The declaration of total war during the Second World War presented both opportunities and challenges for workers' struggles for greater control over planning, production, and employment. Labor historians have suggested that during the war liberal Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) leaders like Sidney Hillman, Philip Murray, and Walter Reuther, advocating patriotic social unionism, insisted upon the larger role of labor in wartime mobilization and politics through unconditional support of the war efforts. United Automobile Workers (UAW) officer Walter Reuther's “500 planes a day” plan was a case in point. Reuther criticized automobile manufacturers' refusal to convert the automobile industry for all-out defense production during the defense mobilization period. In addition to his genuinely patriotic desire for increased production, Reuther suspected that, unless Detroit became the center of defense production, material shortages and construction of new plants elsewhere would result in massive layoffs and undercut union strength there. Thus Reuther's plan for the immediate conversion of the existing automobile facilities answered President Franklin D. Roosevelt's call for a construction of 50,000 aircraft a year. Through a creation of a management-labor-government production board, Reuther tried to institutionalize labor's joint decisionmaking in industrial planning and management. His ambitious yet unfulfilled plan indicated that liberal CIO officers, as Nelson Lichtenstein suggests, “sought to use the state apparatus to advance the interests of their organizations” and to curb the unbridled corporate and military dominance of wartime mobilization.¹

Labor historians have also pointed out that in militant local unions, rank and filers' wartime patriotism intensified their shop-floor contests for shared control of defense production. Workers who endeavored to fight for control over production standards and workplace discipline were militant antistate, antiunion wildcatters. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, international unions pledged not to sanction strikes and pursued compulsory settlement of workplace grievances by the National War Labor Board (NWLB). Union leaders also firmly imposed disciplinary measures upon noncompliant local unions if their volatile job actions interfered with the pace of production. Yet the failure of state planning and regulatory agencies to enforce “equality of sacrifice” between labor and capital sowed the seeds of antistate sentiments among rank and filers. The collaboration with the state more often than not resulted in arrested wage increases and dilatory settlement of labor disputes. Furthermore, corporate managers exploited labor's “no-strike pledge” to roll back union rights and control over production and employment. The corporatist collaboration increasingly compelled local union cadres and their members to utilize primarily “wildcat strikes”—spontaneous work stoppages taking place outside of the union structure—and “stints”—control of the pace and quantity of production—in their everyday struggles. As a result, labor historians argue that wildcatters' continuous use of the unauthorized strike weapon “implicitly challenged the leaders of the CIO and their pact with capital and the state.” Wildcatters resisted state intervention and advocated syndicalist workers' control in the workplace to enforce equality of sacrifice.²

This case study of Brewster naval aircraft workers suggests that the working-class use of the state apparatus in their shop-floor struggles was more common than labor historians have indicated. Brewster workers, like liberal CIO leaders, aspired to reconcile their demands for the maximum utilization of their facilities and skills on the behalf of the war efforts and for greater decisionmaking role in the planning and management of defense production at Brewster. Led by Reutherite, socialist, and Trotskyite union cadres, Brewster workers waged company-wide wildcat strikes and used the extensive network of stints, contesting both the coercive power of the state and the bureaucratic international union leadership in the shops, in the Navy Department, and at the ballot box. Yet the public character of defense work and its centrality to the war efforts also led workers to demand state intervention in their struggles for joint control of defense production at Brewster. Reuther and other CIO leaders presented their social democratic, corporatist schemes when large corporations intentionally delayed a conversion to defense production to protect their soaring profits. They sought a place at the table for labor in state planning and regulatory agencies, by contacting politicians or making public proclamations. Similarly, chronic production problems at Brewster created opportunities for Brewster workers to demand a role in production, management, and planning. Letters that the workers sent to intelligence agencies, the Navy, and politicians disclosed disloyal, inept, or arbitrary management and called for redress by the state. Through more quotidian yet political form of protests than wildcat strikes or stints, Brewster workers struggled to search for workers' patriotic control at the point of production.³

