| This study examines the relationship between workers and organized labor during the first half of the twentieth century. It is a social history, investigating workers at the Curtiss Aeroplane & Motor Corporation in Buffalo, New York from 1908 through 1945. In particular, the study explores the reasons why workers resisted joining the national labor movement in the 1930s, a period which witnessed the rejuvenation of organized labor in the United States.;Prior to 1940, economic, political, technological, and social developments within the aircraft industry led Curtiss workers to adopt a conservative, individualistic ideology that placed management/employee cooperation above industrial confrontation. In addition, persistent organizational failures on the part of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) further alienated aircraft workers from the mainstream labor movement, allowing for the workers' cooperative ideology to flourish. As a result, by 1940 the labor movement made very limited inroads at Curtiss, or in the larger aircraft manufacturing industry.;Unionism eventually emerged in the aircraft manufacturing during World War II. Both the AFL and CIO, seeking to win bargaining rights in an expanding wartime industry, concentrated their energies and resources on organizing aircraft's labor force. Still, although the AFL and CIO organized aircraft, the unions failed to change the workers' individualistic mindset and reorient aircraft workers to a larger group awareness. Instead, labor's wartime organizing programs encouraged and embraced the workers' ideology. The strategy allowed for the workers' cooperative philosophy of economic individualism to continue into the postwar era, creating weak and unstable unions that proved vulnerable in the anti-union climate that emerged in the post World War II period. |
