Hence this worry: if it continues like this, where are we going? Right to the wall, some answered: ‘dark days are coming for GM if, as the management has often stated, Lordstown represents the future of the automobile industry’.38
Even among specialists in management, perplexity spread. Deeming the old procedures to be obsolete, some hatched plans for reform. Faced with the crisis of disciplinary governability, a new art of governing labour would need to be invented.
Notes
1 1. Michel Bosquet (a pseudonym of André Gorz), ‘Les patrons découvrent “l’usine-bagne”’, Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 384, 20 March 1972, p. 64.
2 2. Bennett Kremen, ‘The New Steelworkers’, New York Times, 7 January 1973, special issue on ‘Business and Finance’, p. 1.
3 3. Agis Sapulkas, ‘Young Workers Are Raising Voices to Demand Factory and Union Changes’, New York Times, 1 June 1970, p. 23.
4 4. Quoted by Emma Rothschild, ‘Automation et O.S. à la General Motors’, Les Temps modernes, nos. 314–15, September–October 1972, pp. 467–86 (p. 479). In the industry, according to the Wall Street Journal, ‘morale in many operations is sagging badly, intentional work slowdowns are cropping up more frequently and absenteeism is soaring’ (Wall Street Journal, 26 June 1970), quoted in Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), p. 252.
5 5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 138.
6 6. Judson Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, Fortune Magazine, July 1970, reprinted in Lloyd Zimpel, Man Against Work (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 61–75 (p. 62).
7 7. Emma Rothschild, Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto-Industrial Age (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 124.
8 8. Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 63. According to one union member, ‘the young worker feels he’s not master of his own destiny. He’s going to run away from it every time he gets a chance. That is why there’s an absentee problem’ (ibid., p. 66).
9 9. According to a GM executive cited by Ken Weller, The Lordstown Struggle and the Real Crisis in Production (London: Solidarity, 1973), p. 2.
10 10. Quoted by Ken Weller from the Sunday Telegraph, 2 December 1973 and Newsweek, 7 February 1973 in Weller, The Lordstown Struggle, p. 2.
11 11. Quoted by Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 26.
12 12. Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 63.
13 13. Quoted by Aronowitz, False Promises, p. 36.
14 14. Quoted by Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York: The New Press, 2011; first published in 1974), p. 38.
15 15. John Lippert, ‘Shopfloor Politics at Fleetwood’, Radical America, no. 12, July 1978, pp. 52–69 (p. 58).
16 16. Ibid.
17 17. Agis Sapulkas, ‘Young Workers Disrupt Key GM Plant’, New York Times, 23 January 1972, p. 1.
18 18. See Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 45.
19 19. Quoted by Aronowitz, False Promises, p. 41.
20 20. Gooding, ‘Blue-Collar Blues on the Assembly Line’, p. 68. According to the New York Times, today’s workers ‘are better educated and want treatment as equals from the bosses on a plant floor. They are not as afraid of losing their job as the older men and often challenge the foreman’s orders. And at the heart of the new mood […] there is a challenge to management’s authority’. See Agis Sapulkas, ‘Young Workers Are Raising Voices to Demand Factory and Union Changes’, New York Times, 1 June 1970, p. 23.
21 21. Richard Armstrong, ‘Labor 1970: Angry, Aggressive, Acquisitive’, Fortune, October 1969, reprinted in Compensation & Benefits Review, vol. 2, no. 1, January 1970, pp. 37–42.
22 22. Jefferson Cowie, ‘That 70’s Feeling’, New York Times, 5 September 2010, p. 19.
23 23. Bill Watson, ‘Counter-Planning on the Shop Floor’, Radical America, no. 5, May–June 1971, pp. 77–85 (p. 79).
24 24. Quoted in Milton Snoeyenbos, Robert F. Almeder and James M. Humber (eds.), Business Ethics: Corporate Values and Society (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1983), p. 307.
25 25. Aaron Brenner, ‘Rank-and-File Rebellion, 1967–1976’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1996, p. 37.
26 26. Weller, The Lordstown Struggle, p. 8.
27 27. Aronowitz, False Promises, p. 23.
28 28. Weller, The Lordstown Struggle, p. 3.
29 29. Quoted in ibid., p. 9.
30 30. Ibid.
31 31. Sapulkas, ‘Young Workers Disrupt Key GM Plant’, p. 1.
32 32. Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), p. 46.
33 33. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, p. 7. The Lordstown strike was ‘one of the most sustained campaigns of informal in-plant resistance ever to have been documented’ in American social history (Weller, The Lordstown Struggle, p. 8).
34 34. Malcolm Denise quoted in Weller, The Lordstown Struggle, p. 4.
35 35. Rothschild, ‘Automation et O.S. à la General Motors’, p. 469.
36 36. Ibid.
37 37. Aronowitz, False Promises, p. 35.
38 38. Rothschild, ‘Automation et O.S. à la General Motors’, p. 469.
2 HUMAN RESOURCES
[The alien character of labor] emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague.
Karl Marx1
In the 1950s, conservative intellectuals had believed they were in a position to announce ‘the end of ideology’ – already! – and the extinction of the class struggle with it. The ‘American worker’, claimed Daniel Bell in 1956, had been ‘tamed’. Not, admittedly, by the means that Marx had criticized in his time, nor by impoverishment, nor through ‘the discipline of the machine’ but ‘by the “consumption society,” by the possibility of a better living which his wage, the second income of his working wife, and easy credit all allow’.2 Even when he suffered from his working conditions, the worker’s thoughts led ‘not to militancy, despite occasional sporadic outbursts, but to escapist fantasies – of having a mechanic’s shop, a turkey farm, a gas station, of “owning a small business of one’s own.”’3
Everything was quiet, and then – crash, bang, wallop! At first, people were stunned, unable to understand anything. We need to try and imagine the immense and painful surprise represented by the movements of the 1960s for those who were firmly convinced of the withering away of social conflict in the ‘consumer society’.4
Some, revolted by this revolt, accused the troublemakers of ingratitude. General Motors Vice-President, Earl Brambett, ‘deplores the younger workers’ insistence on even more benefits and improvements, [and] thinks instead they should show more appreciation for what they have’.5 But what more did they want, exactly? That was the scandal. And how could they still revolt? That was the mystery. Explanations were sought; people concocted theories about the revolt, and sought out its causes.
This unrest was first understood as arising from the generation gap. New