Truce in Labor War : Age Eases ‘Blue-Collar Blues’ at GM

Fifteen years ago this spring, the huge and forbidding General Motors assembly complex here in the remote cornfields west of Youngstown became the bitter birthplace of the “Blue-Collar Blues,” and almost overnight the name “Lordstown” was transformed into a synonym for working-class alienation and discontent.

Lordstown’s overworked and angry young workers, including many just out of high school or just back from Vietnam, were rebels with a cause: They would fight GM, and fight hard, to end the constant harassment they were suffering at the hands of a strict and often dictatorial management and to improve job conditions on the fastest auto assembly line in the world, one that was inexorably pumping out 101 Chevy Vegas every hour in the newest, most automated assembly complex GM had ever built.

Bitter 22-Day Strike

Their bitter and sometimes violent 22-day strike in March, 1972, the climax of a labor-management war at Lordstown, was widely viewed as a direct challenge to the established industrial order in America, the blue-collar equivalent of the anti-war demonstrations then being mounted by college students against the nation’s political Establishment.

But, at Lordstown today, the “Blue-Collar Blues” are long gone. In their place has come what can best be described as a blue-collar version of “The Big Chill.”

“When I first got hired, I was a radical,” said Sam Swogger, a slender, soft-spoken 39-year-old who has been working on the line at Lordstown since 1970.

“We all were. I was 21, and I was just back from the Army. Back then, you could do anything you wanted to stop the line, screwing things up, just to slow things down. Back then, losing a week’s pay for that kind of stuff wouldn’t bother me.

‘A Wife, Three Kids’

“But, now, I got a wife, three kids, a house and two cars. You think twice about things like that.

“It’s the same for all of us. We all still got a little bit of the radical in us. But it’s not constant like it was.

“We got older.”

In 1972, “We were taking on the old boys from the corporation,” recalled Bill Bowers, now president of United Auto Workers Local 1112, which represents Lordstown’s workers. “It was a part of the total attitude of our generation, it wasn’t just in our plant. You know, the average age of the guys in the plant was 22 or 23, and most of them had been in Vietnam, fought and came back with the attitude: Who is this punk foreman? And the leadership in the local union was of the same generation.”

With young, long-haired workers flashing the peace sign at reporters, the Lordstown turmoil was soon being described as an “industrial Woodstock.” The rebellion focused national attention on the plight of assembly line workers everywhere and created an unprecedented level of awareness of the problems of tedium and stress in factory jobs.

Ultimately, Lordstown’s workers forced the power structure in Big Business to recognize, for perhaps the first time, that American factory workers of the baby boom generation would not put up with the same conditions that their fathers and grandfathers had so readily accepted in return for a paycheck.

“When ‘Blue-Collar Blues’ are discussed, the auto industry is often singled out as the seat of the problem, the assembly line worker as the chief victim, and the new Vega plant in Lordstown as the case in point,” GM Chairman Richard C. Gerstenberg acknowledged in 1972.

Demographic Bubble

But, at Lordstown today, the rebellious generation of the early 1970s is like a demographic bubble slowly working its way through the industrial system, maturing--or perhaps just settling down--as it goes.

GM, in a mistaken attempt to avoid workers wise to the ways of unionism, had hired mostly teen-agers and workers in their early 20s when it opened the Lordstown plant in 1966; now, those once-angry youths have moved into middle age and have quietly come to terms with factory life. Just as the college demonstrators of the late 1960s and early 1970s have now aged and been assimilated into the corporate and professional ranks, so too have Lordstown’s rebels become wedded to the GM paycheck.

Imports, a more conciliatory GM management and fear of unemployment all have played a part in getting Lordstown’s workers to change. Layoffs in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the plant, along with steel mill closings in nearby Youngstown, idling the brothers and fathers of many Lordstown workers, brought home the harsh facts of international economics to Lordstown’s work force and helped force them to rethink their habits.

“My brother got laid off when his steel mill closed, and he had always been a radical, a real militant at his plant,” said 43-year-old Walt Scott, formerly a militant union committeeman who now acts as a facilitator at joint union-management seminars. “I asked him, didn’t you ever think about the consequences of what you were doing?”

Still, the overriding factor that has prompted the turnaround at Lordstown has been far more basic: Age.

“How much did the fact that we all got older together have to do with it? It had everything to do with it,” Scott added quietly.

“A lot of our attitudes have changed due to a couple of items, namely we took on the responsibilities of a marriage and a family,” Bowers observed. “That changes your attitude a lot. When you only got to produce for yourself, your attitude is a lot different than when you’ve got the responsibilities of a wife and children, and mortgages, and all the other things that go with it.”

