In the first 12 years of its existence, from 1935 to 1947, the UAW knew a real political
life, with conventions held every year – sometimes twice a year, with fights on the convention
floor over the direction the union should take, and with caucuses formed around some of those
differences in the fights for union office. On the political level, there was a wide range of views,
above all in the period when there were fights over the no-strike pledge imposed by the
government during World War II, a pledge that much of the leadership pushed, but the ranks
ignored. But whatever political problems existed – and many did – at the end of the war there
was still a great vitality and internal union life in the UAW.
With the coming of the McCarthy period witch-hunt and with the aid of the bourgeois
state, an enforcement apparatus was eventually imposed on the UAW to discipline the ranks. The
purges of the militants, who only a decade before had built the union, were already beginning in
1947, when Walter Reuther won re-election in the last fully contested election. That election was
marked by vicious red-baiting coming from the Reuther camp. The Reuther forces moved over
the next four years to establish their stranglehold over the union – expelling militants from the
union, taking over local unions from which they couldn’t expel the militants, working in
collusion with the companies as they fired militants, and encouraging anti-communist gangs,
which literally dragged militants out of some plants during work hours, giving companies the
pretext to fire them.
Stemming from this activity, Reuther established the enforcement apparatus that
eventually came to be known as “the Administration Caucus.” That shadowy apparatus, little
talked about in the plants, has controlled the UAW up to this day, holding down every top office
in the International and almost all the positions in the regions for the last 62 years, dictating to
local officers. Since that Caucus fastened its grip on the union, there have been only four
challenges to its choice for UAW president...
But the most notable attack by the Administration Caucus came
in the summer of 1973, a year in which the plants simmered with wildcats. The top union
apparatus sent a 1000-member goon squad, fully armed with baseball bats and iron pipes and
with a few handguns ostentatiously in evidence, to attack picket lines and crush a wildcat strike
that had shut down Chrysler’s Mack Avenue Stamping plant.
With the support of the
International Union, Chrysler very publicly discharged 91 workers and disciplined over a
hundred more, putting an end to the wave of wildcats that had simmered all summer long. The
UAW leadership moved again the next year to break a wildcat strike that broke out at Dodge
Truck in support of a fired steward and several other activists.
The centerpiece of that action was
the “mobile court,” an open collaboration between the union and the state apparatus. A union
official drove a flat-bed truck, from which a circuit court judge ordered the immediate arrest of
any picketer who didn’t move away from the gates.
And union officials pointed out the fired
steward, whom the judge denounced and ordered arrested. Then in 1976 came the GM
Fleetwood strike, called originally by the shop committee after the president and another local
officer were fired. After a two-day shut-down, the Administration Caucus sent regional and
international reps to control each plant gate. With weapons in evidence, they threatened violence
to all those who didn’t go in, helping to end the strike. Almost 500 workers were given some
kind of discipline for that strike, including 10 permanent discharges, in a deal cut by the
International.
Anger by the ranks, who again could not touch the top leaders sitting in Solidarity House,
focused on local officers. During 1978 and 1979, half of all incumbent local officers in Chrysler
plants, for example, were thrown out in local elections...
By the time the “Big 3” auto companies began to demand outright concessions in 1979,
the attack by the apparatus on the ranks had been reinforced by the first wave of unemployment
in 1974-75, and then by the vast increase in unemployment and plant closings during the severe
1979-81 recession...
http://www.soldiersofsolidarity.com/UAWHistory.pdf