The prolonged production problems brought by mismanagement hindered productivity and threatened the job security of Brewster workers. Toiling in three separate plants in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, Brewster workers constructed naval fighters and scout bombers for the US Navy and Allied governments during the war. The multistory building structures with their cramped interiors preserved the batch production of the different aircraft parts that skilled workers constructed and subassembled in Long Island City and New Jersey. The spacious, single-story Johnsville plant accommodated state-of-the-art mass production equipment, but little of the final assembly, tasks that unskilled workers predominantly performed. If the poorly planned plant system hamstrung the thorough operation of mass production techniques, the pressure from the Navy for maximum performance backfired. Eleventh-hour modifications to aircraft that were already rolling off the production lines limited the systematic production planning by company management in the areas of material procurement, labor utilization, and machine loading. At Brewster, the frequent changes to the prototype without fundamental redesign of airframes produced operationally dysfunctional aircraft. In addition, for the Navy's habit of demanding immediate changes in the models often resulted in prolonged retooling and experimentation in the shops. Rush orders for newer and different types of planes compelled the company to prepare machine tools, jigs, and fixtures and to construct parts before thoroughly testing the prototypes. Such practices rendered many tools and parts obsolete. Substantial redesigns and critical production delays became routine. The specter of temporary layoffs and transfers loomed large particularly for semi- and unskilled workers, as the extensive retooling slashed the number of assembly jobs.⁴

Local 365 of the UAW-CIO at Brewster became a key stabilizing force for workers who constantly worked under the menace of temporary layoffs and transfers. The local union organized all workers in the three different states into one big union. Shop stewards struck hard bargains with struggling company management that sought industrial peace to prevent strikes or lockouts. In the process, Brewster unionists established joint control of work and market relations with management and built a strong local union to protect members from the uncertainty of defense work. Its agreements with the company guaranteed the preservation of a union shop and union dues check-off; they also incorporated shop-floor representation into the union contract by specifying the rights, duties, and numbers of shop stewards and shop committees. Furthermore, the local union inserted “mutual agreement” clauses into the contract to establish union control of discipline and employment.⁵

In companies like Brewster, the intensity of competition over defense production went beyond industrial managers and union cadres, as working-class patriotism rekindled rank and filers' struggles to reorient shop-floor control. The juxtaposition of patriotic productivity with workers' immediate concerns for their job insecurity inspired Brewster workers to be active participants in taxing debates and searches for productivity. Despite the vital contributions of labor, however, institutional bases for labor's input on the planning and management of defense production did not exist. Military and civilian bureaucrats refused to share overall industrial planning with international unions, whereas company executives' jealous defense of managerial prerogatives derailed rank-and-filers' efforts to raise productivity through labor-management production committees in numerous factories, including Brewster.⁶

As a result, Brewster workers called for congressional or intelligence agencies to investigate their plants. Failing this, they suggested that the military take control of faltering plants to restore productivity. Political letter writing assumed a critical role in their campaign. By criticizing corporate or military mismanagement and proposing ways to raise or enforce standards of productivity, Brewster workers challenged the coercive power of various levels of industrial authority. In particular, the first section of this article investigates the ways in which Irish, Italian, or Jewish workers used patriotic productivity to undermine the dominant and discriminating network of German-American supervisors. Their letters and confidential reports asserted that their supervisors avowedly demonstrated their disloyalty to the United States by publicly celebrating their German heritage on the shops, showing off their pro-Nazi sympathies, or slowing down production. The convergence of workers' revelations and the Navy's insistence upon sustained productivity resulted in the dismissal of supervisors. The naval interventions undermined plenary managerial control and unwittingly assisted workers' struggles for broader control of discipline and employment beyond the contractual purview of the union contract.⁷

The second section of this article examines the limits of Brewster workers' subversion of patriotic productivity and state intervention. The workers, claiming that their skills, planes, and productive facilities were central to the war efforts, contested the naval industrial politics that disrupted steady defense production and threatened defense workers' economic security. Yet Brewster rank-and-filers' struggles, which did not entail a long-term political and social vision, could not survive the wholesale reconversion to peacetime production. As debates on the relative merits of various plans for curtailed defense production arrested public attention at the end of the war, calls for sustained productivity lost their urgency and nullified the strategies of Brewster workers.

Contesting the Shopfloor Management by Shop Foremen

In a confidential letter of March 1942 to the Military Intelligence Division (MID), Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) J. Edgar Hoover stated that he had learned that Brewster “is desperately in need of someone with complete authority who is capable enough to take appropriate steps to ensure that the work is properly coordinated in order that a high degree of production will be obtained.” The company's inability to meet delivery schedules caused tension between Brewster executives and the Navy. War necessities frequently forced the Navy to discipline inept management and to supervise production directly. The Navy compelled the company to bring in two new presidents before March, as each management team had failed to lead the rapidly expanding company.⁸

The changes implemented by the Navy did not bring the anticipated result: a strong, centralized management. Instead, the local power of shop supervisors expanded. As FBI Director Hoover reported, “at the present time much power is delegated to individual shop foremen who in turn manage their shops in a very haphazard manner.” Various foremen except at the lower ranks did not belong to Local 365 and maintained their independence from top executives. Similar to their powerful predecessors who had built “the foreman's empire” in batch-production firms, Brewster foremen functioned as the de facto production leaders who had considerable leverage in scheduling and engineering. As company supervisors, they also had full power to employ and dismiss workers in their departments.⁹

