A/V Geeks @ Hunt Library - Let's Look Back at Labor

well howdy everyone it's been a while i skip are you ready for me to bring us on home skip let's do it okay great i thought so not at home everybody i am a jason evans growth digital media librarian at nc state university libraries welcome to av geeks at the hunt library again not at the hunt library this is our 14th semester of this series partnering nc state folks with raleigh's av geeks to discuss vintage educational and classroom films we're so glad that skip has decided to join us again and to make this happen um so speaking of skip just so you know if this is your first time with us or even if it's your 1900s skip alzheimer is the founder of av geeks an nc state alum and has been for the last several years maybe a few decades collecting films made throughout the last century uh mostly 16 millimeter educational training and other sorts of how-to movies uh he does an incredible job sharing them with the world and we're so honored that he decides to do it with us every semester for the last i guess seven years now that's great he currently houses over 36 000 such films at the av geeks archive here in raleigh and shares them as stock footage for films and exhibits as research material and during public events that's when um so today's theme our first of the fall 2021 semester is let's look back at labor and we're very excited to welcome our dad our guest professor david zonderman dr zonderman is professor and department head in history here at nc state uh where he teaches american labor history and public history and museums among other things dr zonderman has written several books about american labor history and has worked with museums across the country currently working on a book project titled fighting on the home front workers in the civil war we're so delighted to have dr zonderman with us today thank you for joining us again um and a brief reminder that over 200 of av geeks compilations are available for checkout from the libraries uh and you can also visit avgeeks.com or search av geeks in youtube or at archive.org and with that i hand things over to skip to kick us off all right thank you so much jason uh and so happy to be back so 14 seasons does that mean that this is like our seventh year it's yeah we're in year seven now yeah so wow i don't feel too itchy yet i feel pretty good about i think no it's like i think we're doing i think we're doing pretty good um and i keep getting more film so we can keep doing this forever we're gonna need a bigger internet all right excellent uh david i'm happy to have you back you were with us i believe in the spring is that correct i think so thanks for having me again i'm looking forward to it great great way to sort of begin to start celebrating labor day coming up in about 7 days yeah i think that we figured out david you were saying that um you figured that most people would be leaving on next friday for labor three day weekend so um we figured we'd do it now and then you have something you can think about over a labor day weekend exactly um and so when you were with us last i'm trying to remember what films we showed i think we showed films by the afl-cio now we did on a couple of like occupations right right including jobs that don't exist anymore yeah like well book binding's pretty rare now so and and so i have lots of film about working about labor about and and films made by unions and actually films made to counter what films were made by unions um because you know it was important um information that was being distributed and it was being manipulated in some way so that you know the different pro labor and anti-labor people were always kind of at odds trying to um you know get their word out and um the two films that i picked uh one of them is made by the united auto workers uh union in 1959 and this is an interesting film and i think it's interesting because it's going to talk about what's what's happening now like most of my films they were made 40 50 years ago but guess what they're still important and still talk about what's happening now and so this film is about automation and this is when this is before there were even auto robots this is when they were coming up with ways and machinery to um start replacing people the manual work that people were doing and the unions were concerned about that and so uh this is i it's it's like a 30 minute film but i cut it down to about 16 minutes but it gets the points across so we'll watch this and then david you'll come back and we'll talk about what we just saw sounds good [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] machines without human beings machines without human beings that uncanny spectacle is automation a foreboding frightening word a word to send a shutter through a man or a woman or a child even in periods of full employment when wages are decent jobs are plentiful and times are good but during a depression or a recession when men and women and children seem to be in overproduction then automation is a word to strike terror in any human heart especially if that human heart beats in a wage earner's breast now people know in a general way what automation means 150 years ago the world went through something called the industrial revolution we found out how to build machines that could perform much of the mechanical work men and women used to do machines replace the muscles in our backs and arms and legs but you still needed human beings to direct the machines to do the thinking to do the brain work but now automation provides machines that do the brain work that make the decisions men and women used to make in the factories electric eyes limit switches tapes punch cards servo mechanisms everybody knows that but what does this mechanical brain plus a mechanical muscle do to people to jobs to the way we live will whatever happens happen automatically can we do anything well not long ago uaw president walter ruther was in washington dc there the members of editorial commission comes to a plan let's let senator langer of north dakota ask the question senator langer mr three big corporations put seven billion two hundred million dollars into automobile automotive uh machinery whatever it may be how many men to wrap it out of work well it's hard to give you an exact figure these are some of the things we'd like to know more about we do know we do know that we have felt the impact of automation i worked the first time i went to work in the