oppose workers’ attempts to unilaterally improve and redefine their working conditions. Thus, although the collective bargaining contract provided that seniority would be the controlling factor for promotion or demotion only whenever two workers displayed similar merit and ability, the company had been forced to agree to make all promotions and demotions based on seniority. The UAW local insisted on participating in the setting up of production schedules, and workers in the naval section, where PT boats were made, refused to let time-study engineers perform their studies. In the plane section, where there was a surplus of workers, the steward had concluded an agreement with the foreman whereby when the daily production goal was reached, workers could play cards or simply rest. Summarizing corporate America’s dismay, one manager estimated that “if any manager in this industry tells you that he has control of his plant he is a damn liar.”⁸³ Notably, in 1944 Packard executives, like those of General Motors, had started an offensive against the UAW by trying to remove the most militant shop delegates and by demoting some workers to lower their wages. Top managers had been intent on using foremen in their struggle against unions before the war, hoping that they would peddle the manager’s point of view and values on the shop floor, and they saw no reason to concede defeat on that front.⁸⁴

Corporate managers thus believed that their leadership and authority on the shop floor would seriously be at risk if foremen were unionized—a fear that was compounded by John Lewis’s decision to call a bitter strike in the spring of 1943 to obtain a wage increase and the inclusion of foremen in the United Mine Workers’ contracts.⁸⁵ Considering the critical importance of foremen in the mass-production hierarchical scheme, their fears are hardly surprising. To be sure, the UAW could shut down a plant without the help of the FAA, but the prospect of cooperation between foremen and workers was alarming because it would enable workers to fully regain the independence they had lost to Taylorism, a point made by C. E. Wilson in April 1945, when the foremen’s movement was at its apex:

From our experience both before and during the war, we are certain that the accepted American method of spreading managerial authority and responsibility among foremen—so that management is in close, direct contact with comparatively small groups of workmen—is the best and only sound method of handling day to day relations with the thousands of employes engaged in modern mass production. Anything which would require a change in this set-up would interfere with employer-employe relations and with production.⁸⁶

“Take away the foremen from us and we are lost,” a businessman later explained.⁸⁷ In fact, although corporate America knew they had lost their battle for the ideological loyalty of the workers, they still expected deference to managerial prerogatives. In framing the issue of supervisory unionism in terms of discipline and control, what businessmen really suggested was that the Wagner Act had not superseded common-law principles such as the right to control the work, which harkened back to the colonial master and servant doctrine and remained at the heart of the legal definition of the employment relationship. As the legal scholar James Atleson has argued, from the late 1930s onward, businessmen pressed judges to hold that the status of Americans workers still remained subservient to imperatives of production and efficiency.⁸⁸ As early as 1943, the Smith Bill sought to inscribe these ideas in Selective Training Act:

In the discharge of his obligations to the Government every contractor shall be responsible for achieving and maintaining maximum efficiency and continuity of operations…. He shall be responsible for acts of his executive, administrative, professional, or supervisory employees within the scope of their employment, and such employees shall not be eligible to membership in any labor organization engaging in collective bargaining the contractor, not shall such contractor be required to engage in collective bargaining with any labor organization including any of such employees in its membership.⁸⁹

Moreover, in the case of foremen’s unions, what this meant was that businessmen had to reframe the link between the old doctrine of worker loyalty and the right to organize. Now they argued that loyalty and unionism were not incompatible in the case of manual workers because these workers sold only their capacity to work and perform tasks that did not require the exercise of judgment. By contrast, foremen should not be allowed to join unions because of their role in the production process—maintaining discipline. Quoting the Bible, businessmen repeatedly argued that they could not dispense with the foremen’s full loyalty because “a man can’t serve two masters”: “A foreman, a supervisory employee should keep faith with his employer and not be on both sides of the fence…. There should be no twilight zone in this thing. A man cannot serve two masters. Let us provide that he shall be true to his trust, work for the people who hire him and to a specific job.”⁹⁰ Such statements echoed the prescriptions of nineteenth century judges such as David Brewer who stood firm against the intrusion of unions in relations between employers and workers. The foremen’s struggles revealed the tenacity of such ideas in the post–New Deal era.

