I recently read Stephen Meyer's book
Stalin Over Wisconsin and Walter Buescher's book
Plow Peddler. Very interesting stuff. Meyer gave some good insight to all the labor issues going on at AC in the early 20th century. AC was pretty stubborn when it came to working with the Union. Harold Story was quite the shyster!
Plow Peddler was also very neat. I like how we got an inside look from a employee perspective at AC. I don't agree with him where he said that the "communist led" strike is one of the things that brought down AC. I don't belive for one second that the 1946-47 strike was an attempt by communists to undermine American industry. That is just a smoke screen used for red-baiting and hide labor issues that were really at hand. Were there communists in the rank & file union members of the 248? Yes, but out of 11,000 employees that went on stike, 81 people were fired after it, and not all of them had communist ties. Communist organizations had been helping organize labor unions to help improve working conditions and tame the wild corporate machine. They fought for equal rights for black workers and women, as well as many other things. AC had the money to stick out for this long of strike and it was a battle of who could last longer, and AC obviously had more resources to do it. They were also able to discredit the strike as "communist led" in order to weaken the union and to give a poor reputation to the labor movement. It was all a political game, and AC won. Further more I think it is foolish to say " IF " this strike would have never occured AC would not have suffered later on and even see its own demise. There is no evidence for it therefore no logical conclusion can be made for that scenario.
Other than that...these were both very good books and I think I will start reading An Industrial Heritage. It was written in the 1970s and tells the story about AC.
Edited by Austin(WI) - 10 Apr 2012 at 9:50am
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