automotive industry was back in 1927 in february they were making the last model t4 senator langer and you know all about a model t because up in your country they were very handy back in the days when the roads weren't very good very handy in politics too driving yeah i i wouldn't be surprised if they were i think i think senator langers thought public uh campaigns are the model too i'm not sure anyway when i went to work at boards in 1927. this was before we had automation took thousands and thousands of workers on individual machines to make a model t engine which is a relatively simple piece of mechanism i mean they board each cylinder separately and they did all the other things on separate operation 1951 the ford motor company opened up a new engine plant in cleveland ohio adjacent to the municipal airport it was the first fully automated engine plans they take a rough casting of a v8 engine which is a very complex piece of mechanism compared to a model t engine block they bring it from the foundry and feed it into this automated machining line completely automatic and without a worker's hand touching that engine block 14 and 6 10 minutes later it's fully machined i went through that plant many years back and the people who were showing me around said to me i couldn't hardly see the workers because there were just a few here and a few there watching electric panels red and green lights going on that showed whether the machine was operating the standard when all the green lights were on it meant that every tool in a battery of machine was operating to performance meeting the the precise tolerances of the machining operation when the amber light came on the machine was still operating but this was a signal that the tool in station number 82 was becoming fatigued the worker got a replacement tool walked over in front of 82 when the red light went on the machine stopped and put the new tool in the green light came on she went on without a worker's hand touching that 14 and 6 10 minutes later it was fully machined so they said to me aren't you worried about how you're going to collect union dues from all these machines i said you know the thought never occurred to me what i'm worried about is how you're going to sell ford cars to all these machines you know you can automate the production of automobiles but consumers are still made thank god in the old-fashioned way this is our trouble this is our trouble model t to experimental model electronic flash from muscle and blood to the automated engine line mr ruther tell us what has this meant economically to the automobile industry if you take some overall figures which i think indicates what's happening in terms of productivity in 1947 the industry made four million seven hundred and ninety eight thousand cars and trucks and we had a workforce in nineteen forty seven of six hundred and forty eight thousand eight hundred workers in nineteen fifty seven ten years later we made seven million two hundred and twenty thousand cars and trucks with a workforce of six hundred and fifty two thousand workers in other words in those ten years we had an increase in the total production of cars of 50.5 with only an increase of one half of one percent in the labor force so if you take the level of production in 47 and the level of production in 57 and the level of employment in 47 the level of employment in 57 you find that production went up 50. uh 5 and employment went up only one half of one percent what walter ruther is saying is that american companies in the last 11 years have bought and built 385 billion dollars worth of new factories and new equipment much of it automated equipment in the auto industry alone the big three have invested seven billion two hundred million dollars in modern automated facilities and the result has been unemployment like this unemployment like these unemployed general motors workers there they are here we are people wanting jobs needing jobs and there are the new factories modern as all get out but close down tight since this is the way things have worked out mr ruther do you oppose all this expansion we don't object to that expansion in our productive capacity because we know the workers that i represent they're grown people they know that there are no economic santa clauses that you can't get something for nothing that you can only have higher living standards more of the good things of life only as you create the economic wealth by the application of human labor and human intelligence to the tools of economic abundance and the economic resources that we have access to so they say fine we've got a bigger plant capacity we've got more modern and more productive tools but they say if we aren't using these tools and we've got idle capacity and unemployment then why and the answer is we aren't using our productive capacity because we haven't got the purchasing power in the hands of millions of families necessary to translate human needs into demand on the store counters of america and that's why we're in trouble we're in trouble walter ruther says in a sense these machines can only do almost everything a human being can do but not everything machines don't buy automobiles for example and that means unemployment all right since this is the situation is the uaw opposed to automation many people at least have been told that unions oppose technological advances mr ruther what about that i have i have been very sad when i hear a labor spokesman fight against improved technology you know king canute couldn't stop the flow of the tide and labor can't stop the flow of technology labor ought to welcome technology you haven't gotten our pamphlets on automation i shall see that you get them because we have we have been standing on the house top saying give us the best automation you can bring in give us the most productive tools because we know that the only way we can have more is to make more and the only way you can make more is to have more productive tools we have been leading the parade for automation we want automation we want the peaceful use of the atom because only as we apply human labor whether it be with hand or with brain to the tools of production can we create the economic wealth that we want to share this is a general motors contract we signed in 1955 on page 66 section 100 reads as follows this is out of our agreement my signature is at the end of this agreement it reads as follows and i quote the annual improvement factor provided herein