The company's limited incorporation of mass production techniques resulted in its heavy reliance on foremen and skilled workers to experiment with new models and to sustain production. The dependency perpetuated “job shop” production; the “great amount of hand work,” to put Captain Wadleigh Capehart, Inspector of Naval Aircraft at Brewster, was prevalent in both construction of parts and final assembly. Constant design changes led foremen and skilled machinists to produce one or a few of identical pieces using hand tools and general-purpose machines. Skilled sheet-metal workers who “do not even work from blueprints” also used various hand tools such as mallets, hammers, and hand shears to cut and form aluminum plates, reported a New York State Employment Service agent in August 1941. The extensive handwork resulted in the minimal use of dies, which once put into action could reduce handwork and shorten the time required to churn out the large quantities of identical parts. In addition, the lack of efficient tool engineering organizations forced tool-and-die makers to prepare assembly lines “in the old knife and fork method.” Then they reworked the jigs and fixtures that they had custom made for early production runs in order to hold and guide cutting or welding of the latter ones. Their temporary and makeshift character of these tools rarely ensured the precise assembly of separately fabricated parts and required extensive finishing work.¹⁰

In addition to their skill and experience, production foremen maintained strategic importance in the organization of production by ethnically segregating such departments as machine shop, tool and die, jig, and sheet metal. According to naval intelligence reports, shop supervisors in those departments were predominantly German-born, naturalized skilled mechanics and machinists. For instance, Heinrich Claus, a foreman of the machine shop department, had controlled tool designing since 1933. Like Claus, most company supervisors came to the United States during the 1920s and worked in various machine shops in New York City and New Jersey. Most became naturalized and began working at Brewster during the 1930s. These foremen, endeavoring to maintain their entrenched power and authority in their departments, preferred to hire and promote fellow Germans over other ethnic groups. In his March 1942 report, naval intelligence agent John C. Goodbody pointed out that ninety-five percent of those hired for Claus' department were naturalized citizens of German birth. In the jig department, German foreman Max Werner supervised forty-eight workers of whom thirty-five were German-born.¹¹

Skilled German groups notably enforced their own work rules and cultures. According to Hoover's letter of March 1942, Bruno Steegman, a German turret lathe operator, adamantly “refused to have a tool installed on his machine which would definitely speed up production.” The company called off the changeover when Steegman threatened to quit. Carl Sens and Herman Brunder, who operated the same machine on different shifts, “maintain[ed] even balance of work between them” and agreed “not to turn out over 100 pieces a day,” reported agent W.B. Howe in March. In addition to their control of employment and work processes, they asserted ethnic solidarity and craft power by embracing the German cultural heritage. For example, even though the company put up the signs that read “No other language but English to be spoken” throughout the plants, these workers established German as the shop-floor language.¹²

German supervisors and skilled workers, however, were unable to maintain the ethnic segregation of departments for long. During the defense mobilization period, the number of the workforce fast grew from 1,000 in January 1940 to 10,643 in January 1942. In the process, the company promoted semi-skilled workers of other ethnic groups to skilled positions and transferred them into those departments that Germans had previously dominated. The Irish and Italian Americans constituted the majority of “new” workers who began working at Brewster after 1940. This ethnic composition reflected residential patterns in the Brewster vicinity. According to a report of the personnel department of Brewster in November 1942, out of 8,874 workers at the Long Island City plants, ninety-two percent lived in the five boroughs of New York City. In the 1940 census of those boroughs, of the total “foreign white stock”—born either in a foreign country or of foreign or mixed parentage, twenty-three percent were Irish; twenty-one percent were Italian; and twelve percent were German.¹³

Sizable numbers of Jewish workers also entered Brewster during this period, despite the hardship they encountered in getting into aircraft companies. Some of them had to fake their religion to get a job. Thomas V. DeLorenzo, for example, discarded his old Jewish name Harry Posner and presented a false record of a Catholic baptism to get a job at Brewster. Before a House Naval Affairs Subcommittee hearing in November 1943, he argued that “in order to get employment in Brewster I had to lie, and I didn't hesitate about doing it, and I wouldn't in the future if I had to have a job to support my family.” Moreover, according to Al Nash, a Jewish worker himself, “anti-Jewish feeling” was “prevalent” among many company managers and workers at Brewster. Candidates for stewards informally solicited votes on an ethnic basis and were not hesitant to utilize ethnic animosity at the ballot box. When Nash ran for steward, his rival candidates wrote such derogative words as “kike” or “Abie,” a derisive diminutive for sons of Abraham, across his campaign posters.¹⁴

