Explaining Union Organizing at Foreign Owned Auto Companies: Narratives before Numbers

Amy Bromsen, Wayne State University

This paper will interrogate the experience of researching one puzzle which might offer new insights into the UAW’s failure to organize transplants, using both qualitative and quantitative research. My doctoral dissertation (Wayne State, 2019) set out to understand why, after decades, there was no union at Toyota’s giant Kentucky plant, TMMK. Once there were sufficient transplants for statistical analysis, no available data set distinguished TMMK by location, union density in country of ownership, nor similar relationship between capital, labor, and the state similar in both the home and transplant country. The sample was too small, and too much was unique. The ubiquitous problem of bad data emerged. Up until the 1970s the Japan Productivity Council established by the CIA to reflect US foreign policy during the Korean and Cold Wars, had provided only biased narratives and numbers. A false narrative with supporting false statistics required a new narrative which called on different statistical bases. Moreover, Japanese enterprise unions established by the US Occupation were illegal under US law, and therefore the statistics on unionization rates were, on careful study, illusory. A participant’s insight—“It is just not bad enough here”—became one basis for a preliminary narrative that only Toyota used union substitution to defeat the UAW. Another hidden narrative was that all Toyota throughout the South were built and maintained by unionized building trades. Insight from narrative data determined what statistics to gather, and how to compare union organizing drives at different companies in different states. That became the narrative comparing UAW with building trades, which led to a far different assessment of the UAW, one of the most important to understand US labor history analytically. From this I was then able to re-examine the history of Japanese and US unionism and see more similarities than differences.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 246. Understanding the Exceptional Decline of US Trade Unions: Narrative Data and Quantitative Data as Synergy.