recognizes that a continuing improvement in the standards of living of employees depends upon technological progress better tools methods processes and equipment and cooperative attitude on the part of all parties in such progress if further recognized it further recognizes the principle that to produce more with the same amount of human effort is a sound economic and social objective we want the best tools that general motors can buy we want the most productive automation machinery that the general motors and ford and chrysler can create in cooperation with machine tool industry on this there is no argument we know we can have more only if the tools of production create more and we want the most productive tools available let us suppose that we have no ultimate automation no multiple trails no huge presses to press out frames what in your judgment would be the cost of an ordinary automobile today compared with the price that it actually obtains in the market if we did not have the tools of mass production and economic abundance there would be no automobile industry there'd still be a few built around by hand and only a few fellows who were millionaires sport car owners would have them they'd just be a handful and the roads would still be muddy and so forth we all know that but why do we make progress we make progress because management wants to drive ahead they want to make more money they want to get more the things that they want but workers when they drive for higher wages why is it in a country where they're where you have cooling wages why is it that their rate of technology is always slower because when manpower is cheaper than machines nobody gets a machine but when you raise wages and it costs more to have manpower than machines you invest in technology and the drive for higher wages is perhaps the most powerful motivation that accelerates technological progress on one thing walter ruther and president eisenhower are agreed automation by itself is not good or bad it is like a knife or high explosive it can be used to advance the well-being of people then it is good or it can be used to produce dark hopeless tragedy and then it is evil but the question is how do you tame automation how do you make it serve people the uaw says when men or women are laid off because of automation when the plant moves people should be given new jobs if there are not new jobs they should be given moving allowances to places where there are jobs if they need training they should get training if they have to be re-educated for new jobs then they should get the education and allowances to live on in the in between times but says senator dirksen who is sensitive to the interest of the big companies doesn't this cost money now among other things you include of course a severance pay and also removal pay where a facility is removed to another town and the employees have an opportunity to go so that they would be paid for moving to another site i think that's in your bargaining that's right but that's that's not a cost factor because when the company moves the factory now let me give you a good example there's been a lot of uh political propaganda circulating in michigan about how the climate in michigan because of the democratic administration in the in the governor's office is creating an unfavorable political climate and the automobile industry are all running away and other companies are running out of michigan but that isn't true they're moving for reasons quite unrelated to politics and the best example is that the last decision made by the kaiser corporation and christopher corporation is the last of the big three who have decentralized their operations uh general motors started out on a more decentralized basis ford was pretty compact in detroit they have decentralized since the war and chrysler now is getting around for that sort of thing chrysler corporation recently announced that they were moving a plant from evansville indiana to plants there to st louis missouri now in indiana they consider that they got the most favorable political climate they got a republican administration they got a right to work law they got everything that the people who represent that point of view think constitutes a completely favorable climate from industry's point of view and yet they're moving out of indiana into a democratic city in a democratic state why because these moves have nothing to do with politics they are moving there because the evansville plant is antiquated it's an old plant it's inefficient it's a high cost unit plant in terms of its physical layout and its equipment and they're going to build a brand new plant in st louis but the reason they aren't building a new plant in evansville is st louis is closer to the market that plant will service and that's why they're moving now when the chrysler corporation moves they will have to pay for the cost of moving their machinery and all the other things that go into the physical plant and we think that moving the worker's family or providing the worker with some cushion until he can make a readjustment and get relocated himself is a part of the cost of doing business just like moving the machinery now the chrysler corporation will have a more modern more efficient plant and they will pay for the cost of moving the machinery out of the greater efficiency out of the greater profitability of the new plant and we think we ought to pay for the cost of moving the workers out of the same greater profitability and greater efficiency so this isn't new money this isn't going to cost the consumer anything but i just think that that if moving machinery is absorbed as a normal cost of doing business that moving people also should be that's all this is but it won't cost the consumer a penny all right so david um what do you think about this film oh i mean there's there's lots to say of um two things quickly and then i'm happy to say more but one is for those folks who don't know walter ruther is a very very important man in american labor history in fact he was called the most dangerous man in detroit in the middle of the 20th century um he didn't start the united auto workers but he was he was a key figure and he became president i want to say right about near the end of world war ii and in 1946 he led the auto workers on a big strike against general motors uh that went on for quite a while and you know general motors at that point was someone some folks may know the old expression what's good for