SPRING 2025
ISSUE 02

₁ GM to Dedicate Fremont Plant,” Peninsula Times Tribune (Palo Alto), March 16, 1964.

₂ “GM Capital Spending for 1964–’65 to Hit $2 Billion,” Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet, March 27, 1964.

₃ Beverly Silver, “Labor unrest and the successive geographical restructuring of the world automobile industry, 1930s to the present,” PCID Working Paper Series No. 11. Johns Hopkins University, 1993.

₄ Quoted in John H. Mollenkopf, “The Post-War Politics of Urban Development,” Politics & Society 5, no. 3 (1975): 247–295, 269.

₅ Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 51.

₆ “200 Stay Out at GM Plant,” Oakland Tribune, June 28, 1963.

₇ “Demands of UAW at Fremont Spurned,” San Mateo Times, October 31, 1967; “Fremont GM Plant Walkout,” Fremont Argus, June 7, 1968; “Wildcat Strike at GM Plant,” Oakland Tribune, March 29, 1977.

₈ Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter, Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept (Boston: South End Press, 1988), 60.

₉ Charles O’Reilly, New United Motors Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI). (Stanford: Stanford Graduate School of Business, 1998); Willy C. Shih, Knowledge Transfer: Toyota, NUMMI, and GM. (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2024); John Shook, “How to Change a Culture: Lessons from NUMMI.” MIT Sloan Management Review 51, no. 2 (2010). The predominant view of NUMMI in management circles is best summarized by Shih: “[At NUMMI,] Toyota hired mostly former GM workers, including well-known plant militants and activists. It taught workers TPS [Toyota Production System], but more importantly it installed a culture that was the essential ‘software’ that enabled TPS to work. Toyota transformed it to become the most productive auto assembly plant in the U.S.” [abstract taken from Shih, Knowledge Transfer].

₁₀ “Interview with Kenny Horsten: Black Panther Caucus at Fremont GM,” International Socialist, May, 1970, 7. Horston’s name misspelled in original.

₁₁ “Interview with Kenny Horsten,” 7.

₁₂ “Black Panther Caucuses: Exposé . . . 1969,” The Black Panther (San Francisco), February 2, 1969.

₁₃ “Interview with Kenny Horsten,” 6.

₁₄ “Interview with Kenny Horsten,” 6.

₁₅ “Black Panthers Form Caucus at Fremont GM,” Workers’ Action (Emeryville, CA), January 1969.

₁₆ TJ Minchin, “‘A Gallant Fight’: The UAW and the 1970 General Motors Strike,” International Review of Social History 68, no. 1 (2023): 50.

₁₇ Jackson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2012), 44.

₁₈ Dan Georgakas and Marvin Survin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012 [1975]), 25.

₁₉ Tom Cagle, “On Trade Union Work.” SWP Discussion Bulletin 29, no. 8 (June 1971).

₂₀ “Agitators Blamed for GM Bombing,” Fremont Argus, September 5, 1970.

₂₁ “Workers Trashed GM,” Berkeley Barb, September 18, 1970.

₂₂ “UAW Leader Hits Leftist ‘Free Ride’,” Oakland Tribune, October 14, 1970.

₂₃ Wini Leeds, “Brotherhood People Power!” The Conspiracy 3, no. 12 (1973): 5.

₂₄ “GM Workers Protest Firing of 4 Employees,” Fremont Argus, May 11, 1973.

₂₅ “Marxism or Klonskyism?” Marxist Leninist Forward (Oakland), January 1977.

₂₆ “Workers Petition to End GM Layoffs – and Ask Women to Drop Their Sex Discrimination Suit,” Fremont Argus, December 22, 1974.

₂₇ “Fremont GM Provokes Walkout,” Workers Vanguard (New York), April 1, 1977.

₂₈ “Taking up the Woman Question,” Class Struggle 12 (1979).

₂₉ This American Life, 403, “Nummi,” presented by Frank Langfitt and Ira Glass, aired March 26, 2010, WBEZ Chicago.

₃₀ Georgakas and Survin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 6.

₃₁ “Workers’ Use of Drugs Widespread in Nation,” The New York Times, June 21, 1971.