“We also got tired, we got tired of fighting,” sighed Denny Lawrence, a former Lordstown radical who now helps run a new union-management school that teaches problem solving and communications skills to line workers and foreman. “You would get to the parking lot, take a deep breath and go in and fight. It was too stressful.”

Today, most of the workers who fought what they call “The Wars” of the early 1970s are still at Lordstown, still hanging doors and fenders on Chevys, which still snake down the line at speeds of better than one a minute.

Plant Avoids Layoffs

Lordstown’s hourly employment, now over 8,000 in three adjacent plants, is slightly higher than in 1972; Lordstown has largely escaped the layoffs that have ravaged other GM facilities over the last year. And, although the car plant now makes Chevy Cavaliers and Pontiac 2000 subcompacts instead of Vegas, many of the production tasks have apparently remained relatively unchanged since 1972.

GM has stuffed its newest plants with hundreds of robots, but there are still only 32 on the passenger car assembly line at Lordstown, about the same level of automation as 15 years ago.

Although the same people and jobs remain, the atmosphere in the plant could hardly be more different.

Now, peace is at hand at Lordstown. The plant’s management and Local 1112 have buried the hatchet, and a cooperative relationship has gradually evolved. Today, the two sides jointly sponsor employee involvement programs that are considered among the most progressive within GM.

The company and union are now experimenting with a four-day week for line workers, and, since late last year, the union and management have also been working together to implement a new Japanese-style team labor concept that will allow workers to swap jobs within their area, while giving union members greater say in how their jobs are designed.

“The management and the union are now in the same foxhole, battling the competition,” said Jack Roberts, manager of industrial relations at Lordstown. “That wasn’t true before.”

Absenteeism, which was rampant at Lordstown in the early 1970s, is now down to a daily rate of about 1.5%, half of the current GM average. Formal union grievances against management, which totaled an incredible 16,000--or more than two for every union member--at the time of the 1972 strike, have dwindled to just 350 today. “I used to carry that many around in my pocket,” Roberts said, laughing. Union grievances against management’s efforts to overload individual jobs--common in 1972, when the company was speeding up the line while cutting the work force--have all but disappeared.

“Before, it was both sides . . . . They said f--- you over something, we said write a grievance, write 10 just for them saying f--- you,” Local 1112 shop chairman Al Alli, now the most powerful union officer in the plant, remembered. “So the plant wasn’t running too good. But what’s happening now is we can sit down and talk instead of write grievances.”

Quality Record Soars

As a result of this new labor harmony, the plant’s quality record has soared over the last five years, to the point where Lordstown, which, in the early 1970s, was producing some of the worst cars ever built, consistently gets quality grades that rank it among the top five GM facilities in the nation. Although its ratings have been slipping in recent months as the work force tries to adjust to the new, more flexible labor system, Lordstown has on occasion even won higher quality grades than the Japanese-managed GM-Toyota joint venture plant in Fremont, Calif.

Although the mellowing of the work force has helped, workers, union officers and even GM managers here say that the fighting would never have stopped if the company had not changed even more than did the workers on the line.

“I don’t think the union’s ideas have changed in decades, but it’s been management that has changed its philosophy to the point where it now wants to do things the union has talked about for years,” said Dan DiLisio, a local union staff member, who was interviewed while Local 1112’s shop committee was having lunch in the plant’s executive dining room, once off-limits to union members. “In the union, our methods have changed, but not our ideas.”

“Management’s emphasis here is now much more on quality, not all volume like it used to be,” Bowers said. “They are still concerned with volume, but, instead of threatening or intimidating the employee to get the volume out . . . they’re willing to sit down and talk and come to us in the union and plan things ahead of time,” he added.

“These guys are still tough union guys, and we’re still a tough management, but now we both know that both sides are powerful, and we’re trying to work together instead of fighting, so we can keep this plant open,” Bernie Brown, Lordstown’s personnel director, noted.

Still, many workers here remain suspicious of GM’s motives and stress that confrontation could once again replace compromise at Lordstown if management ever reverts to the practice of pushing production volume above all else.

“There was a lot of bitterness, a lot of mistrust during the wars, and the people who were here during that time still have that mistrust of management deep down inside for what went on,” said Dan Morgan, a bear of a man with a full beard, who was hired at Lordstown in 1970, just two months after leaving the 173rd Airborne Division and Da Nang. “I know I do. I can’t trust management. I have to live with them, but I can’t trust them.