general motors is good for the united states they were the big dog then you know think amazon and walmart today well that was general motors in 1946 which is a huge indication of how our economy is shifted as well um so ruth is very well known and very well respected um in the 1960s he was a huge supporter of martin luther king and the civil rights movement if you look at the dr king's march on washington and his great speech and you look in the background you'll see in many cases walter ruther a lot of the signs say for both jobs and freedom and they're printed by the uaw so again big supporter um as you can see he's a very articulate man um he knows sort of economics he knows how to run a business he's not just this sort of cigar chomping you know corrupt union boss you know pounding the table he can talk to senators and make some pretty sophisticated arguments um the one downside to ruthless he was pretty ruthless within his own union i years ago i met a couple of old-timers who had sort of locked horns with him back in the 50s and 60s and they said you know it wasn't like the mine workers where they actually killed you if you if you blocked horns um but the one guy said he wound up with a basement uh an office in the sub-basement of the union headquarters which is called solidarity house in detroit so luther was still a pretty tough in-fighter um i'll just mention a couple things about you know this clearly is it's a kind of a simply structured film you know it's got sort of the the scenes of automation and then you cut to his various testimony in 1959 in front of congress any of you that are congress junkies um everett dirksen who was the republican minority leader in the senate during the lyndon johnson years um is there johnson's the one with a really deep kind of gravelly wheezy voice um and lyndon lyndon johnson both hated and kind of loved everett dirks at the same time they had a long time they would talk to each other almost every day apparently and just bust each other's shoes but really respected each other as well um but um you know i think rupture makes a couple of really important points probably the most famous one is that story tells about going to a plant and you know the plant manager sort of says hey you know you can't get all these machines to pay union dues and he sort of goes back ha ha you can't get machines to buy cars either can you um i've heard that same story told um where um and maybe this is the same same event you just didn't name the guy but i'm told that same story happened between ruther and george romney who at one point was the president of american motors corporation again if any old-timers are listening today you know the rambler the amc cards that at one time was the fourth of the big three and then that company died out in late 60s early 70s and if the name romney sounds familiar george romney went from being president of amc to governor of michigan and his son is mitt romney so and supposedly um walter ruther made that same statement george romney said to him when he was showing him a plant you know robots you know don't go on strike and luther said robots don't buy cars so it's a classic argument and i i would argue um it still holds water today i mean one of the things i always i get sometimes i have my students read stuff that was written back in the 1930s by new deal labor economists who started to say um the one of the first things we have to do to get out of a depression is we got to pay workers a little more money and let them organize unions safely so they can bargain for better wages because when workers have more money in their pocket they'll go out and spend it um you know it's the old if i remember my econ 101 the marginal propensity to spend and consume if you give a worker a dollar that man or woman is going to probably go out and spend it because they need to they got to buy food they got to buy shoes whatever if you give a millionaire another dollar that man or woman probably ain't going to run out and spend it they're going to save it they're gonna find some whack-a-doodle investment to try to make 100 out of one you know that sort of thing and it goes on it went on years later so um you know remember this testimony from ruther is more than 60 years ago um but i think some of his you know it's not all the same but some of his basic points are really true about workers as consumers the other is again i think ruth is making a very sophisticated argument here that many people don't really make or don't know about but i i would argue it's still true and that is many unions there are it is absolutely true some unions fought automation tooth and nail a good example is the printers the newspaper printers when the um in the 1970s and 80s when newspapers went from what's called hot type to cold type the printers unions fought that tooth and nail and then wound up in some cases going on strike they got special contracts where the old timers stayed on until retirement um but the auto workers particularly under ruther and and um to a long extent for example the mine workers under john l lewis at the same time mostly worked with the companies on automation now some of their members weren't happy some of their members were very distrustful but ruther had this argument that that if if um auto companies automate it more and more that in fact and remember what he says in his testimony if they're willing to help retrain workers then in fact new opportunities might open up or as a company becomes more productive and more efficient it makes more profit and workers through profit sharing might actually make more money so he was aware of job loss he was concerned about it but he also thought that equation was not the only one that there were other aspects to automation and that a labor union if it took a kind of um multi-step process you might say to automation there might be certain advantages in it fascinating the um i guess david what's interesting is to think about this and think about it in terms of and what they were talking about was the idea of like well relocating workers if you're going to relocate your factory you should also factor in the you should budget for relocating your workers as well um and you know i think about now and i think about the idea that um during pandemic having people working remotely and now some of these tech jobs they're just spreading themselves all over the world um how do you think that plays out or was there a historical precedence for that