The intermingling of diverse ethnic and religious groups at Brewster generated multiple sites of intergroup conflicts, but the ethnic one was most salient. Like New York City transit workers, Brewster workers were steeped in the ethnic subcultures of New York City and New Jersey. Ethnic tensions in those residential communities, particularly between German and non-German groups, took the forms of ethnic strife among Brewster workers. Some new workers fired off critical letters or reports to the FBI, President Roosevelt, the Navy, or Congress, all of which alleged that German supervisors were “German at heart” and questioned their loyalty to the United States. Claiming to be “true Americans,” these new workers claimed that their supervisors' family or business ties to Germany testified to the latter's political loyalty to their “fatherland.” Having escaped the political and economic turmoil of 1920s Germany, immigrant workers at Brewster had not experienced the anti-German hysteria in the United States during the First World War. Thus, in contrast to the previous generation of German immigrants who had distanced themselves from the culture and heritage of their homeland, those of the postwar years took visible pride in their ethnic background. Many had family members who sent regular letters from Germany; others visited them whenever possible. In addition to maintaining contact with their homeland, many immigrants had no plan to stay permanently in the United States. According to one of Howe's informants, Carl Sens, “although [a] good machinist is not a good American.” Like Sens, “many of the German workmen at Brewster desire to return to Germany and desire a German victory.” The informers also suspected that the purchase of German securities or Ruechwanderer Marks (reemigration marks) demonstrated an intention of returning to Germany. Just as the purchase of Series E Savings Bonds and later war bonds validated citizens' support of the war efforts, any Germans' financial investment in Germany aroused suspicion among non-German workers.¹⁵

The exposés demonstrated that the writers and informers were critical of the partial Americanization of the Germans and their disengagement from the war efforts. The wartime celebration of ethnic pluralism created a sense of solidarity among members of the white working class. It also spurred European ethnic workers to express their commitment to the war efforts and to accept American cultures and society, a process that federal immigration restrictions in the 1920s and mass consumer cultures of the 1930s had already set in motion.¹⁶

In addition, new workers' defiance of German supervisors' vested power on the shop floor erupted in ethnic and class conflicts. Writers and informers contended that German supervisors showed bias against them in hiring, promotion, or job placement. German Americans used ethnic and kinship connections to land and hold better-paid jobs to the exclusion of non-German workers. One informant complained to the MID in August 1941 that “it is impossible to obtain a position except that you have a German name” in certain departments at Brewster. Those who managed to clear hurdles at the factory gate encountered on-the-job discrimination. In 1941, a female worker claimed that she lost her job after four weeks in the steel fitting department because she did not speak German. She believed that the supervisors' use of German discriminated against English-speaking, unskilled workers, for broken communication retarded the latter's learning process and left them with little chance of surviving the probationary period. She added that “all the bosses and all the men conversing in the German language” should be “discharged from a defense plant.” She argued that “if your lead men would talk English instead of mixing in German when they speak to you probably we could understand what to do.”¹⁸

Like wildcat strikes, these writings were spontaneous, individual acts of resistance to an authoritarian work regime. The differences between the letters and the confidential reports indicate that the union did not orchestrate a mass letter-writing campaign. Yet, in contrast to antistatist wildcatters, Brewster letter writers called for immediate state intervention in their struggle for a democratic workplace, partly because they wanted to honor the no-strike pledge. Prior to a naval takeover of the Brewster plants in April 1942, there had only been one wildcat strike. The workers also sought third-party intervention because of haphazard handling of shop-floor grievances at Brewster hindered in-house mediation of disputes.¹⁹

Wartime anti-Nazi sentiment also fanned the tensions, as writers and informers investigated the prewar activities and associations of the Germans in hopes of finding evidence of their Nazi sympathies. One worker claimed that he had often encountered his foreman and other Germans in the sheet metal department participating in Nazi rituals prior to the German declaration of war against the United States in December 1941: “When they address or meet one another, they often give the Nazi salute . . . Some of them make metal swastikas at expense of this company.” Informers also reported on the suspects' participation in allegedly pro-Nazi meetings or demonstrations. George Reisberger was a person who demonstrated his “great admiration for Hitler,” as he bragged about his attendance at the German-American Bund's George Washington's birthday rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 to fellow workers. Others reminded intelligence and government agents that the United States was fighting the same enemy that it had defeated during the First World War. A worker in the jig department informed the FBI in March 1942 that German First World War veterans held key positions in the plant and “systematically delayed or sabotaged” making “everything or every part of a plane.” He suspected that the Germans continued to wage war by putting defense production in “great danger,” but was confident that the loyalty of American war veterans would guarantee “all-out effort for defense.” Another Brewster worker, an American veteran of the Great War, wrote to President Roosevelt in January 1942 suggesting that “many loyal Americans, particularly the War Veterans” be appointed to “responsible supervisory jobs.” The writer emphasized patriotism, not skill, as the main qualification for supervisors “in a vital defense plant.”²⁰

