The Marginality of the Unions

The pressure of paternalism, the vigor of managerial discipline, the large proportion of engineers and white-collar employees in the plants, and the newness of the industry made the challenge of building trade

unions formidable indeed. Economic conditions during the early 1930s only compounded the difficulty. The contraction of the industry from 1931 to 1934 weakened workers' bargaining position and made the usual threat of dismissal all the more real. At the same time the hunger of the Air Ministry for new prototypes kept a high proportion of the work force involved in the prototype shops rather than in the production shops, where resentments against management, and hence the appeal of a union, were likely to have been greater. The bitter acrimony in the labor movement between Communist and non-Communist factions made organizing in the plants tougher still.

Under these conditions few workers were willing to risk dismissal and the blacklist, the price commonly paid for a life as a trade union activist. Although police records are spotty, it is safe to say that in aircraft factories, which in most cases employed from 150 to 1500 workers, there were rarely more than a half-dozen employees during the early 1930s who devoted themselves to the clandestine life of Communist cell meetings, tract writing, and the virtually futile effort to recruit comrades into the Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (CGTU), the Communist-backed labor confederation.^[37] Socialist militants were even rarer, except in Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, traditional centers of strength for the Socialist Party, the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO). The archives have left scarcely a trace of any anarchists or revolutionary syndicalists; although a few of these holdouts against wartime reformism and postwar communism may well have worked here and there in the aircraft industry, most of them probably lost their jobs after the war. No doubt many aircraft workers felt some loose connection to a tradition of working-class militancy—through memories or folklore about the old prewar CGT or the big metalworking strikes of 1919; and surely many workers voted for Socialist or Communist candidates in the national elections of 1928 and 1932. But during these in-between years before the Popular Front, as historian Yves Lequin has described them, only the rare militant dared to jeopardize a job in the aircraft industry for an overtly political life.^[38]

Few as they were, militants in aviation nonetheless managed to prepare the ground for the big unions that would eventually mushroom in aviation after 1935. Most activists were either unitaires , that is, affiliated with the Communist-backed CGTU, or confédérés , affiliated with the non-Communist CGT. The latter adhered to a more moderate, nonrevolutionary vision of the labor movement. For them, Léon Jouhaux's famous Minimum Program of 1918 still served as a doctrinal beacon. His program called for collective bargaining, the eight-hour day, labor representation in national economic planning and in factory management, and the nationalization of key industries.^[39] Though most confédérés voted Socialist, they clung to the tenets of the old CGT charter of Amiens of

1906, which affirmed the absolute independence of the labor movement from political parties. In the world of aviation, confédérés did best in two settings—in the shipbuilding cities of Nantes and Saint-Nazaire, where confédéré metalworking unions already predominated, and in the airlines and airports. Even in the inauspicious climate of the early 1930s a number of airline personnel and civilian employees in military air installations joined the CGT.^[40] But confédéré militants found it much more difficult to woo blue-collar workers in the aircraft industry. In this respect confédéré experience in aviation reflected the national pattern: the confédéré wing of the labor movement had its strongest support in white-collar France, especially among civil servants. For the most part it lacked firm roots in the private, industrial sector.

As a rule, unitaire militants had a better foothold, such as it was, in airplane factories. Like the confédérés, the unitaires did best in areas where their metalworking union was already well established. For the CGTU this meant Paris. By far the most important center for aviation, Paris offered that rare aircraft worker who was also a unitaire militant a viable radical culture within which to fashion a life as a union militant. A vast expanse of working-class neighborhoods in the east end of the city and in the red-belt suburbs gave militants access to organizations, newspapers, leaders, and friendships that served to sustain one's faith in a working-class movement.