um i i do know that that um you know in excuse me um with the auto workers their contracts have kind of ebbed and flowed a bit on this question um usually auto workers contracts are three or five years and what they try to do at least the auto unit workers unions try to do what's called pattern bargaining like if they make up what they'll usually do is pick one of the main you know they call them the big three they're not as big as they used to be and the union isn't as big as it used to be either but say they'll pick chrysler and if they can negotiate a contract with chrysler they'll go to gm and ford and say you know see what we did here we want you to follow the pattern um there have been a couple of cases and i'm sorry i can't remember the exact years but i know in some of the uaw contracts they've worked really hard to put in this particularly in a period when they thought there was going to be a big wave of plant closings or moving or readjusting or retooling or whatever they tried to include a number of different things sometimes what's called sub supplemental unemployment benefits sometimes retraining grants sometimes moving grants and and i know um some people may remember a couple years ago the big plant in lordstown ohio shut down that's one that had sort of been big for a while it shrunk for a while it regrouped for a while mr trump claimed he'd keep it open didn't happen so it shut down and i know some workers depending on the seniority some of the more senior workers people with 10 20 30 years in the company did get the opportunity to transfer to another plant now the challenge there you know sometimes it's the cost as mr ruther pointed out 60 plus years ago for many of these people they said well you know i've lived in this town 50 years and my agent parents are here and you know my ex-wife is here with the kids so i'm not moving a thousand miles to another plant even though i could get a job there so the moving has there's all kinds of of questions involved and i think particularly um in many smaller industrial communities you're often dealing with with with two factors one is simply long long-time family and personal links and i think that needs to be recognized you know in theory yeah sure i mean some people do it all the time people pack up their car i mean i moved from here from wisconsin but in fact wisconsin wasn't my hometown my hometown was in boston so when i moved from wisconsin we left behind some friends we really liked but okay you move um the other is is the cost of moving housing in a lot of small industrial cities if the the one key factory goes belly up your house is now worth nothing you're underwater so the idea of oh just sell your house and buy another one you know for example people who move to raleigh if you move from to raleigh from california you can afford a mansion in raleigh even if you sold a small house in california but if you move from you know dubuque iowa to to raleigh um raleigh might as well be san francisco the housing market seems very expensive to you and your house if you can even sell it is selling for a song um you know occasionally read these articles everyone should move to now i'm just picking on dubuque i don't know if it's too freaked sure but you know you can buy a victorian mansion for 80 000 as well yeah but where are you going to get a job to even pay that mortgage you know so um these kind of moving costs there's all kinds of both economic costs but also sort of social and personal costs as well all right so um this next film so that first film i would say that was pro labor i mean uaw pro labor um this next film was made by ac delco and acdelco is gm is that correct general motors and um this film is fascinating when i first saw it it was a another collector had a copy of this and i saw it and my jaw dropped because it is an amazing film that's trying to motivate workers to be better but is basically saying it's your fault that these plants are closing because of what you're doing and what you're not doing and it is this amazing example of blaming your workers for maybe some missteps at a higher level um but it is really it's phenomenal it's called what's it all about let's watch that what's it all about every day we hear the words words like quality productivity excellence competition words don't seem to get the whole message across but we can tell you what it's all about it's about work and jobs and what's happening at delco products some of you know right now what's happening there have been layoffs closed doors empty rooms silent machines they're moving out the equipment that was once used to build appliance motors and this equipment is only two years old it's expensive machinery designed to help us do better work make better motors but it didn't work out that way these machines were bought so delco products could be more competitive now they're moving them out selling them to the competition why because the machines didn't work not really we just couldn't compete in the marketplace somehow we didn't put it all together sometimes some of us didn't think it was necessary to come to work every day the cost of quality in dayton couldn't meet the competition elsewhere now the doors are closed thirteen hundred people were laid off some did come back to work in other areas but a lot of jobs were lost many can relate the shutdown to work in the hermetically sealed appliance motor area for them that's where it happened what's it all about it's about competition in the whole world people are working making the motors that once was our job somebody down south somebody out west even somebody in japan is doing that work the need is still there but the competition is getting the job done now you know you say there's really nothing to worry about we have new products coming up yes and no we can't take two steps backward while we take one step forward we need the new products and the old business too that's the only way we can stay healthy we can learn a lot from what happened in other industries most of us know that nine out of ten home radios are made in japan that industry is gone from the usa did you know that two out of every five pair of shoes are made overseas little league or big league nine out of ten baseball mitts sold in the u.s are made somewhere else that sweater you wear to the bowling alley where was it made seven out of ten sweaters come from another land and motorcycles american motorcycles have just about disappeared 19 out of 20 are far