“If they push us, we’ll come back and screw ‘em,” he added. “Only we’ll do it more subtly now than before.”

There was very little that was subtle about Lordstown in 1972.

A year earlier, Lordstown had been chosen as the sole production site for the Vega, which represented GM’s first all-out effort to conquer the fledgling subcompact market and eliminate what Detroit saw as a small, but increasingly annoying, threat from the Japanese.

But, because GM knew it would make much less money on its new subcompacts than it was used to on its mammoth ‘60s-era land cruisers, the company was determined to squeeze costs and push for ever-higher volume at Lordstown to stretch the Vega’s profits.

In 1971, GM brought in its toughest management group, the General Motors Assembly Division, to crack the whip at Lordstown.

Almost immediately, the new management team announced that the speed on the assembly line would be ratcheted up, soaring from 60 units an hour to the almost unheard-of rate of 101 units hourly. Meanwhile, management’s time-study experts swept through the plant, eliminating between 300 and 500 line jobs that they considered too easy.

The result--a burned-out, increasingly hostile work force.

“We were like robots, we were working 11-hour shifts, six, sometimes seven days a week, 101, 103 cars an hour,” 40-year-old Larry Fogle recalled. Brief wildcat strikes became commonplace as workers sought to shut the line down any way they could.

Repair Lot Jammed

But management held fast to its demands that its ambitious production goals be met by an understaffed work force. Supervisors issued disciplinary warnings as fast as they could write them and had leading militants laid off or fired, all in an effort to intimidate and prod the workers to keep up.

There was little regard for quality. “A lot of times, if people couldn’t keep up, they’d just lay a part in the car without attaching it, so you wouldn’t fall too far behind,” said Dan Morgan. Soon, quality got so bad that the 2,000-car repair lot outside the plant was frequently filled up, backing up the production system and forcing management to shut the assembly line down and send its workers home until the cars could be fixed.

At the same time, Local 1112 was adding to the combustible atmosphere as it underwent a wrenching period of political infighting. The consolidation of management power at Lordstown under GM’s assembly division had forced the union to merge its two bargaining units into one. That meant that there would be fewer elected union positions, prompting union officers to compete with one another to see who could be the most militant in order to survive the next election.

“There was a lot going on all at once,” Bowers noted. “It was an explosive situation.”

It did not take long for war to break out, a war that began before the big 1972 strike, and which continued for years after. Hooded pickets would sometimes illegally block the plant gates, threatening supervisors trying to cross their lines and forcing line workers to turn around and go home. “They pushed us to the point that some people got hurt,” Morgan said. “It was push-push-push. Guys would just explode. It was unreal out there for a time.”

By the time they were done with their wildcat walkouts, their guerrilla-like tactics--harassing supervisors, physically assaulting foremen in the plant or on their way home, sabotaging the line and vandalizing the Vegas on their way through the plant--the workers at the complex had more than earned their nickname, “The Luddites of Lordstown.” (Luddites were 19th-Century English workers who smashed labor-saving machinery.)

Today, both the union and management are trying hard to bury that past. Alli, who is now widely hailed as the architect of the plant’s innovative labor-management programs, noted that Lordstown’s new image as a high-quality plant with peaceful labor relations has helped it avoid getting on to GM’s lengthy plant-closing list.

“In the past, we fought first and resolved our problems later,” recalled Alli, who was fired for nine months for being an activist during the wars of the early 1970s. “And we ruined the product, we ruined the reputation of the plant and everything else by fighting first. What we’re doing now is we’re saying: Here’s a problem, let’s sit down and resolve it.

“Today’s a different atmosphere and a different way of life and a more mature membership and a corporation that’s in trouble,” Alli added. “Regardless of what we want to say, we’re part of this corporation. We don’t want to be one of those 11 (plant closings) that they’ve announced. And we’ve been pretty lucky so far.”

Still, some labor experts wonder whether the new detente at Lordstown is symbolic of a substantive change in American labor-management relations or whether it merely reflects the fact that blue-collar workers are now more fearful of losing their jobs and are thus less inclined to rebel.

“The underlying issues and problems concerning work and dignity on the job that were raised at Lordstown in 1972 are probably still there,” said Harley Shaiken, a widely respected specialist on labor issues in the auto industry at UC San Diego.

“ ‘Blue-Collar Blues’ as a term is no longer around, but the issues the term represents still are,” Shaiken added.

“The question now is: Has there been a real change in labor-management relations or have the issues just been buried by fear?”