The labor system: two locals and a reckoning

1933–1982

The system's discipline and its discontents both organized: At the rubber works the organization was Local 65 of the United Rubber Workers of America, CIO, whose documented course the Ball Band section prints at the size the surviving record carries: a strike of the whole force — 7,500 workers, the local's president stated — on 8–9 March 1943, against the War Labor Board's delay in ruling on a twelve-and-a-half-cent wage appeal, in a plant three-fourths of whose output was war work; 3,100 employees out on 10 February 1950; a strike of 4,300 production workers closing the plant on 18 September 1951 over pay rates for eleven skilled workers; and a six-month strike of 1967–68 preserved in one worker's documented account — it "took every nickel he had," won five cents across the board, and is printed in the Ball Band section as one family's measurement, not the local's official history, which the record reached does not contain. The reckoning came from inside the system's own structure. The footwear divisions whose transfer Uniroyal announced on 22 March 1968 employed approximately forty-two per cent of the plant's workforce — 1,364 footwear employees, on the federal court's findings — and about fifty-nine per cent of the plant's women worked in them, against thirty per cent of its men: the phase-out's weight fell, in the first instance, on the women who had been more than half the wartime labor force. In Chrapliwy v. Uniroyal the plant's segregated "men's" and "women's" departments became a landmark of American employment law — the 1973 partial summary judgment finding layoffs conducted on a segregated basis by sex, and the 1981 settlement decree ordering $4,758,000 in cash and approximately as much again in pension benefits to 526 women, with 296 class members reinstated at full seniority. The case's whole course is the Ball Band section's; its systemic meaning is this section's: the labor system the races and the rubber mill built carried, in its own job structure, the discrimination that federal law eventually priced, and the price was paid by the plant's owner to the plant's women. On McKinley Highway the institution itself migrated. UAW Local 5 — begun in 1933 as an AFL local of Studebaker's South Bend workers, the oldest existing local in the UAW on the union's own account — survived Studebaker's closing, in the UAW's history, "through the amalgamation of some of the sold off operations of Studebaker," the defense division that became AM General among them, and stands today as the local of the Mishawaka truck plant: its members ratified a new contract on 25 September 2025, a 12 per cent wage increase over three years on the union's release, after a concessionary history the same release recounts. A labor institution founded in a wagon works in 1933 now bargains for the builders of the wagon's military descendants across the river; the continuity is the union's, documented in its own records, and it is the longest unbroken thread in this whole section.

Sources:

1. Chrapliwy v. Uniroyal, Inc., 458 F. Supp. 252 (N.D. Ind. 1977) — the announcement of 22 March 1968, footwear at approximately forty-two per cent of the workforce, the 1,364 footwear employees, and the fifty-nine/thirty per cent division of the burden by sex; and 509 F. Supp. 442 (1981) — the settlement decree, 526 women, $4,758,000 and approximately as much again in pensions, 296 reinstated.
2. Eugene Register-Guard, 9 March 1943 (wire); Medford Mail Tribune, 10 February 1950 (United Press); The Daily Banner (Greencastle, Indiana), September 1951, via Hoosier State Chronicles — the strikes of 1943, 1950 and 1951, as the Ball Band section carries them.
3. UAW Region 2B, Local 5 history; Walter P. Reuther Library, UAW Local 5 Records — the 1933 origin, the survival through amalgamation, the oldest-existing-local standing; UAW press release, 26 September 2025 — the 25 September 2025 ratification and its terms; both as the AM General section carries them.
4. This build's Ball Band and AM General sections — the labor records whole, cross-referenced and not retold.