Consider, for example, Henri Jourdain's recruitment into the CGTU in the early 1930s. Jourdain, who was the son of poor agricultural workers in the Centre and was to become a prominent leader in the PCF after the Second World War, began his career as a trade union militant while working in 1932 as a metal fitter in Wybot's airplane prototype shop at the Porte de Saint-Cloud, on the western edge of Paris. One of his fellow workers, a young man named Louet, was a member of Communist Youth. He "oriented me," Jourdain later wrote, "toward the revolutionary movement. I admired and envied the extent of his knowledge and his culture. A very convincing man, it was he who recruited me into in the CGTU." Once signed on, Jourdain discovered a whole new world of serious, committed people. At his first union meeting, "in a small bistro in Boulogne," he met Alfred Costes, the head of the CGTU's Parisian Metalworking Federation, "another of these métallo autodidacts with extensive knowledge." Self-taught himself—he had already developed a passion for cycling, theater, and the cinema—Jourdain dropped his night classes in industrial design at Arts et Métiers to enroll in the PCF's new université ouvrière , where he studied political economy, history, grammar, and spelling. By 1933 he had become one of three active unitaires in his factory, and though he did not join the PCF until the fall of

1936, he quickly became ensconced in the associational life of the Parisian Communist movement.^[41]

Although not everyone in the CGTU had Jourdain's intellectual appetite, he was a typical aircraft unitaire in being young, skilled, and eager to become a part of something larger. No CGTU membership lists or even membership figures are available; but from the few brief glimpses of militants that appear in police reports, it seems safe to surmise that most of the aircraft unitaires before 1935 fit this description. The four major unitaires in Dewoitine's factory in Toulouse, for example, certainly did: one was twenty-two years old and worked as a technician and inspector; another, thirty-nine, was an inspector of finished pieces; a third, twenty-seven, was chef d'équipe in the wing-building shops; and the fourth, thirty-seven, was a skilled fitter. They all had been born in towns not far from Toulouse or Perpignan.^[42] The preponderance of young, skilled, and native workers in the thin ranks of the unitaire unions paralleled the emergence of a new generation of leaders at the national level in the PCF—the rise of young men like Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos, and Benoît Frachon. In the aircraft industry, as elsewhere, what the CGTU local lacked in size it partially made up for through the youth, daring, and dedication of its members.

Part of what sustained the CGTU, of course, was its backing from the Communist Party. Although many militants, like the young Henri Jourdain, were not party members (at least not yet), enough of them were to ensure PCF control. Since 1924, and not without prodding from the Comintern, the PCF had staked its future on the factory cell as its principal form of grass-roots organization. Typically, a factory cell and a factory local of the CGTU came to have overlapping memberships. By 1926 police informants had discovered active cells in a number of aircraft factories in Paris—at Potez, Farman, Hispano-Suiza, Blériot, Renault, Gnôme-et-Rhône, and Bréguet.^[43] In all these cells militants tired to master the usual repertoire of political skills—recruiting members, attending meetings, organizing protests, and issuing tracts, leaflets, and newspapers like Les Ailes rouges or L'Aviateur, which wove together the party line and local grievances. Militants met with one another almost daily, usually in the haven of a reliable café. Secrecy was essential, ideological conformity the rule.

In the provinces the lives of unitaire militants fit the same basic pattern, though the strength of the movement varied from place to place. In Méaulte, Potez's company town, a unitaire militant could scarcely survive. But in cities like Toulouse and Bordeaux the PCF and the CGTU metalworkers union provided enough of a base to keep a tiny cell alive. In Bourges, for example, aircraft militants derived support from a rela-

tively stable union that militants had established during the war at the government arsenal. This base, coupled with an unusually strong cluster of woodcutter's locals, made it possible for militants at the Hanriot airplane factory at the airport in Bourges to persevere in what otherwise would have been a more politically isolated setting.^[44]

Strict discipline, however, was as much the bane as the boon of the CGTU. It gave militants what every trade union needed—leaders, newspapers, instructional pamphlets, modest funds, and, not least, comradeship and a network of reliable contacts crucial for clandestine work. Doctrinal orthodoxy had its virtues as well. It provided militants with a ready-made language for propaganda, a revolutionary vision, and a sense of common purpose—all of which helped them to endure a period of retrenchment in the labor movement.

