The Role of the Trotskyists in the United Auto Workers, 1939- 1949

Willie Thompson has acknowledged in his survey of the history of the worldwide left, The Left in History: Revolution and Reform in Twentieth-Century Politics, that the Trotskyists "occasionally achieved some marginal industrial influence" in the US trade unions.'However, outside of the Trotskyists' role in the Teamsters Union in Minneapolis and unlike the role of the Communist Party (CP) in the US labor movement that has been well-documented in numerous books and articles, little of a systematic nature has been written about Trotskyist activity in the US trade union movement.'This article's goal is to begin to bridge a gap in the historical record left by other historians of labor and radical movements, by examining the role of the two wings of US Trotskyism, represented by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Workers Party (WP), in the United Auto Workers (UAW) from 1939 to 1949.In spite of these two groups' relatively small numbers within the auto workers' union and although neither the SWP nor the WP was particularly successful in recruiting auto workers to their organizations, the Trotskyists played an active role in the UAW as leading individuals and activists, and as an organized left presence in opposition to the larger and more powerful CP.In addition, these Trotskyists were able to exert an influence that was significant at times, beyond their small membership with respect to vital issues confronting the UAW.At various times throughout the 1940s, for example, these trade unionists were skillful in mobilizing auto unionists in opposition to both the nostrike pledge during World War 11, and the Taft-Hartley bill in the postwar period.They also organized UAW members in fighting for the inclusion of the escalator clause in 1947-1948 while constructing a non-CP left-wing presence within the union.This activity was based largely on how these two organizations came to conceive of left-wing politics in the post-World War I1 era, both within the UAW and the nation as a whole.Since the SWP and the WP each viewed itself as the vanguard party that would lead the US working class in revolution, both parties were in favor of organizing an independent left-wing opposition to the UAW bureaucracy during World War I1 in order to keep a revolutionary political program alive within the union.However, by the late 1940s, while the SWP clung to this position, the WP abandoned its goal of establishing such a movement, eventually coming to see the Reuther Caucus -the dominant political faction within the UAW after 1947 upon the election of Walter Reuther to the union presidency for the 5 3 0 Left History 10.2 (Fall 2005)

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