In March 1964, a crowd of “more than 450 Bay Area civic and industrial leaders,” including Governor Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown, gathered in Fremont, California to dedicate the largest auto plant west of the Mississippi River.¹ The event was greeted with the greatest fanfare Fremont had ever seen. A decade earlier, the suburb had been made up almost entirely of unincorporated tracts of southern Alameda County farmland. Now, thanks to a fastidiously forward-thinking Planning Commission, Fremont was undeniably on the move.

The factory was designed by architect John Savage Bolles, the man behind such landmarks of postwar San Francisco as the Embarcadero Center, Candlestick Park, and the Ping Yuen and Potrero Hill housing projects. Local papers enthused about the plant’s cleanliness and modern beauty. The Oakland Tribune ran a feature on its “seventeen different varieties of trees and shrubs,” from the Australian scarlet flowering gum to the Mexican Yucca gigantea. At the dedication ceremony, General Motors (GM) chairman Frederic G. Donner impressed the gravity of the company’s Fremont endeavor upon the assembled luminaries: the plant, he argued,

symbolizes an economic way of life that, if applied internationally, could level the barriers to world trade and the free flow of investment funds, and in due course, release the full potential inherent in private enterprise. The result would be a rate of economic growth that would mean a better life for all peoples of the free world.²

GM truly saw Fremont in global terms. Throughout the 20th century, the auto industry spread around the world, chasing weaker and less organized labor forces. Labor scholar Beverly J. Silver has described this pattern as the “trajectory of Global Fordism.” When working class formations take shape, bargain for, and gain power in areas where manufacturers have concentrated production, management tends to respond by investing in new sites of production where cheaper, more disciplined labor exists.³ It was this process that first led GM to nearby Oakland and was now driving it south into Alameda County’s southern suburban hinterlands.

Prior to GM’s relocation to Fremont, Oakland had been home to one of the country’s largest auto manufacturing complexes outside of the Midwest, earning it the somewhat optimistic moniker of “Detroit of the West.” Chevrolet, Caterpillar, Willys–Overland (the forerunner to Jeep), and other manufacturers had set up shop in Oakland in the 1910s and 1920s during the first great wave of auto industry decentralization.

Like General Motors, the Bay Area’s industrial planners also saw decentralization and suburbanization as the key to avoiding the cities’ labor unrest. A 1948 report by San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club – a “public affairs” organization whose earliest members included Bank of America founder A.P. Giannini, Wells Fargo’s Isaias Hellman, and Herbert Hoover – argued that,

labor developments in the last decade may well be the chief contributing factor in speeding regional dispersion of industry, and have an important part in the nationwide tendency toward industrial decentralization . . . Generally, large aggregations of labor in one big [central city] plant are more subject to outside disrupting influences, and have less happy relations with management, than in smaller [suburban] plants.⁴

Barely a decade had passed since the 1935 birth of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the warfare of the Flint sit-down strike. Two years before the Commonwealth Club’s report, Oakland had been shut down for two days by a general strike, triggered by fierce public outrage after police offered protection to scabs at a striking downtown department store. The hegemony of organized labor in Oakland was such that these scabs were trucked in all the way from open-shop Los Angeles; there simply weren’t enough people in town willing to work as strikebreakers. Bay Area autoworkers were not among the region’s most politically radical. UAW members in Oakland sided against left-wing labor leader Harry Bridges during conflicts over the direction of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and when members of the Communist Party attempted to distribute literature outside a meeting of UAW Local 76, irate union men chased them down the street. But they were militant. In the years leading up to GM’s decision to build Fremont Assembly, its Oakland plants were rocked by a wave of strike activity, including a wildcat walkout at its Chevrolet facility.

GM’s desire to distance itself from urban labor activity dovetailed neatly with the Metropolitan Oakland Area Program (MOAP), a postwar campaign of industrial suburbanization led by the city’s elites. The MOAP oriented East Bay development around a vision of “suburban industry tied to downtown Oakland and the port, universal homeownership in both city and suburb, an absence of industrial strife, and booming West Coast markets,” uniting “neighborhoods and factories, workers and managers, homes and highways . . . in a delicate balance that brought the machine (industry) into harmony with the garden (single-family home).”⁵ The 1950s saw a rush by rural Alameda County communities to incorporate and industrialize. Fremont, soon to become the county’s largest suburb, was incorporated in 1956 and almost immediately began rezoning large tracts of agricultural land owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad for heavy industry. In short order, Fremont’s civic boosters managed to woo GM away from the more distant South Bay suburb of Sunnyvale, where management had already announced plans to relocate their Oakland operations.