The stakes inherent in the definition of the notion of employee thus become fully apparent—the cultural status of corporate America had seriously suffered as a result of the Great Depression. It was not lost on these men that organized foremen might be more receptive to ideas of planning, economic security, and other collective nostrums. In point of fact, Keys himself advocated economic planning in his weekly radio broadcasts in 1943. Indeed, debates over questions of political economy in the 1930s and 1940s largely reflected a move away from the idea that businessmen and top managers could be trusted to oversee the capitalistic system by themselves. Tellingly, such fears were given full airing in the Packard brief, which argued that “the public will realize, late enough perhaps, that the unionization of supervisors for collective bargaining purposes has given alarming impetus to the collectivization of industry now going on.” In Congress, C. E. Wilson, the head of General Motors, sounded the same note when he asked the members of the House Military Affairs Committee, “Where are you going to stop it? Are you going to have the whole country go into a union and then have a Socialist State?”⁹¹

Over the same period, under the aegis of the budding modern presidency, the federal government had largely extended its reach over the economy through agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board and the National Planning Resources Board, and this institutional development had proceeded apace since Pearl Harbor as the government became involved in regulating wages and prices. In that respect, the influence of Walter Reuther’s proposals for a corporate organization of the economy—even if they did not come to fruition—and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 call for an “Economic Bill of Rights” were indicative of the forces bearing against unmitigated freedom of enterprise. Notably, corporate managers chafed at Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which left out Freedom of Enterprise, or, as General Motor’s director of labor relations, Harry Coen, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in November 1943 put it, “The Freedom of Opportunity or perhaps it should be called the freedom of Individual Initiative.”⁹²

Anticipating Friedrich von Hayek’s own definition of freedom as “freedom from coercion,” Coen exhorted his audience to see the foreman question as one that involved the status of freedom in the United States:

If the foreman is willing to trade his faith in his ability to get ahead on the basis of his own individual initiative for the lulling influence or the creeping paralysis of mass security on a lower standard of living, he does not have the stuff that it takes. It any part of management has softened up to the point of a willingness to trade mass action for the freedom of opportunity which is inherent in a free economy, it is high time that we face the issue and purge management of all such parasitical influences that would tend to weaken and destroy that kind of economy.⁹³

Tellingly, the brief for Packard Motor Company in the NLRB Packard case sounded the same cultural themes:

When the worker leaves the rank and file and becomes a foreman he voluntarily casts his lot with management. He leaves the collective bargaining group and as an individual joins and becomes part of the management group…. If he wishes to trade this opportunity to advance as an individual for the questionable security of collective bargaining, he can do so by remaining with the rank and file…. Those who have the desire to succeed, who are willing to study and better themselves should not be held down by those who do not have the desire or ability or the same courage or energy.⁹⁴

The struggle against foremen was thus a struggle for cultural hegemony. What ultimately lay at the heart of the battle over foremen was top managers’ drive to defend the symbolic values that had underwritten their own rise to predominance—and power—since the end of the nineteenth century and shaped the transition from a proprietary to a managerial capitalism. The time was ripe for such an endeavor, as industry’s contribution to the war effort had at least partly restored its image and now enabled it to reaffirm the “American” principles of industrial management, that is, a line of authority linking top executives to workers.⁹⁵ Most important, then, these managers connected middle-class Protestant values such as hard work, moral courage, and individualism with management in a business faith in a way that made it impossible to conceive of supervisionas a specific group whose own professional ethos would reconcile industrial leadership and the principle of collective bargaining. The American free enterprise system, they contended, rested on the merit and individual achievement of managers seeking to climb the ladder of self-advancement. Accordingly, they sincerely believed that competition among foremen was necessary to the free-enterprise system. Work should define foremen according to their performances in comparison to others. As for collective bargaining, it was fit only for those who had foregone the freedom that the United States afforded them.⁹⁶

What Industrial Harmony?

In a famous ruling handed down in 1953, the Supreme Court reminded American workers that the goal of the national labor law, as expressed in the Taft-Hartley Act, was to “strengthen cooperation, continuity of service and cordial contractual relations between employer and employee that is born of loyalty to their employer.”⁹⁷ Indeed, Taft-Hartley was a clear victory for conservatives and businessmen, for the industrial harmony it pursued included a larger protection for management and the pursuit of economic imperatives. Most important, to that effect the Taft-Hartley Act also offered a statutory definition of “employees” that excluded foremen and supervisors from the Wagner Act and ensured their full loyalty to the employer. As had been the case since the beginning of the Progressive Era, the legal definition of the worker remained sociologically limited and subservient to a broader economic policy. Yet the exclusion of foremen from the Wagner Act was not a foregone conclusion. On the contrary, the supervisory exclusion was opposed by industrial pluralists sitting on the NLRB, who reinterpreted the main tenets of the social science pioneered by John R. Commons and defended a vision of societal harmony predicated on a broad right to organize accruing from employment in general. It is to their unsuccessful efforts that we now turn.