Craig Miller

     Wildcat strikes — spontaneous walkouts by groups of workers without union authorization — were a feature at Quad-Cities IH plants, though less so under the UAW than under its more militant predecessor, the FE-UE. Still, reports of wildcat actions would spread by word of mouth around town occasionally, along with rumors about what started them. But one retired UAW union official called upon to mop them up says they weren’t as frequent as some people may think.

     Craig Miller was a UAW Local 1309 representative at Farmall for much of the 1970s and up through the closing of the plant in 1986. In his section, he had 17 union stewards who reported to him, representing 1,700 employees. He was a UAW committeeman, and committee chairman for a spell, involved in contract negotiations on provisions specific to Farmall, and he otherwise kept tabs on real or potential conflicts and grievances.

     Here he was asked about the frequency of wildcat strikes during his time as union rep, and how he’d respond.

     They’d happen occasionally but usually they’d be of short duration, maybe a day. Maybe not even a day, maybe a few hours. And there wouldn’t be a lot of them. 

     For one thing, it was against the contract and we didn’t solicit it. Sometimes guys would walk out. I know personally there was some guys who walked out of my area, and the plant manager got ahold of me and said, “What’s the issue?” And I said, “I’m not 100 percent sure, but I think I know.” He said, “Well, you can get ‘em back to work, then we’ll talk about it. If you can get them back to work shortly, I’ll turn my head,” meaning they wouldn’t be disciplined or none of that stuff. 

     I went over to one of the local watering holes where some of them had gathered (laughs), and I went in there and I said, “Now let’s get our ass back in the plant.” And I said, “I’ll guarantee that I’ll meet with the management, upper management, plant manager included, and he just told me that if you guys go back into work right now, he’ll turn his head.” So they said, “What does that mean?” I said, “That means he won’t acknowledge who was gone, so he can’t discipline anybody.”

     And so I convinced ’em begrudgingly. Some of them had already decided that they was going to do something else, but they did go back. And the general foreman was standing there taking notes. And I said to him, “What are you doing?” And he said, “Well, I’m taking notes so I can dock these guys because they didn’t punch out. Didn’t punch off the clock. And I said, “Well, no, you was standing right there when the plant manager told me that if I can get them back in here, he would turn his head. Do you want me to call him to see if that’s exactly what he meant?” “Oh no,” that general foreman said, “I heard him.” And he just tore that list out. 

     It was against the contract, and as a labor representative it was my job to enforce the terms of the agreement, not just for the terms of the agreement as negotiated. A work stoppage was not a part of the agreement; in fact it was prohibited. So we did our best to enforce it. I won’t begin to tell you that there weren’t a few, but I will tell you that the union officials by and large did our best to quell them and keep them from happening, and if there was one that happened, to get it done with.

     There were different reasons that they’d go out. There was one where there was a bomb threat, and this actually hit the paper. I can’t tell you what year that was, it was probably in the mid-70s. Somebody called in with a bomb threat to the Farmall plant, and the next day we heard about it, it was in the paper. The company hadn’t even bothered to contact the union or ask any of us for our input. And when guys found that out, they started talking and bitching about it, and I know that I personally talked to the number three man in the plant at that time, and I said, “why wouldn’t you have at least told the union?” “Well, we didn’t think it was a credible threat.” And I said, “well, you know that’s kind of hard to determine, but you would know for sure it was credible if somebody got blowed out through the roof.”

And the assembly line stopped, and the guys actually started out of the plant. I was able to stop them and get them to go back to work, with the commitment from upper management that in the event that that should happen again they would at least notify the union and the union officers and together we would make that determination as to whether the members should be advised or whether we should maybe even evacuate the plant. 

    I wouldn’t say wildcats was a problem, no. If anybody was telling you that, that’s not right. Because we had a strong union. Even management people that knew me well, and some of them went to Ohio (after Farmall closed) as I did, told me independently “boy, if they ran as institutionally sound as Farmall did, with the help of the union here, we’d be a lot better off.”

It was pretty well acknowledged that we had a strong local union, and we not only enforced the contract as well as we could, on behalf of the members, but we also took to enforcing the contract and the terms of it, as well as we could. 

     They did happen, not as much as maybe some people would like to think. For the most part it was pretty well controlled, once somebody got involved. Sometimes they’d happen before you had an opportunity to get involved. Then it was a struggle trying to get them back in. 

Then the other thing, they get out and then they think, “God, if I go back in, unless there’s something negotiated, they’re probably waiting there with discipline, maybe going to give me some time off or something like that,” you know. So once they went out — I mean, it was spontaneous, but then there was thinking involved by those who were already out, “gosh what’s going to happen to me when I go back in?”