It is very difficult to prove that these German personnel were pro-Nazi and thus untrustworthy. Most German Americans, fearing another outbreak of anti-German paranoia and dismayed by the Nazi policies, were reluctant to associate with ethnic German or pro-Nazi organizations. Some interwar German immigrants were sympathetic to the anticommunism, anti-Semitism, and isolationism of the American Nazis, but did not conspire to bring the United States under Nazi domination. Thus, once the United States entered the war, they immediately endeavored to prove their patriotism by outpouring loyalty statements and rallying behind the war efforts. FBI Director Hoover's March 1942 letter to the MID described a Brewster informer's observation that “since the attitude of the United States became anti-German these workmen have gradually subsided in their pro-German feelings.” Moreover, except their alleged flirtation with the Nazi symbols and prewar connections to the pro-Nazi groups, other charges were nonspecific and lacked substantial evidence.²¹

In addition, the German Brewster personnel did not meet the production quotas and delivery schedules imposed by the Navy, not because of their pro-Nazi beliefs but because of their defense of handwork, their resistance to speedups, and their involvement in prolonged experimentation. Yet the writers regarded these practices as covert acts of sabotage. A Brewster worker confided to his friend, who then reported it to War Production Board Director Donald Nelson in March 1942, that “from the top down, from supervisors down through the foremen and assistant foremen, there was the constant slogan—‘Take it easy!’ (underlined in the original text).” Germans also supervised the most important phases of extended design modifications, which slowed volume production runs and perpetuated idleness. In particular, German foremen and skilled workers had spent nearly two years on a prototype of the SB2A Buccaneer scout bomber. In contrast to the German personnel's steady work and relatively secure position despite production problems, the letter writers were vulnerable to layoffs and transfers. They took matters into their hands by claiming that it was their patriotic duty to reveal the disloyalty and incompetence of their supervisors.²²

The charges of non-German workers against their German supervisors caught the attention of the FBI, the MID, and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested and interned “potentially dangerous” people of German ancestry, and the Army excluded and relocated those to inlands from coastal security zones. Naval intelligence officers, overtly emphasizing preventive measures, also aimed to “let out” defense employees who were “not being too sure—suspicious,” in the words of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard in October 1942. In the process, they relied on ethnic profiling by suspecting that German nationals or naturalized Americans had what industrial relations officer of the Navy Captain George M. Keller referred to as “connection with subversive interests,” because of their German backgrounds.²³

On March 14, 1942, the Navy requested the dismissal of twenty-seven German-American employees. The company promptly complied, discharging five company supervisors and twenty-two skilled workers. This was the first test case, in which the Navy put into effect a joint agreement signed by the military, the Department of Labor, and representatives of the CIO and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In January 1942, the joint memorandum endorsed the military's authority to remove “an employee of subversive activity on a national-defense project of importance to Army or Navy procurement” after “adequate investigation reveals that there is good cause.” Before transferring plant protection responsibility to the Army in May, Navy officers initiated the discharge of “various individuals in plants” with naval contracts in numerous cases. In particular, they targeted German supervisors in machine tools and aircraft factories, which, they suspected, “are staffed at many key points with men, and even executives, of dubious loyalties,” reported Lieutenant Peter Belin in December 1942 to fellow naval intelligence officers.²⁴

Navy officers, however, admitted that they had removed the employees without any definitive evidence of sabotage at Brewster. Captain Capehart reported to the ONI in December 1941 that the existing reports by the FBI and ONI lacked the “proof which is conclusive . . . as to disloyalty of a man employed in an airplane plant.” He testified that “in every case the man reported against was found to have had a good record during his employment with Brewster, and to have caused no trouble during said employment.” However, naval officers acted upon the belief that, in the words of agent Goodbody in March 1942, “the presence of a concentration of employees of German descent within the plant [con]stitutes a real threat to security.” Lieutenant Commander Robert H. Thayer explained to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in April 1942 that “because of their nationality and background” those Germans “mentally sympathize with the Nazi causes.” He justified their discharges to prevent them from being “used when the time comes by the active enemy agents,” even though the Navy did not secure any positive evidence against them. In addition, Navy officers were sharply critical of the prevalence of handwork and lackluster productivity. They tried to augment productivity by undercutting the influence of inept production leaders who had “not accept[ed] suggestions which would increase production,” reported agent Howe in March 1942.²⁵