But ideological conformity so corseted militants that it hampered their ability to work effectively as trade union organizers. By adhering to the Communist strategy of class against class, militants had to propagate ideas that were often at odds with the short-term interests of the aircraft rank and file. The class-against-class line of the late 1920s and early 1930s derived from the Soviet view that capitalism had entered into a crisis, or "third phase," which was intensifying class conflict within nations and accentuating the threat of an "imperialist war" against the Soviet Union. As a result, the Comintern called on militants throughout the Communist movement to agitate against war and repudiate Socialists and moderate trade unionists as "social fascists." Militants were encouraged to use tough tactics—insurrectionary protests, political strikes, and violent demonstrations—to destabilize the European democracies and wean workers from the moderate left. The strategy was eventually to have catastrophic consequences in Germany; in France it simply isolated militants, provoked repression, and kept the PCF and the CGTU in steady decline.^[45]

The crippling effects of the class-against-class strategy were especially transparent in aviation. As in every other branch of French industry, militants in aviation went out of their way to distinguish themselves from reformists by stressing their own uncompromising opposition to militarism, employer paternalism, the rationalization of production, and the pernicious role of the capitalist state. In cell tracts and factory leaflets aircraft militants constantly reiterated these themes. At Gnôme-et-Rhône for example, militants passed out leaflets claiming that "Gnôme-et-Rhône and the government that is at its service are one and the same. And this is why the economic struggle only worsens, marching ineluctably toward war."^[46] The CGTU's metalworking newspaper, Le Métallurgiste, hammered home a similar message under the headline "How 'They' Are Preparing for War!":

[Bréguet at Villacoublay] is a company that also takes a very active part in the establishment of the "circle of iron and fire" that the world imperialists are forging around the USSR. [Bréguet does so] through its technicians who, being highly experienced, train instructors for foreign aeronautical services, and through the manufacturing of special tools that aircraft construction requires and which can only be made by very experienced workers. Poland, Romania, Serbia, and all the states bordering on Russia have recourse to the Bréguet company.^[47]

Antimilitarist rhetoric also provided Communists with a vocabulary for attacking employer paternalism. L'Humanité described Potez's factory at Méaulte as "a military regime in every sense of the term."^[48] Even the sports programs fit into the framework. "To make young workers accept all this forced exploitation," a Communist journalist wrote in L'Humanité, "the big industrialists in the Paris region try to enslave them in their factory sports clubs, in camping trips and vacation camps controlled by the Comité des Forges. It is in fact the militarization of the factories."^[49] At Blériot's plant outside Paris unitaire militants made a similar attack on the company soccer league, which "the bosses use . . . to cultivate in young workers an ideology conforming to their interests." These militants urged workers to join a CGTU league instead.^[50] Like employers, Communists also viewed recreation as morally uplifting—precisely the reason they hoped to get soccer out from under the bosses' control.

The same logic compelled unitaire militants to reject almost every manner of cooperating with the state. In contrast to the confédérés, whose leaders participated enthusiastically in the Conseil National Economique, the League of Nations, and the International Labor Office, Communist unitaires condemned all cooperation as "class collaboration." The CGTU enforced this principle all the way down to the shop floor. In 1929, for example, a painter in an aircraft factory in Bordeaux earned what must have felt like a scolding when he innocently suggested that the union ask a labor Ministry inspector to investigate unhealthy working conditions in the plant. The painter hoped that as a result of union efforts, the ministry might force the company to establish a special drying room for painting as well as give each painter two liters of milk daily. The local unitaire leader in the metalworkers union, a militant named Casta, scoffed at the notion. Labor inspectors, he said, "would scarcely heed such a request," and he went on to remind the painter that "it is only the workers themselves who ought to take the necessary action by expressing their grievances to the boss, via the union."^[51] Casta, like most unitaires, felt that the union must insulate workers from the reformist mentality an appeal to state officials would have nurtured.