If GM expected the move to calm its workers, they were quickly disabused of the notion. Two weeks after production began, members of the newly incorporated UAW Local 1364 staged a pair of wildcat strikes within days of each other. The first walkout followed a company guard’s “manhandling” of a worker who allegedly refused to wear safety goggles.⁶ When 11 union members were suspended for leading the unauthorized strike, hundreds of workers walked out again. Company representatives who tried to photograph them were pelted with rocks and bottles. The UAW international, the Alameda County Labor Council, and Local 1364 shop committee chairman, John Santos, pleaded with the workers to return to the plant at emergency meetings in Oakland. Having made their point, they went back to work.

Fremont workers struck again fewer than six months later, this time winning major contract concessions. The pattern was set, and it stuck. For the next two decades, Fremont Assembly workers would consistently rank among GM’s most militant, frequently rejecting deals negotiated by UAW’s international leadership. During national fights, they often expressed desires to stay out longer, to fight harder, and to win more locally. Before the plant was closed in 1982, GM-Fremont would be shut down by at least three more wildcats as workers walked off the line in protest of anti-union comments by GM labor relations official E.A. Sullivan (workers dubbed the strike “Sullivan’s Holiday”), in outrage over a right-wing foreman’s assertion that Bobby Kennedy “got what he deserved,” and after a foreman assaulted a union official and insulted an injured female worker.⁷

Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, this militancy was trained on UAW leadership almost as often as on General Motors. Political radicals of various stripes worked the assembly line. The plant developed a reputation for lawlessness, and its productivity was among the lowest in the GM system. The company shut Fremont Assembly down in the 1980s, then reopened it as an experimental joint venture with Toyota called New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI), where Toyota introduced its famous “team concept” and other “Japanese management techniques” to the American scene, overseeing a dramatic rise in the factory’s productivity.⁸ NUMMI, in turn, closed down in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and auto-industry bailout. In 2010, the facility was bought for a song by a fledgling electric car manufacturer, Tesla. This viciously anti-union company still churns out vehicles there today.

The story of the Fremont plant has become a well-known business school case study – a tale of how smart management can turn a lousy, miserable workforce into a happy, highly productive one.⁹ In reality, the story of auto manufacturing in Fremont is that of an increasingly effective assault on worker power at the point of production, a story that offers a window into the development of novel techniques of labor discipline that have since become standard across the American economy.

—

Kenny Horston was a second-generation auto worker. Born in Detroit, his father worked at the sprawling Dodge Main and Ford River Rouge complexes. One of the early generation of UAW–CIO organizers, the elder Horston was forced to confront harassment and discrimination from the company and fellow workers. Detroit’s auto plants almost exclusively hired whites prior to World War II. When Black workers were allowed on the lines, a number of whites walked off or held impromptu sit-down strikes in protest. Horston’s father was also a frequent victim of seasonal layoffs. His seniority should have protected him; were he not Black, it likely would have. Kenny would later recall his frustration as a young person, struggling to understand “why my old man had to work two jobs for us to barely get by . . . why we had to live in a rat-infested house; why his checks wouldn’t always buy enough food . . . how we used to wake up at any time of the night and hear rats running around the kitchen or up and down the hallway and shit like that.”¹⁰ Hoping to avoid life in the factories of Detroit, the younger Horston moved to San Francisco and went to college, studying to become a social worker. But things didn’t pan out. Soon, he found himself on the assembly line in Oakland. He stuck around, became active in the union, and transferred to Fremont when the new plant opened.

When GM moved to Fremont, they initially stopped hiring Black people. If pressed, management revealed their racist sentiments, insisting that Black workers were trouble: “They were always gambling and fighting, they never came to work on time, they never paid their bills, they were always drinking on the job, and in general, they were just unreliable workers.”¹¹ But as production ramped up, the informal freeze became untenable. From about 1965, the plant hired steadily increasing numbers of Black workers. By the end of the ’60s, more than a third of Fremont Assembly’s workers were Black, some two thousand in all. At the same time, fewer than four hundred Black people lived in Fremont. These workers flowed in and out of the plant each day from Oakland, San Leandro, Hayward, and other working-class communities across the East Bay. This was true for a bulk of white workers at the time, as well; Fremont boasted some of the highest housing costs in the region, well beyond the reach of the average auto worker.