Historians have investigated the wartime internment and exclusion of German aliens and naturalized citizens in the contexts of such ethnic and political factors as the rise of Nazism in Europe, the prewar growth of pro-Nazi groups in the United States, and the ties to Germany. The Brewster case also suggests the workplace origins of exclusion; the ethnic and class contests over jobs and work cultures brought about the discharge. When German shop foremen's challenges to the new labor contract of 1941 stalled the handling of grievances in the spring of 1942, rank-and-filers' spontaneous exposés of German skilled workers' and foremen's ethnic affiliations proved to be an expedient check on the latter's shop-floor authority. Moreover, non-German, less skilled workers were able to challenge managerial prerogatives to discipline and layoff employees. The clauses of the 1941 labor contract expanded the union's power to regulate workplace labor relations; the mutual agreement clauses specified a joint-decision on discipline and personnel. Yet company management had the final say, and contractual regulations did not apply to the shop supervisors who did not join the union. Thus the March discharge indicated that rank-and-file workers tried to extend workers' control of market relations, which they had established through the union contract. They did so by initiating and facilitating the discipline and discharge of shop supervisors by the Navy, which lay outside the purview of the contract.²⁶

Brewster workers also had to look beyond the narrow confines of the workplace to keep up their joint control of work and market relations. Navy officers had the power to deprive Brewster workers of their jobs if operational requirements no longer needed Brewster planes and plants. When naval orders for production changes in 1941, 1942, and 1944 jeopardized their economic security, workers, in the words of union president DeLorenzo, “went to Washington to raise a little hell.” They tried to bring other state agencies and the sympathetic public to exert collective pressure on the Navy, contending that continuous production of Brewster planes, to quote a Brewster worker William Browy in April 1944, was “so necessary to a successful conduction of our war effort.”²⁷

Contesting the Industrial Planning of the Navy

The labor-management-state contests over reconversion to peacetime production started early at Brewster, whose relationship with the Navy was becoming increasingly tenuous. By February 1944, the company became a fulltime subcontractor to build the F3A Battler, the Brewster version of Chance-Vought's F4U Corsair. The Navy had canceled all outstanding orders for the troublesome SB2As and instead ordered Brewster to concentrate on the better-designed and-engineered F3A fighters in November 1943. The changeover boosted productivity but promised very shaky reconversion prospects for both labor and management. Without its own designs and production orders, Brewster's days as a valuable client of the Navy were numbered. The Navy had maintained a core group of prime contractors at the expense of subcontractors, who received awards last and cancellations first. In addition, the growing public scrutiny of the problems in the plant drastically cut down on the Navy's financial and contractual support of Brewster.²⁸

The naval threats of contract cancellation compelled Brewster unionists to try to normalize the ailing company first for continuous employment and preservation of the union movement. For most Brewster workers, international unions' campaigns for early yet gradual reconversion to civilian production proved to be illusionary. Automobile and aircraft factories producing heavy bombers for the duration could convert their production lines to the manufacture of automobiles and airliners. In contrast, Brewster workers' economic security was dependent upon steady military production. The civilian aviation market for small, private charter services, through which naval aircraft companies could utilize their specialty, remained hazy. Thus Brewster workers tried to prove to Congress and the Navy that they had the will and capacity to produce quality planes while surpassing production schedules. Reviewing the December 1943 production record that exceeded the assigned quota, an editorial in the Brewster union newspaper Aero-Notes boasted in January 1944 that “we have hope that the record will be continued during the coming months. We are determined to do everything in our power to make Brewster production the envy of other war plant[s] in the nation.” Yet increased productivity, rather than inviting more contracts, resulted in constant layoffs and temporary transfers. Workers constructing the fuselages of the F3As, for instance, “run on too high a schedule,” stated the Navy's March 1944 report to the House Naval Affairs Subcommittee. The overproduction compelled management to reduce production schedules by eighty percent and transfer “excess employees” to other departments.²⁹