made you get the picture we're losing to the competition it's time we recognize that working means a full day every working day we mean everybody the others are gaining because we have forgotten how we made our business strong we are only strong when everybody comes to work on time all the time we are strong when each person does his job and does it right the first time how many times have you heard someone say don't work too hard hard work is what made us strong we are only strong when we are willing to compete with the whole world there's no real way the government can save us tariffs and surtaxes only help for a little while in the world market foreign governments would soon put taxes on all goods made here that means people in many u.s industries lose the competitive edge if they don't have jobs they don't buy cars or appliances that need motors then it comes right back to us we should know the facts of life and here they are as for appliance and air moving motors we're out of business closed up shut down we didn't cut them listed in hermetic motors we are operating at 50 percent of our capacity that's one half of what we can do industrial motors we're working at 75 percent of capacity a little better but we should be running at 100 percent we're 25 percent down on the good side we do have the energy absorbers to build we are ahead of competitors in this one area but how long can we stay that way you can bet on this we can't research and develop new ideas and then lose the business we had most of us grew up knowing about competition if you score a field goal and the other guy scores a touchdown he's ahead that's what it's all about now let's talk about what we can do about it the equipment we work with is designed to be productive at a normal consistent pace it's the best machinery we could design and buy but it must be run from the very moment you start your shift if you're doing your job you know it but if you're not you know that too see we're paying the highest rates we should set the highest goals for ourselves the machines are there all the time but they can't be used to advantage when people stay home from work when we come to the plant we come here with the idea that we'll do a full job for our pay a full measure that's what it's all about we are the people who can really make the difference in competition that's us us everybody has his own job what matters is how we do it we can't blame the other guy it's our pride and our sense of value if we don't do the job somebody else will and he or she may not live in dayton or rochester the competition is out there wherever people are willing to work at the job and give a hundred percent effort no amount of good management modern machinery or product research can substitute for our pride in our work this runs pretty deep in all of us we can only walk the world with dignity when we know we're giving our very best and you know when you are dignity isn't the color of your shirt or the cut of your jacket dignity is what's in your heart and hands pride is knowing that you help to build a product that can and will compete with anything and anybody in the whole world and it's something more than that too it's knowing we have a place to work and there's a job there for us a place to work is where we find dignity believe me it's how we go about it that counts what's happened has happened we can't replay the game and get back the jobs we lost that we can make sure that it doesn't happen again and again well we can that's more like it we is a big word it's a personal word it means a big effort from all of us with a little pride and honest concern we could put delco products right back where we belong on top when we do it we're buying something for ourselves you see this is our place we work here and that that is what it's all about my wow yeah um it's it's amazing to me uh because this was meant to be shown to uh employees and this is like you know i'm sure that there were examples of people taking advantage of things but to do it on that level is is amazing to see and it's it's interesting to see how quickly they scapegoat uh the workers yeah no i think i think you nailed it skip it's really sort of um you know if they're thinking they're doing worker motivation to blame workers is not exactly the way to go about it um and it's you know it's a very familiar story i can't remember the date on that i think that's late 1960s yeah i didn't i couldn't find an actual year for it but it was either early 70s or late 60s yeah and so that's kind of the first big wave of of plant closures and as they reference you know the south i believe the plant is in dayton ohio so a lot of plants have moved to the south in the 50s and 60s or as i mentioned out west and of course you're getting greater japanese competition particularly in the auto industry in the auto parts p some people may know ac delco to this day makes makes spark plugs and brake parts and so it's still part of i think it's still part of the general motors family although i do know a few years ago one of the things general motors did was um it it cut loose a lot of its part supplier in terms of like union contracts like at one point a lot of even the suppliers were covered by various contracts now the auto parts industry is almost completely ununionized i mean the only part of the auto industry that remains unionized are the assembly plants and of course the the so-called big three all the automakers would love to get out of those contracts because in fact most of the assembly plants for foreign manufacturers in this country tend to be built further in the south and they're not unionized in fact just recently i read a book manuscript for a publisher that's coming out that shows i mean toyota volkswagen um i'm trying to think you you name it you know honda mercedes-benz they're all down in georgia alabama kentucky tennessee um and um in almost every one of them the manufacturers sort of sweet talk to uaw oh sure we'll we'll have a union someday don't worry about it we'll work on once we get the plant up yeah right the minute the plant's up and the uaw starts to organize they fight them tooth and nail and some people may know that there's a big volkswagen plant in chattanooga that had several organizing campaigns and the union lost um so it's a real challenge but in this particular movie i think you're right there's just a lot of like you know um the message is you're not disciplined you got lousy quality you know um and