At some point in the late ’60s, Kenny Horston joined the Black Panther Party. In July 1968, he and two other Fremont workers formed the Black Panther Caucus, a militant grouping within UAW Local 1364. The caucus was directly inspired by Detroit’s Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), a radical organization founded by young Black workers in the spring of 1968 at one of the very plants where his father had once worked. In May, DRUM led a daring wildcat strike at Dodge Main. As a long-time trade unionist, Horston wanted to apply the Black Panthers’ distinctive brand of revolutionary Black nationalism to questions of the shop floor; DRUM seemed to have found the formula for doing exactly that.

When GM transferred the bulk of its Oakland operations to Fremont in 1963, the UAW consolidated two Oakland-based locals into one. For the first several years of Fremont Assembly’s operations, “political struggle” within the new Local 1364 consisted almost entirely of contests between the leadership cliques of these two defunct locals. One-time Local 333 bigwig Floyd “Pancho” Bueno’s Blue Caucus held leadership at Fremont for the plant’s first six years, withstanding challenges from former Local 1031 leader John “Chief” Herrera’s Headlighter Caucus. While the two frequently traded barbs, there was little to distinguish their approaches to either GM or UAW leadership. Both were firmly in line behind Walter Reuther’s leadership clique in Detroit. Horston saw union members’ support for these leaders as a problem of insufficient political education. Like DRUM (and the other “RUM” formations that followed it), the Panther Caucus agitated for union democracy and against the widespread racism of the company and their white union brothers. Horston’s key ambition was to develop the caucus as a tool to “educate the working people to the political impact that the UAW and other unions have on their social and economic lives” in order to “gather the masses in a revolution to throw out the bogus leaders – by democratic elections or by any means necessary.”¹²

While the leadership of UAW Local 1364 insisted that the intra-union racism Horston identified simply did not exist, they wasted no time in mobilizing the plant’s organized racists against the Panthers. In 1968, another politically oriented caucus had also been formed at Fremont. The “Voice of Free Labor” caucus was a small but active group of white workers excited by the third-party presidential campaign of arch-segregationist George Wallace, Alabama’s governor. While the Panther Caucus distributed anti-war literature, provided free food, and brought Huey P. Newton to the plant, the Voice of Free Labor handed out pamphlets that read, “The Lord is my shepherd, and the government makes me to lie down beside Negroes.”¹³ The “Wallaceite” workers spread a rumor that the Panther Caucus planned to blow up the factory, a claim echoed by some in Local 1364 leadership. On one occasion, Panthers arrived at a union meeting to find the Wallaceites openly toting rifles. Before long, the Fremont Police Department were posted outside the plant on a daily basis, frequently harassing Black workers as they left their shifts.

The Black Panther Caucus, its members were careful to note, was not a Black Panther Party caucus. Horston was the only actual party member in the caucus, and white workers were encouraged to join (though few, if any, did). In Fremont, where Black workers were a sizable minority, the strategic value of revolutionary Black nationalist rhetoric was less obvious than in the overwhelmingly Black-majority factories of Detroit. The Black Panther Caucus strongly advocated struggling in coalition with organized white and Chicano workers. Prospective members were required to attend political education classes intended to “make it very clear to these brothers . . . that if we’re going to engage in a struggle, we’re going to engage in a struggle to overthrow the General Motors Corporation and the avaricious businessman and to run out the bureaucrats and the racists and fascists and the union leadership [and] in order for us to do this, we can’t be talking about the color of a man’s skin.”¹⁴ In Detroit, radical Black workers struggled to find white allies. In Fremont, the Panther Caucus soon found more than it could count. By the end of the decade, white-led, Panther-friendly radical formations proliferated at the plant as student revolutionaries from Berkeley flowed in.

