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opinionAlso in this section:
Jackson, Frankensteen's monsters Pilgrim, The Caribbean garbage problem
Henry Ford's company goons (left) move in
Frankensteen's monsters by Eric Jackson, historical photos by Scotty Kilpatrick from the UAW archive
Richard Frankensteen wasn't an evil baron or a mad doctor, and he didn't have bolts in his neck. He may have been a member of the Communist Party USA, and if not he was a leftist closely allied with them. He once ran for mayor of Detroit, but even during the Great Depression with the support of organized labor he was a bit too radical for the voters to win that race. He was a vice president of the United Auto Workers. His great contribution to that once mighty union, now in a sorry state due to the overall decline of the US auto industry in particular and of American economic power in general, is what makes his memory relevant to Panamanians today.
If Richard Frankensteen was more or less a commie, let us also understand who and what Henry Ford was.
Henry Ford was one of the international businessmen who financed Adolf Hitler's rise to power.
Why would an American industrialist do such a thing?
Because, for one thing, Henry Ford was a vicious racist who especially hated Jews. Have you read the English version of that classic anti-Semitic screed, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Ford paid for the English translation of that forgery, which was conceived by the Okhrana, the Russian Tsar's secret police, in order to incite pogroms against the Jews.
Ford, like Hitler, also hated labor unions. He created a private army of spies and goons headed by one Harry Bennett to keep the United Auto Workers out of the Ford Motor Company. Bennett was a member of the Michigan Parole Board, and used that position to hire some notoriously brutal thugs for the 8,000-strong Ford Servicemen, Henry Ford's version of Hitler's Brownshirts.
To avoid unionization, Ford also created and controlled a social life of sorts for company employees, including the "Blue Card" company union.
As vice president of the UAW, Richard Frankensteen was put in charge of an effort to counter the company union tactics of many automotive industry employers. A favorite strategy was underground oraganizing within the company union, culminating in a meeting at which a motion from the floor to affiliate with the United Auto Workers would be made and passed. Company unions thus subverted to become the genuine articles became known in labor legend and lore as "Frankensteen monsters."
The Ford Servicemen set upon Frankensteen
Ford's network of spies, and the sheer size of the corporation, made it hard to change the company union's color as was done in some of the smaller companies. There a variety of tactics were needed, one of which was a direct effort by outsiders to contract the work force.
And so it was that on May 26, 1937, Frankensteen, fellow UAW leader Walter Reuther and a couple of other union organizers posed for a Detroit News photographer with the Ford Motor Company sign in the background, standing on public property at the Miller Road entrance to the main Ford plant. It was a few minutes before a shift change, and a group of UAW women wearing berets planned to pass out some 8,000 leaflets.
About 30 of Henry Ford's goons came up and beat the hell out of Frankensteen, Reuther and the other union activists. One of the UAW people was stomped so severely that he suffered a broken back. The Ford Servicemen strong-armed photojournalist Scotty Kilpatrick to give up his glass photographic plates, but the quick-thinking reporter hid his pictures of the beating and handed them some different ones to destroy.
Of course, shorn of its political and economic importance and viewed strictly in terms of the Common Law, this was a garden variety assault and battery. Under the then recently passed federal Wagner Act labor law, it was also an unfair management practice. The local cops and courts were on the company's side, but a few years later a federal labor panel did find that Ford had committed an unfair practice.
Reuther (left) and Frankensteen (right) afterwards
So at the end of that day, had Henry Ford and Harry Bennett won?
Of course not. People around the country saw the photos that depicted the sort of nazi thugs that Ford and Bennett were, and as World War II approached the Roosevelt administration added to the public pressure by turning a few screws of its own.
After a 1938 heart attack Henry Ford turned the management of the company over to his son Edsel, who signed a contract with the UAW in 1941, on the eve of US entry into World War II. Upon Edsel's death the old man tried to resume control of the company, but by then the United States was at war with Henry Ford's buddy Hitler and the factories were producing war materiel. Franklin D. Roosevelt presented the industrialist with a choice of turning the reigns over to his grandson Henry Ford II or having the company nationalized as an emergency wartime measure.
* * *
In Panama these days we see a company union movement sponsored by the government.
Last year, to avoid negotiating with the teachers' unions, President Torrijos created the puppet CUM with whom to "negotiate" and sign a "contract," which was never ratified by a rank-and-file vote because CUM is a paper organization that has no membership.
This year in the construction industry, the Torrijos administration is back at the company union strategy.
On Isla Viveros, a Colombian developer whose partners include Torrijos campaign manager Héctor Alemán and convicted French bank fraud specialist Andre Beladina not only brought in a subcontractor with a company union and a gang of armed "security guards," he warned in public documents and La Prensa that if SUNTRACS is not removed from the area --- where most of that union's members who were working on the project live --- that five or ten people would be killed. Instead of throwing the Colombian hoodlum out of the country like any Panamanian president who upholds the law would do, Torrijos sent in the National Police to support the developer.
The Brazilian-based Norberto Odebrecht SA construction company, which obtained the concession to build the Panama - Colon autopista under most irregular circumstances and which was notoriously at the center of a corruption scandal that brought down a Brazilian president, is also playing the company union card.
All this is surely a prelude to a struggle over whether the canal expansion will be a company union job.
Will there be violence? There has been violence.
Will Frankensteen monsters rise from the mists of obscurity to cause nightmares among those who would smash the Panamanian labor movement? It will be interesting to see.
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