it occurred to me um you know the question we don't have an answer for is sort of when were was this film shown i mean i'm guessing they must have had like all like all worker meetings in fact in labor law it's called the captive audience meeting under again some people may not know this but and this happens more often during union organizing campaigns but in fact a company can do it at any time if you work in a company your boss can say that some morning you know two in the afternoon you all have to be in the break room um and you have to get paid you can't they can't make you take time off but as long as the boss says you know we're turning off the line for an hour you know you'll get paid to show up in the break room the boss can do pretty much what he or she wants you know they can't like beat you but you know so during a union campaign in some campaign the amazon uh warehouse in bessemer alabama did this for like a month before the vote almost every day they had these captive audience meetings so and they can tell you whatever they want about unions they're not supposed to threaten to close the plant although a lot of companies sort of dance around that you know whoa you know we may not be competitive in the future and gee what would happen then etc etc etc so my guess is that this this film was shown like all around ac delco you know at various uh worker fun maybe they made it you know a fun event they said oh you know free ice cream but you have to come watch the movie i don't know what they did but it's it's it is interesting yeah it's a pretty good guess uh regarding um you know all right we're gonna have a meeting a company meeting everybody show up um and and so uh there i asked people for questions in the comments sure and uh somebody asked is there a company that saw that it was failing and was able to pivot successfully to another industry and let's make that um you know let's not make that early 20th century because i'm sure a lot of carriage manufacturers became auto manufacturers but um let's say like from the 50s on hmm um one example and it's it's it's sort of small little rays of hope you might call it right here in north carolina the textile industry you know most of the big mills are gone you know kannapolis is gone roanoke rapids but scattered around the state are some smaller plants that are not doing what they used to do which is like spinning thread or making t-shirts but they've gone into various specialty various what's called non-wovens i mean my colleagues over the textile college could tell you a heck of a lot more than i can about the specifics of it but you know i've had a chance to meet a few folks in the industry and they they always they make a great effort to say it's not dead and gone um we have one of the last textile colleges in the country but it's very it's very active it's got a lot of money it's got a lot of research investment so that's one example but again you have to almost think of textiles not as your grandpappy's textiles so um the other and this may not answer the question so if i'm not quite doing it but we were actually talking a little bit right before the start of our our program um i think there are certain industrial cities that have survived and gone in new directions and i in fact there are several historians and a number of urban geographers and sociologists that have written a lot about trying to figure out sort of why is like the example i gave in our discussion was why is pittsburgh doing relatively well and i put relative in quotes you know there's there's certainly poor neighborhoods in pittsburgh there are people that are unemployed but nothing like youngstown ohio and i've been to you know where do labor historians have conferences we don't go to palm springs we go to youngstown ohio for a conference it was really cool to see the city and the people were wonderful there i went on this very cool tour of sort of abandoned steel mills um and i think obviously youngstown's a much smaller city there's all kinds of reasons why but i'm always bring up places like pittsburgh and milwaukee is another example that milwaukee is a it lives in chicago shadow but it's a relatively healthy city a lot of insurance in milwaukee a lot of precision machine tooling that never went out of business so you know i'm not sure all these industries completely change but certain industries find niches and pockets the u.s steel industry we often hear about because like youngstown the big giant steel mills are mostly gone but a lot of what's called specialty steel custom steel making um is often still made in this country it's again made in small badges it's very specialized products it's not just the giant steel bars um so and i will add there are many economic historians that would argue that we this country could have remained viable in steel making for decades we just chose not to invest in it what we did was we after world war ii we helped the german and the japanese economy recover through things like the marshall plan we gave them money to modernize their steel mills but we never did it in this country and either the government should have done it or the industries themselves should have invested but they didn't so all right dr zonum and we have another question somebody asked a bunch of questions but we'll get to um two of them around the time of the delco film would uh factory production lives been so diverse in terms of race and gender or was that just for the movie and then also um she wanted to know do professors have unions um okay they're both great questions i mean i'll take the second one first just real quickly um faculty unions kind of vary around the country mostly if you live in a state that allows public workers to organize and bargain and you work in a public university chances are you may belong to a faculty union not always because faculty are notoriously hard to organize they all think they're special and important don't need a union i try to convince people you're a worker you're an employee your boss can still screw you in some ways even if you have tenure anyways um if you're having to work at a private university you fall under what's called the yeshiva decision of the supreme court and that's yeshiva university it's a jewish university in new york city where the faculty tried to organize back in the 60s or 70s and the supreme court ruled that faculty were management and did not fall under u.s labor law protections here in north carolina i'm a state