The workers also tried to rescue the company by becoming self-appointed lobbyists and taking over the managerial function of contract negotiation. Local union cadres mobilized members to write on this issue. They could not renew contracts with the Navy through collective bargaining and had no access to mobilization agencies. Thus numerous Brewster workers asked their congressional representatives to “intercede with the Navy Department” on their behalf. Representative Leonard Hall (R-NY) received letters from Long Island City workers, who insisted that nonstop production was the way to victory. In a letter to Hall in April 1944, a bench hand asserted that Brewster workers had met the Navy's demand and thus were entitled to another contract. “Every man and woman in Brewster has broken his or her back, not only to meet, but beat the production quota set for us,” wrote May Yee. Others also insisted on additional production of the F3As, which the Navy had described as “the best of its kind” to help the soldiers “finish the jobs quickly.” Johnsville workers rallied community support to pressure politicians in their congressional districts. In his letter to Under Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal in May 1944, Republican Representative Samuel K. McConnell, Jr. of Pennsylvania wrote that “many residents and small business establishments in the community of Hatboro, Pa. . . . importuned” him to intervene for an additional contract, which, they asserted, was of “vital interest” to the area's economic development.³⁰

Brewster workers, however, encountered yet another obstacle when the Navy selectively began to cancel production contracts with those companies plagued by production problems. On May 22, 1944, the Navy abruptly announced that all outstanding contracts with Brewster would end on July 1. Immediately after learning of the imminent termination, Brewster unionists contacted numerous federal, state, and local agencies to repeal the Navy's decision. Two hundred union members, including many wounded veterans, organized parades, in which they proclaimed their contributions to the industrial and battlefronts and protested to Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia of New York City. Other CIO regional and international unions, along with “the rank-and-file citizens of the state of Pennsylvania” and New York, dispatched indignant letters to politicians and mobilization agencies. They demanded the repeal of the Navy's decision that “demonstrated that the [Navy] Department has not planned for or exhibited any consideration of the people thus thrust out of work.” In addition to the peaceful protest strategy, Gabriel De Angelis, chief editor of Aero-Notes, wrote that “the union took the only other avenue open to it—militant action.” The workers “decided that unusual means must be used to bring the matter to the considered attention of government officials.” On May 29, 6,700 Long Island City working men and women staged a “strike-to-work” demonstration, working without pay until they would secure a new contract. Most of them, having received discharge notices in the morning, refused to take their layoff pay and turn in their plant badges at the end of their day shift, remaining in the plants. The New York Times reported that another 3,300 Brewster workers at Johnsville joined the “stay-in” strikes to show the Navy “their willingness to stay on the job.”³¹

The protests of Brewster workers denounced the bankruptcy of naval reconversion planning and its callous neglect of defense workers' economic security. A Washington Post editorial condemned the strike, but properly captured its character. It reported that “it is an organized demonstration of disapproval directed against the action of the Navy in suddenly canceling its contract with Brewster and thus forcing the company to dismiss most of its employes.” The strikers hung banners that read “Empty plants mean lost production. The equipment is here. Let us use it for production” or “We've got the tools. We've got the ability. We've got the experience. We've got the will. But we ain't got the work” from the windows and fire escapes of the two Long Island City buildings. They asserted that their skills and productive facilities at Brewster were essential to the war efforts and protested that the abrupt termination was an insult to their service. Outside of the plants picketers paraded with placards. Some female protesters carried signs that asked: “Is This What My Husband Is Fighting For?” Government and corporate agencies had tried to stimulate the enlistment of women into defense production and to whip up morale by emphasizing their connections to the men at the front. These agencies stressed that women provided for their fathers, husbands, and sons at the front by working in defense factories, just as they had taken care of them at home. Female strikers tacitly accepted their gender supplementary roles, but strongly decried that the government's failure to protect the economic security of working women was a slap in the face of worker-soldiers fighting for their family members on the battlefields. The protesters conceded that their answers to the call to arms through “hard work” and hard fighting “pa[id] poor dividends” in the end.³²

The Navy's swift cancellation of the Brewster contracts drew national attention to the problems of reconversion. Civilian government agencies belatedly criticized the Navy and tried to forestall a complete shutdown of the plants. When the workers conducted the sit-ins and deluged government offices with protests, de Angelis recalled that “Washington sat up and took notice.” President Roosevelt criticized the Navy's handling of the cutbacks at a press conference and promised continuous employment for Brewster workers. The War Production Board (WPB) and the Office of War Mobilization (OWM) promised to create a plan for the Long Island City plants. The War Contracts Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs held a hearing on May 30 as “a test case for judging the adequacy of present Government demobilization and reconversion policy.” The Committee concluded that the Navy, without adequate consultation with other government agencies, management, and labor, had too hastily decided the termination. Democratic Senator James E. Murray of Montana, the Chairperson of the Subcommittee, told 5,000 Brewster workers at a mass meeting on June 1 that “Congress must develop a full program now for cutbacks in the aircraft industry and other war industries and for conversion to other forms of production.”³³