The arrival of the Panther Caucus marked a new era of political activity at GM-Fremont. Another Black caucus emerged, the Emancipation, led by “Black moderate” Earlie Mays, who ran for president of the local with Black Panther Caucus support.¹⁵ Left-wing white workers formed the United Action Caucus (UAC). As with Horston and the Panther Caucus, the founders of the UAC were not “proletarianizing” students but long-time GM workers. UAC founder Tom Cagle was also the son of a Midwestern auto worker. His father, a communist, helped organize the UAW in Pontiac, Michigan in the 1930s. As a ten-year-old boy, Cagle joined his father at the Flint sit-down strike, helping fashion spears out of an iron fence to defend the picket from police. When he came of age, he, too, went to work in the auto plants, conspicuously toting a copy of Marx’s “Wage Labor and Capital” to his first day on the job. By the late 1940s, he had become disillusioned with the Communist Party and relocated to Oakland, where he converted to Trotskyism and later joined the Socialist Workers Party. Saul Wachter, another UAC founder, was a New York-born card-carrying member of the Communist Party. In 1960, he had been called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in San Francisco along with his son, a student activist at UC Berkeley. Students from Berkeley and other nearby universities came out in force against the hearings. Their ensuing battle with the San Francisco Police Department is often considered the first act of the militant student movement of the 1960s. Like Cagle, Wachter had worked for GM since 1948, following the plant from Oakland to Fremont. That these two were able to work together, even briefly, points to the political spirit that predominated in the plant in the late 1960s, less hardened by sectarianism than in following years.

In the fall of 1970, the UAW led a national strike against General Motors. Under pressure from increasing overseas competition and “declining productivity . . . increasing absenteeism, and a high number of unauthorized strikes,”¹⁶ GM’s profitability had entered into stark decline in recent years. Determined to stem the bleeding, CEO James Roche resolved to drive a harder bargain with the UAW in 1970 contract negotiations. “Nothing less than the American future – the kind of country we will pass to our children,” he asserted, “is at stake.” The union refused the company’s proposed rollbacks on raises, health coverage, and cost of living allowances, leading its members onto picket lines across the country. Despite the mammoth scale of the strike – one of the country’s largest since the postwar strike wave – and the significant gains it achieved in wages and benefits, the fight was marked by a curious spirit of fraternity between the union and the company. The union’s vintage class struggle rhetoric notwithstanding, journalist William Serrin described the strike as a “civilized affair,” in which workers attended mandatory UAW courses on “order” before participating in perfunctory, dispassionate pickets.¹⁷ The amity between GM and the UAW was so great that the company “floated the union a loan in the middle of the strike,” by allowing them to delay a required payment into a jointly operated health insurance program, effectively “financ[ing] a work stoppage against itself.”¹⁸ Serrin also argued, controversially, that the 1970 strike was principally about cementing the legitimacy of incoming UAW president Leonard Woodcock, who took over following Walter Reuther’s death in a May 1970 plane crash.

At Fremont, however, the 1970 strike was a less humdrum exercise. In the run-up to the strike, a bomb exploded at Fremont Assembly in the middle of the night, destroying 27 windows. The blast was heard as far as ten miles away. On the night before the strike began, the mood already set by the bombing, a crowd of workers outside the plant noticed that GM was attempting to move a load of trucks out of the factory. In that moment, as UAC founder Tom Cagle later remembered,

years of pent-up anger, frustration, and exuberance erupted as these workers charged this haulaway with a barrage of rocks and bottles, forcing it to back up into the yard . . . stopped and set fire to a company garbage truck . . . chased the guard out of his shack toward the plant as they broke out all windows . . . turned away the fire engine as it responded to the fire with a barrage of missiles. Police cars were hit the hardest as they turned off their lights and scurried back to Fremont. Established roving bands of pickets in trucks and cars to circle the plant. This territory surrounding the plant became their “liberated” territory . . . This was completely a spontaneous expression of these workers. It was in no way given a lead or organized.¹⁹

The next day, UAW leadership blamed the chaos on “rabble-rousers from Berkeley,” claiming that no “actual” autoworkers were involved.²⁰ One union member told the Berkeley Barb, a prominent underground newspaper, that the “press makes it look like the radicals were doing everything while we sat around and watched . . . You have to know what it’s like working in that place to understand why guys would want to let off some steam. It’s hell in there.” He added with a smile, “in fact, it was a friend of mine who helped set the dump truck on fire.”²¹

In any case, the line between “rabble-rousers from Berkeley” and “union members” was not as neat as it appeared. The plant’s proximity to Berkeley meant travel in both directions: while the young Maoists of the Progressive Labor Party traveled south to become autoworkers, young autoworkers traveled north to participate in Berkeley’s free culture of drugs, sex, and politics. In Fremont, as in the oil refineries of Richmond (just north of Berkeley), New Leftists bent on “industrializing” often found that the most radical workers were young, long-haired, and pot smoking. These groups were a combustible mix, and together they made sure that the 1970 strike was anything but a “civilized affair” at Fremont. The local cracked down on agitators in its own ranks, calling the police – and their own baseball-bat-wielding goon squads – on demonstrations staged by radical caucuses. Local leadership attempted to split the Left by dividing it between “real workers” and interlopers. The Black Panther Caucus, whom the leadership had once smeared as dangerously violent, were now legitimate, while Progressive Labor and the UAC were outsiders merely attempting to “fatten their own kitty.”²² Despite repression by the union, the company, and the police, the radicals had become firmly entrenched at the plant by the end of the 1970 strike.

