- Labor - Janesville Sesquicentennial
-
- [Photograph of Lou ADKINS]
-
- Union organizer; 'Nothing to lose'
- Lou ADKINS said he felt no fear as a union organizer
at the Fisher Body and Chevrolet plants in
- 1934, because he had nothing to lose.
- "I never even gave it a thought," he said, of the
possibility that he would lose his job or the plant
- would move due to union activity.
- "So what (if the plant closed). We didn't have much
of a job then.
- "One day it could be working 15 hours. The next day
it could be 15 minutes," ADKINS, who
- was a tack-splitter at the time, said.
- "There was no grievance procedure and there was no seniority.
In fact there was nothing," he said.
- There is no question but that management mistreated the workers,
ADKINS said.
- "The fired a guy or laid him off at will - without any
reason or rhyme."
- The first union meeting of Janesville plant workers was at
a filling station in 1934, and ADKINS
- was one of the eight or so founding members. But General
Motors did not recognize the union until after the sitdown strike
of 1937. In the interim, GM put pressure on union members, ADKINS
said.
- "There was intimidation and coercion. Hell, they fired
our president, (Waldo LUCHSINGER),"
- ADKINS said.
- Nor was the union well received by the Janesville community
at large.
- "Oh hell, we were a bunch of communists and what have
you," ADKINS said of the public
- perception of unionists. "It was terrible."
- ADKINS was on the board of the local in Jan. 5, 1937,
but even he did not know the precise
- moment the signal to begin the sitdown strike would be given.
"There was only two guys that knew when they were going
to pull the plug," he said. "John Wesley VAN HORN
was president at that time. He knew."
- The signal came at 1 or 1:30 p.m. and the workers filed into
the cafeteria, said the old union official.
- "We went out and got a bunch of food and brought it
in. Somehow there was a meeting arranged in
- (city manager) TRAXLER's office. An agreement was
reached that the company wouldn't hire nobody and we could visit
the plant to be sure that they complied," ADKINS
said.
- "TRAXLER did all the arranging on that deal,"
he said.
- "It was about 12 o'clock midnight and we vacated the
plant," ADKINS said.
- The strike lasted until Feb. 11, 1937, and when it ended
the local had won recognition of its right
- to bargain for its members.
- The lot of the autoworker has improved considerably since
the days when men would be fired or
- hired on the whim of a foreman, said ADKINS, who began
at the GM plant in 1934 at 35 cents a day.
- ADKINS went to work for the international in 1955
and retired in 1965. He worked as a service
- representative with the international; a sort of traveling
troubleshooter for the locals, ADKINS said.
- The autoworkers are still a strong union, he said, but he
is not so sanguine about other unions.
- "In the meat packing and brewery workers, they're really
asking the guys to go backwards,"
- ADKINS said.
- Things will improve for workers when the Democrats recapture
the administration, ADKINS said.
- "It's the John Birch Society," he said of the Reagan
administration. "That's what you have now. The administration
is the most reactionary people on God's green earth," he
said.
- He also expressed irritation at the American appetite for
foreign cars. "They surer than hell don't
- make their wages in Japan for the money to buy them with,"
he said.
- ADKINS called for protection of U.S. markets to establish
an even balance of trade. "You can't
- hardly buy anything to eat or wear that ain't produced overseas,"
he said.
- "They (Japan) impose quotas and won't let us bring American
products in. But they ship 'em out to
- beat hell."
-
- [Photograph; caption reads: Electrical workers, all members
of Local 890, stand ready for a Labor Day celebration in 1919.]
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