employee i work in north carolina state and in this state we do not allow public workers to collectively bargain a contract i think that's a terrible law but it is the law and courts have upheld it which i think is bizarre i can join a union i belong to the aaup the american association university professors but our chapter at nc state is a non-bargaining chapter so the law is very mixed it depends on where you work and what's what state you're in um as far as the first question it's an excellent observation about sort of the diversity of the men and women people of color white people um my guess well i know one thing i'm going to guess a second thing my guess is probably some of it was quite deliberately done by the company in the film production company to make the company look oh we welcome everybody and you know we're a good employer we welcome everyone to work for us as long as you're a hard worker or blah blah but also if this was made late 60s early 70s it's after the civil rights act of 1964 which outlawed discrimination in employment and it took a while you know it didn't happen overnight and in fact there have been several good books written on particularly the fight of black workers to get jobs in the south where there was an enormous amount of resistance but by the early set early to mid 70s more and more workplaces were racially integrated but i'll make one final point on that is ironically when many of the just when black folks started to get a foot in the door and get jobs in manufacturing with unions where they paid good wages many of these companies started to go out of business or at least shrink and had to lay off people and in many places with a union contract it was done by seniority and since many of the black men and women have been hired the last last in first out that was kind of the principle there was some litigation about that and in a couple of cases court said you can't completely follow seniority if it's going to mean firing all the black workers you have to work out some um you know some other mechanism but it was it's it's a fact that many black industrial workers lost jobs fairly quickly it was another sad fact i'll just make one other quick point not since it reminds me of seniority and all another interesting thing happened and i uh doc a master's student years ago write a fascinating thesis on when in durham in the big tobacco factories they had a number of black workers as well as white and that was true going back to the 40s but they had segregated unions so in 1965 when you have the civil rights act um the government tells the the the two unions at the at the big like ligand myers plant or chesterfield whoever was you have to merge your unions you can't have segregated locals anymore so the white union goes to black unit says okay we have to merge our seniority lists so all the white people will go the top of the list and all the black people go to the bonding list and the black union says the hell with that we're not going to tell a 30-year veteran you're behind a white guy who got hired last month that's not going to happen and they end up going to court and fighting about it the court said no you have to merge your seniority list so that the guy with 30 years doesn't matter what color he is is on the top and the guy or gal with one month is at the bottom so i mean i think it strikes many of us today is sort of absurd but my student she had these great records she was working with that you know the white union in the late 60s just assumed of course that's the way we're going to do it you know what are you black people complaining about you know so um creating an integrated workforce had its own deep challenges i should say david um having grown up in dayton ohio in the 70s um i had many friends whose both their parents worked at the plants um so um i know that they hired both men and women and they were working you know there was all three shifts running so i would have friends that would work whose parents would work third shift because we would have to be quiet during the day yeah that's a great point and dayton was sort of you know the center of a lot of this um sort of smaller auto you know auto parts and small motors manufacturing an enormous number of companies in in that dayton you know akron had the huge rubber factories dayton akron youngstown that steubenville that whole sort of industrial belt in northern ohio and i don't know if you still have family there but you know dayton toledo all those places have struggled for decades um so i mean my wife had a friend from she worked for ibm in the 80s and had a friend in training who came from toledo so when we moved to wisconsin in 1987 we went we stayed in toledo for a few days and it was fun uh but boy you could see half that city was just closed um so yeah that's an area of the country that took particularly in the late 70s 80s massive economic transformation and many of those cities have just never recovered right that's why ohio you know ohio politics um you know if you go back a hundred years ohio was sort of republican and then the middle of the 20th century because of strong unions of ohio was a democratic stronghold and today ohio is once again a red state and it's it's shaped by a lot of factors but demographics economics are huge factors in that right well david thank you so much for uh joining us again um stuff about labor the history of labor just keeps coming back again and again and again so it's really fascinating to kind of take something some of my films and you put context and then us realize oh yeah we're still dealing with that exactly exactly no you're absolutely right i mean both of these films there are some some of it looks quote unquote dated and someone was like my goodness that could have been made yesterday not 50 or 60 years ago anytime you know that i love doing this this is just excellent fun and i i should say to everybody tuning in uh thank you for tuning in with us uh we will be doing something next month but we just don't know what it is yet we haven't figured it out we have to narrow it down so you know i have 36 000 films so trying to find ones that are interesting and having experts talk about them um you know we have to figure that out so please keep um checking in with av geeks and checking in with the hunt library and um we will see you everybody have a good weekend everybody have a good safe labor day weekend next weekend and we will see everybody soon everybody take care bye