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In the fall, the collective relocated from their working-class digs in southern Seattle to the more middle-class north Seattle. As usual, the banks robbed by the members of the George Jackson Brigade were far away from their home, including the Old National Bank in Juanita and the Skyway Park branch of the People's National Bank. The proceeds from these and other recent bank robberies funded a new campaign, one in support of automotive machinists in Bellevue who had been on strike since May 18. Brigade members walked with picketers at five different automobile dealerships and concluded that the workingmen would be amenable to some old-fashioned American labor violence. The Brigade launched attacks against the Westlund Buick-Opel-GMC, S.L. Savidge Dodge, and the BBC Dodge dealerships. It sent a letter addressed to the Automotive Machinists Union claiming responsibility for the three automobile dealership bombings. While the Brigade took its potshots at the owning class in the United States, a parallel formation in West Germany involving the Red Army Faction was shaking the country to its foundations.

This chapter begins with Ovshinsky’s early work experiences as a machinist and toolmaker, at Akron Standard Mold while he finished high school and continued afterwards at Goodrich Rubber. There he continued to master his craft, but his involvement in labor union activism made him the target of violent hostility from the Goodrich management, leading to a series of job changes. With the entrance of the U.S. into World War II, Ovshinsky tried to enlist but was rejected for both health and political reasons. After marrying his high school sweetheart, Norma Rifkin, he moved to Arizona, where while working in a Goodyear aircraft plant he became intent on going into business for himself and began planning an innovative lathe, his first major invention.

This chapter considers the effect that an autonomous technical artefact – the printing press – had on the workers in charge of them, the press-machinists. It establishes how the printing press possesses material and social agency in the continuity and transformation of craft masculinity. This issue is examined in the context of the technological shift from letterpress printing to high-speed offset-lithography, which took place chiefly in the 1970s. While the compositors’ experience of technological change has received some attention in labour history and sociology, the trade of press-machining has been almost entirely ignored. Charting the printing industry’s transition from letterpress to offset-lithography opens a new window of understanding into the relevance and influence of large-scale technical machinery on the shop floor. This is related back to the reinforcement of craft masculinities in declining industrial contexts. This allows us to see how particular practices and identities are sometimes maintained and reinvigorated when a conservative institution is threatened with change.

This chapter is about the experiences had by women in the printing industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on the stories of three women – a tablehand, a senior manager and a printing apprentice – the chapter explores how women in the printing industry coped with the shifting challenges of a patriarchal printing environment. One of the threads holding these three stories together is the presence of design and embodied experience; each of these narratives speaks of something made, designed or physically manipulated, be it spatial, environmental or technological. The active making and re-making of things and spaces, and the forming of embodied knowledge about machinery and industrial objects, were strategies that female workers mobilised in order to survive challenging and often discriminatory circumstances. The contentious politics lifting – and associated legal limitations – is evaluated, revealing a disjuncture between workplace rhetoric and actual embodied practice.

This chapter begins with the narrative frames of company and union, describing the rise to power of the Boeing Company and of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW). Known for its militancy, the IAMAW has enacted a history paralleling the turbulence of the larger labor movement. Throughout its history, the leadership of the IAMAW at Boeing has cooperated with concessions unless forced to do otherwise by the rank and file of the union. At key moments, such as the 1995 strike at Boeing, rank-and-file workers can push their leaders from below, putting out educational flyers, petitioning against concessions, and organizing union members into an anticoncession caucus.

This chapter introduces more fully union activists and their organizations, and relates their stories about the origins and purposes of the caucuses as they told the author. It also lays out the agenda and perspectives of these activists regarding Boeing and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) and its leadership. The themes of these stories include the rejection of cooperation with management in the form of joint programs; the identification of union leaders as “Boeing managers”; the desire to retain and restore labor gains of previous generations (which they view as having been squandered by union leaders); and the recognition of the ways in which race, gender, and sexual orientation influence the working experience. The overall goal of this chapter is to understand more fully the critique, resounding in these accounts, of the practices of both the union and the company.

This chapter assesses the situation of the dissident Machinist movement at Boeing today. There are a number of important and poignant lessons from this struggle for democratic reformers inside unions. These lessons speak to how reformers can push their official leadership while staying focused on the company; prioritize long-term organizing and contract cycle agitation above electoral bids and legal strategies; and recognize that unions—and dissident movements inside of unions—are only democratic and vital to the extent that they involve large numbers of their members and represent their demands. The chapter considers the question of whether one can speak legitimately for the rank and file without their active involvement in the movement from a dissident position any more than one should do so from a business union position. The credentials and, more important, the power of a dissident union movement depend upon taking advantage of critical rank-and-file consciousness to build an organization that restores a balance of power between union leadership and the rank and file in the longer term. Only then can the rank and file become ready, when the time comes, to make their own history.