—

Over the next decade, a staggering array of far-left groups, mostly outgrowths of student activity at Berkeley and Stanford, fought over the allegiances, real and imagined, of Fremont workers. In addition to the Black Panther Party, the groups that carried out significant, sustained activity at Fremont Assembly between 1969 and 1979 included the Progressive Labor Party, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the International Socialists, the Workers League, the Spartacist League, the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party, and the October League. Between these groups, cooperation was the exception and bitter squabbling the rule. The hodgepodge of revolutionaries in the factory created its own kinds of confusion. At one point, a shift in the SWP’s party line led them to denounce the rank-and-file caucus they had helped initiate, then censure one of their own members when that caucus didn’t rescind its endorsement of him in a union election. In another incident, a member of a Trotskyist group was erroneously denounced by a foreman as belonging to the Progressive Labor Party, leading confused workers sympathetic to the Trotskyist to join the Maoist group.

In 1972, the October League, one of the many Maoist outgrowths of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), joined forces with a small rank-and-file group led by Earlie Mays (the Emancipation Caucus’s unsuccessful candidate for Local 1364 leadership three years earlier) to build the multiracial Brotherhood Caucus. The caucus held organizing meetings in every department in the plant, advocating union democracy, women’s equality, and the creation of a formal anti-discrimination office within the local. Importantly, it encouraged workers to begin attending union meetings. In the first meeting to make quorum in years, rank-and-file workers voted in favor of providing childcare at future meetings over the objections of union leadership. Within months, the caucus grew to several hundred members from its initial ten. Bright red “Brotherhood People Power!” patches adorned workers’ jackets as “Brotherhood fever” swept the plant.²³ In an attempt to hit back at Brotherhood, GM fired a handful of October League-aligned workers for failing to disclose their educational history. Had they known that these workers had college degrees and were therefore “overqualified,” the company argued, they would never have hired them in the first place. Hundreds of workers marched in support of their overeducated coworkers, who won their jobs back.²⁴ Brotherhood won a number of seats in the 1973 election (among the new union officers were a number of open communists). In 1975 it won power outright, which it held until the plant was shut down seven years later.

Despite its Black radical style, Brotherhood’s leadership was considerably more moderate than many of the organizers who helped build it. Support for the caucus split the Left, with both the Trotskyists of the Spartacist League and the Maoists of the Revolutionary Union (who had earlier supported Brotherhood) denouncing the new leadership as no different than the old Bueno and Herrera factions. By 1976, even the October League was distributing pamphlets on the shop floor depicting Earlie Mays “tied to a railroad track with the ‘rank and file express’ bearing down on him.”²⁵ The skeptics’ prediction that Brotherhood would not take a sharply more militant tack than its predecessors was borne out, but the local did see a tremendous decline in shop-floor racism, as well as real advancements in union democracy and gender equality.

As the crisis of the 1970s crept on, the radical groups were divided over how to respond to incoming waves of layoffs. A mass layoff in 1974, the first in a series that would eventually lead to the plant’s closure, hit women workers the hardest. Because GM hadn’t hired women on the assembly line until 1968, they had the least seniority, which meant they were the first to be fired. The October League backed a group of laid-off women in a lawsuit against GM, challenging the legitimacy of the seniority-based layoffs. The Spartacist League’s (woman-led) Committee for a Militant UAW denounced the lawsuit as a “petty-bourgeois” attempt to divide workers on the basis of gender and held rallies in defense of the seniority system alongside Local 1364 leadership.²⁶ Despite their fierce rivalries – feuding leftists came to physical blows at the plant on at least one occasion – solidarity did sometimes exist between the communist groups at Fremont Assembly. When union leadership disciplined members of the October League for a pamphlet advocating “unauthorized” strike activity, the Spartacists distributed a leaflet throughout the plant: “Hands Off the Idiots.”²⁷

