Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Masten, April | Sellers, Christopher | Klubock, Thomas | Freeman, Joshua.
Date
2013-12-01
Keywords
automobile industry, globalization, international labor, UAW | History
Department
Department of History.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77726
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
During the 1960s, American workers confronted new challenges at home and abroad. After more than a decade of Cold War struggles against communism in Europe, organized labor became an integral part of American foreign policy in pursuit of similar goals in developing nations. The concurrent rise of multinational corporations altered the international landscape of employment and created economic uncertainty for workers in the United States. My dissertation explores the ways rank and file autoworkers and official representatives of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) adopted the language and practice of working class internationalism to respond to these changes. I argue that the transnational exchange of ideas and practices among workers and their institutions demonstrated a convergence of ideas about race, class, and industrial organizing across national boundaries. Through case studies of autoworkers' organizing efforts, I show the ideological overlap between the UAW's international affairs program and domestic organizing projects in U.S. cities. The UAW attempted to build a network for international collective bargaining with workers in Latin America, emphasizing that an organized workforce was a key element of the development process. In Los Angeles, the UAW's " community unions" embraced rhetoric and strategies that echoed modernization theory and were typically applied to developing nations. In Detroit, dissident African American autoworkers infused Black Power and anti-colonialism with class consciousness in an attempt to build an international working class revolution. In each case, the actions of autoworkers were guided by a transnational understanding of class, labor, and community. My research follows autoworkers' diverse expressions of working class internationalism into the 1970s to broadly consider the relationship between labor and American liberalism in the postwar United States. The UAW championed liberal solutions to problems facing workers and working class communities in the U.S. and developing nations, even as many rank and file autoworkers cited racial divisions and the impact of deindustrialization to question the postwar liberal order. Ultimately, I conclude that the UAW's fidelity to liberalism at home and abroad during the 1960s left autoworkers dangerously unprepared for the globalizing world. | 259 pages
Recommended Citation
Murphy, Michael John, "Autoworkers and the Globalizing World: Working Class Internationalism from Latin America to Deindustrializing America, 1960-1980" (2013). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3513.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3513