Segmented Work, Race-Conscious Workers: Structure, Agency and Division in the CIO Era

Abstract

Ex-Cell-O, a major machinery manufacturer in Detroit, was not a particularly hospitable place for black workers in the post-World War II years. The firm had a long-standing history of what officials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called "flagrant job discrimination". Whole sections of the Ex-Cell-O plant were bastions of whiteness; black workers remained confined in the firm's most unpleasant and low-status jobs. Moreover, company hiring officials often turned away black job applicants. Responding to the systematic racial exclusion and subordination at Ex-Cell-O, leaders of United Automobile Workers (UAW) Local 49 called for nondiscriminatory hiring and upgrading at the firm. In 1950, Local 49 officers complained that Ex-Cell-O failed to promote a black worker to a position that he deserved under seniority rules. Under pressure, the machinery company's management promoted him "to a better job", but did little more. 1 Complicating the picture, the white rank and file at Ex-Cell-O fiercely resisted racial integration. When a skilled black worker was offered a job in an all-white department in 1951, 146 of the 149 white workers walked out in a hate strike, and planned a work stoppage when they returned. Local 49 officials refused to support the strikers and insisted that the black worker keep his job. In the aftermath of the walkout, shop-floor race relations remained tense. The combination of company hiring policy and rank-and-file racism kept the doors at Ex-Cell-O virtually shut to blacks. More than a decade after the hate strike, the firm had barely improved its hiring practices, despite its promises to treat black and white workers equally. In 1962 black Ex-Cell-O workers complained that the company's managers "either overly place Negroes in certain classifications or pick one or two to place in different classes to say they don't discriminate". Ex-Cell-O's tokenism riled African-American workers. One commented with chagrin that Ex-Cell-O promoted "the average white worker", but only upgraded blacks who were