These rank-and-file left-wing formations were a significant part of plant life for the majority of GM-Fremont’s existence. Although they never led Fremont workers onto the barricades, neither did those workers treat them as a hostile or alien presence. Other than the short-lived Voice of Free Labor caucus’s racist agitation in the late 1960s, there is no indication that ordinary Fremont workers ever seriously clashed with the radicals at the plant. In 1941, when communists leafleted a UAW meeting in Oakland, the men of Local 76 hand delivered them to the police, who in turn passed them directly to the FBI. There are no such stories from Fremont Assembly. In fact, Local 1364’s tradition of militancy, which predated the arrival of the New Leftists, made Fremont a relatively welcoming environment for the Left. At their best, the left groups – particularly the Panthers, October League, and Spartacists – did much to deepen the democratic culture of the local. Workers at Fremont Assembly had access to an array of regularly published rank-and-file newsletters about plant issues produced by rival groups – and, in some cases, by unaffiliated workers. Open debate about company and union policy flourished on the shop floor, something which is almost unimaginable in the same facility today under Elon Musk’s dictatorial management. At their worst, they channeled existing militancy in futile and self-defeating directions. At precisely the moment when shop-level organization was most needed, these groups became mired in doctrinal Leninist disputes over “the woman question,” the upshot of which would determine in what order Fremont workers ought to be laid off.²⁸

As the decade wore on, the decline in profitability that had so worried GM officials in 1970 reached crisis levels. Competition from foreign automakers, especially the vastly more productive (and higher quality) Japanese firms, took a severe toll on American auto manufacturing. Mass layoffs and plant closures swept the country. In 1979, the company laid off over three thousand workers in Fremont. Two years later, the plant’s truck line closed down. Finally, in 1982, General Motors shuttered Fremont Assembly.

—

Less than a year after GM shut the plant down, it made an explosive announcement. Fremont Assembly would reopen – not as a General Motors plant, but as an experimental joint venture between GM and its bitter rival Toyota, Japan’s leading automaker. In exchange for helping them make inroads into American manufacturing, Toyota promised to teach GM the ins and outs of its much-vaunted Toyota Production System and the so-called “Japanese management techniques” that made it so tantalizingly efficient. Fremont was to be ground zero for the rebirth of American auto. Where this left the workers and their union remained an open question.

In the 1980s, after Fremont Assembly had given way to NUMMI, a popular narrative began to take shape about the GM plant’s decline. In this narrative, carefully crafted to the needs of auto industry PR, Fremont had been home to “the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United States.”²⁹ Its “awful” workers, prone to “absurd” absenteeism, were more interested in gambling, having sex, drinking, taking drugs, and filing grievances than in producing cars, until finally the unlucky plant was “put out of its misery.” Although the company did not cite worker militancy or misbehavior when it was closing GM-Fremont down, this story became the dominant account by the mid-’80s. A 2010 episode of This American Life about the Fremont factory, which faithfully reproduces this company narrative, now stands as the plant’s de facto official public history. While the supposedly unique lawlessness of Fremont Assembly – “the worst among the bad” – is greatly exaggerated, it is true that absenteeism, drug abuse, and sabotage were facts of life in the facility. But very similar, sometimes considerably more severe, conditions prevailed at plants across the country. In fact, as Marvin Surkin and Dan Georgakas explain in their 1975 account of Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers, “extraordinary absenteeism . . . chronic lateness . . . the open use of drugs . . . poor workmanship . . . [and] sabotage” had joined the wildcat strike as the standard expressions of auto worker discontent and rebellion by the mid-’70s.³⁰ In Detroit, the drug problem in auto manufacturing was so severe that workers created a program, Curb Heroin in Plants (CHIP), to combat it. And while drug abuse was sometimes a form of quiet rebellion against, and escape from, the drudgery of life on the assembly line, it was also a way of making that drudgery tolerable enough to survive. Denny Lemmond, onetime Local 1364 shop committee chairman, recalled workers turning to amphetamines “to keep going” while “putting in 12-hour days for months at a time.”³¹ Eventually, many workers hit a physical breaking point. “Men might just start running through the plant screaming. They’d leave the line and start running.”

With NUMMI, Toyota was to teach General Motors how to keep those workers from running.