Challenging the Community Wage and Management Rights
This is still under construction
 
 
 
UE Local 810 developed the most progressive policy in respect to race in the District during World War II. Above, officers of the Gund local are sworn in, after the almost-entirely African-American workforce voted to join the UE. Below, a woman steward leads a discussion of an integrated group of workers from Local 810Photos from UE Archives-Pittsburgh
 
Photo courtesy of John Logsdon
 
Bob Logsdon speaking as President of the St. Louis CIO and UE representative to small arms workers. Photo Courtesy John Logsdon
Sentner speaking to Small Arms Workers, 1945
 
Sadelle Berger, left, led the CIO organizing of the 1944 election campaign. Here she and women from the Small Arms Local 825 are sending out campaign literature to unseat Bennett Champ Clark from office
 
Charles Wright, 1945 photo. The 28 year old Wright had moved from Sunbeam worker in Evansville to Indiana state representative by 1944, and came to embody the ideals of the UE. He also served on the Evansville Inter-racial Commission.

Among St. Louis companies, Emerson Electric stood out as the most transformed by the war. Symington's connections to James Forrestal (who had recommended Symington to Van Alstyne, Emerson's underwriter in the 1937 crisis) and others in the wartime administrative echelons proved decisive in making Emerson one of the area's primary defense contractors. Symington used his connections to position Emerson as a major airplane gun turret producer. By early 1941, Van Alstyne sent Symington to Detroit to negotiate with Preston Tucker (the inventor who later gained fame for his unique automobile designs), who lacked financing for his newly created turret designs.

Instead of negotiating with Tucker, Symington lured away Tucker's engineers. The government paid for the construction of a seven hundred thousand-square foot plant for Emerson, which, “one of the largest metal-working facilities in the nation," that employed nearly ten thousand workers at its peak.

Emerson's transformation made Symington an even more important local player in St. Louis.

Turret plant of Emerson Electric, which set Emerson on the course of war production for the rest of the 20th century  

 

This Fortune article was a vanity piece orchestrated by Symington, in order to earn him a better reputation among the Dillon Read financial military crowd. Instead, Sentner's revelations about his party membership became a major focus of the article and clearly annoyed Symington.

It is possible that Sentner's decision to tell the Fortune reporter about his membership in the CP was also a signal that Sentner was not ready to concede fundamental principles for a degree of respectability or legitimacy.

   

 

Some have used the brief fame accorded Sentner and Symington by the remarkable Fortune magazine as confirmation of the Communist support for a labor-management truce during the war.

A closer look at the relationship between the union and the company during the war reveals a far more complicated story, one in which Sentner continued to search for a way to build community alliances to promote workers' power, and to this end to deftly parley with management like Symington on issues of workers role in wartime planning.

Symington feared and slowly began to resent the erosion of management rights, even as he furthered his reputation as a liberal committed to the extension of labor rights during the war.

By 1943, even as the article in Fortune proclaimed harmony between the union and the company, Symington was already privately worried about growing encroachments on management rights.

What had happened? The answer lies in two primary factors: the growing sector of workers who challenged Local 1102's leadership to be more aggressive and the district's policy to use the National War Labor Board to enhance workers' rights and to challenge the labor market.