Message: 5
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2011 09:44:11 EST
From: waistli...@aol.com
Subject: [MLL] The Dave Moore Interview II: the real story of
organizing Ford
To: marxist-leninist-list@lists.econ.utah.edu
Message-ID: <19e91.e3ddc3e.3a55d...@aol.com>
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The Dave Moore Interview II.
PA: When was the first time you started working on organizing the auto
unions?
DM: I got hired at Ford in 1935 making 60 cents an hour in the foundry.
That?s where they put all the Blacks. We had a few Italians. We had a few
Polish and what not. They had 12,000 Blacks at the foundry at Ford and another
4,000 or 5,000 scattered around the plant. The foundry was the hellhole of
the Rouge Plant. Silicosis, tuberculosis. You could burn up in the furnace.
You had no protection whatsoever. Health hazards were the order of the
day. When a white man who worked in the foundry came out after his eight
hours, he looked just as black as a Black man did. Everybody looked the same.
Hello WL,
Great story you posted. I think you wrote that you're a toolmaker? I'm an
ex-foundry welder/QC checker in Australia.
You might be interested to know that in Australia in the 21st century that
foundries are still pretty much as you describe and that the majority of labour
is mostly emigrants from the Pacific islands of Samoa, Tonga, Fiji etc with a
smattering of southern Europeans, Latin Americans and now in recent times some
Africans.
In tems of union organisation,because the majority of the workers are semi
skilled they are organised by one of the non-craft/apprenticship based unions,
one called the Aust.Workers Union, the latter is also known as 'Australia's
Weakest Union' by its detractors!
This union, the AWU is one of the main supporters of the social-imperialist
Aust Labor Party, and in spite of the potential militancy of its membership is
probably the weakest trade union in Australia.
The result is that foundry workers here are low paid realtive to other
engineering workers and still suffer the same conditions that the interviewee
described in the US in the 30's
Mike
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