The promise of government aid ended the sit-ins, but neither reversed the contract cancellation nor saved many jobs. In his official replies to inquiries regarding the effect of the cutback on employment conditions at Brewster, Admiral DeWitt Ramsey states that the responsibility of devising a plan to consider unemployment “does not belong in the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics.” The Navy's indifference to the workers' plight was also evident in the media and in the what Local 365's May 1944 official statement referred to as “the Wall Street Navy”—high-ranking civilians in the Navy who had previously worked in brokerage houses and investment banks. When Assistant Secretary Bard, a former investment banker handling wartime industrial relations, noticed the Long Island City workers' protests, he advised them to “pack up and go elsewhere.”³⁴

In July 1944, the Navy took control of the Johnsville facilities and moved the Naval Air Modification Unit (NAMU) there. The new facility absorbed 1,100 former Brewster workers and received another 1,000 from the Philadelphia Navy Yard for modifications and engineering projects. Most important, former Brewster workers at the NAMU experienced two significant changes. The Navy banned unions from all naval facilities. Local 365 lost its bargaining privileges at the NAMU. The naval takeover of the plants did not end the pattern of production changes and retooling processes, which generated idleness. However, since the Navy employed them, and there was no union to blame, neither Congress nor the news media objected to the waste of manpower there. Long Island City workers, on the other hand, faced a grimmer prospect. Out of 8,000 workers on the job in May, only 916 were still there in July. These workers no longer produced airplanes, but were checking inventories and disposing material. By August 1944, production at Brewster almost slowed to a crawl, as all government agencies had refused to negotiate defense contracts with Brewster. The termination of the naval contracts eventually destroyed the Brewster membership of Local 365 in 1945, forcing rank and filers to find other jobs and union leaders to continue their activism in other companies or union offices.³⁵

Conclusion

The Brewster reconversion was symptomatic of the shifting relationship between defense workers and the state toward the end of the war. Because of their centrality to the war efforts, defense workers could find a more receptive audience in state agencies concerned with maximum production. The shop-floor engineering of patriotic productivity and its uninterrupted administration amid drastic changes in production methods and processes were not easy tasks in many defense companies. Most large civilian contractors went through numerous trials and errors in their hasty conversion to defense production; veteran defense companies had to expand their productive capacities overnight and had just commenced the implementation of mass-production techniques at the beginning of the war.

The mismanagement and subsequent delays in those companies created the opportunity for defense workers to lay their claims to patriotic productivity and assisted their struggles for a democratic workplace. Non-German Brewster workers questioned the technical authority and trustworthiness of skilled German groups by pointing out the latter's demonstrated inability to solve production problems and alleged Nazi sympathy. Their letters and reports not only provided valuable evidence against German supervisors but also compelled the Navy to take action against them in March 1942. In the process, non-German workers defied skilled Germans' authoritarian control and contested managerial prerogatives of discipline and employment.

Research and development (R&D) and flexible production of high-tech weapons, however, became the cornerstone of naval postwar planning. State responsiveness to poor productivity was contingent upon the military's support of mass production through its mass consumption of the weapons on the frontline. Brewster workers' unsuccessful protests against the Navy's contract cancellation in May 1944 demonstrated that once the urgency for productivity decreased, workers encountered difficulty in enlisting state intervention.³⁶

The military selectively downsized the number of defense production workers toward the end of the war, which accordingly diminished the latter's link to the state. Once the military purged Local 365 from the defense network, local union members' relationship and contact with the state scaled down to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Local union cadres effectively initiated the NLRB-sponsored elections to infiltrate the strongholds of antiunion metal and engineering shops in metropolitan New York in 1945. Yet a few union cadres led by Thomas V. DeLorenzo and labor lawyers spearheaded these union-organizing drives; rank and filers no longer directly dealt with the Board or other state agencies in their everyday struggles. The bureaucratization of postwar unions like Brewster reshaped not only intraunion relations but also workers' relationships with the state.³⁷

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Nelson Lichtenstein, the ILWCH editors, Wythe Holt, Jr., Daniel J. Walkowitz, Molly Nolan, Marilyn B. Young, Nancy Turner, David F. Krugler, Paula M. Nelson, and Eun-Suk Jeon, and the University of Wisconsin-Platteville for financial support.