This is not to say that unitaire militants were anarchists, rejecting the legitimacy of any state. On the contrary, apart from a few revolutionary

syndicalists who had survived the "Bolshevization" of the CGTU in the 1920s, most CGTU militants were either Communists or sympathizers who admired the Soviet Union as a workers' state. Their appreciation of the potentialities of state power made them all the more hostile to what they viewed as the inevitable collusion that prevailed between industrialists and state officials under capitalism.

In the aircraft industry, however, a radical rejection of the capitalist state made it difficult for militants to attend to the immediate grievances of their fellow workers. State officials, after all, had a good deal of say over basic conditions in the industry. The Labor Ministry, with its small army of labor inspectors scattered throughout the country, had the power to enforce legal regulations at the workplace, modest though they were. What is more, the Finance Ministry and the Air Ministry had considerable leverage with the builders. During the left-wing interlude of the Cartel des Gauches in 1924, the government began to require that aircraft contracts include labor clauses stipulating limits on the use of foreign labor and procedures for raising wages during the period of the contract. Labor clauses were expanded in 1930 to provide further protections for workers. Even Albert Caquot, whom the builders considered well disposed to their interests in these matters, felt obliged as industrial and technical director to enforce labor clauses.^[52] Since the Labor, Air, and Finance ministries were all becoming increasingly involved in labor matters, militants could ill afford to ignore the implications state intervention had for their strategies; and as the ministries became more involved in air policy, Communist hostility to the state became a heavier burden for local militants to bear.

Likewise, staunch antimilitarism could be a liability for a militant in aviation. At one level, of course, antimilitarism spoke to a pacifist sentiment widely shared in interwar France. At the same time, however, opposition to military production ultimately conflicted with the obvious stake aircraft workers had in the military procurement orders of their factory. Aircraft workers in the early 1930s may have harbored some misgivings about building weapons of war, but by contemporary standards it was decent work, good pay, and a way to practice a craft. A prototype shop in depression France was a far cry from a munitions arsenal during the First World War, where war-weary assembly-line operatives did indeed respond to many a pacifist appeal. Not surprisingly, then, the antimilitarist campaign of the CGTU failed to win much support in the aircraft industry, especially during the depression, when commercial aviation could hardly be viewed as a plausible substitute for the military market.

The CGTU campaign against rationalization, moreover, failed to speak directly to the problems aircraft workers faced in their industry. During the late 1920s and early 1930s the CGTU stepped up its efforts

to recruit semiskilled workers in the big metalworking plants of automaking, munitions, and machine construction. Although Communist militants were no more opposed to rational production than they were to the state per se—Lenin, after all, had hailed Taylorism as an asset to a modernizing Soviet economy—they opposed capitalist rationalization and stepped up their attack against the kind of work organization that prevailed in factories like Citroën and Renault.^[53] In aircraft manufacturing, however, workers were plagued by different issues—job insecurity, the volatility of the airplane market, and the instability of their firms. To solve these problems, Communist leaders would have had to approve defense spending, which on antimilitarist grounds they opposed. As a result, the PCF and the CGTU had little to say about the real question of rationalization in the aircraft industry—the need to streamline the industry and modernize its production.

CGTU doctrine, by reflecting the class-against-class strategy and the priorities of militants in other metalworking sectors, prevented aircraft unitaires from functioning effectively as trade union organizers. Hostility to reformist tactics, while preserving the revolutionary integrity of the CGTU, rendered militants useless as day-to-day advocates on the shop floor. Isolation, moreover, made militants easy targets for repressive employers. Henri Jourdain survived as a unitaire leader at the Wybot airplane factory just long enough to organize a single protest, a one-day symbolic strike on May Day, 1933, in which only five or six workers took part. Afterward, he recalled, a friend "told me that I was going to be fired, and in order to have some chance of being hired elsewhere, he advised me to quit first instead."^[54] Jourdain was lucky: he escaped into a job in another metalworking firm just in time. Like many of his unitaire comrades, Jourdain remained a militant on the move, struggling to give life to a sterile strategy and keep one step ahead of the blacklist. It was a testimony to human tenacity that the CGTU survived at all.