Company and labor papers: The Studebaker Co-operator and the union's own house

1924–1963

The papers inside the plants: At survey size, the record carries one company magazine whole and one union local's institutional frame. Studebaker's Co-operative Department published an employees' magazine called The Studebaker Co-operator, under the motto "Just Folks — Working Together." Its contents, as the head of the department described them to the Society of Automotive Engineers in November 1924, were the plant's own life: snapshots of workmen's babies, the baseball and bowling scores of the plant teams, personal items. The description survives because the labor press quoted it to criticize it — Labor Age, in March 1927, printed the Co-operative Department's program, the magazine among its instruments, as a study in what "cooperation" without a union meant inside the plant. The union that replaced the cooperative plan has its own documented frame: UAW Local 5 began in 1933 as AFL Local Union 18310, was renumbered Local 5 in 1935, hosted the first UAW Constitutional Convention in South Bend in 1936, and stands in its own history as the oldest existing local in the UAW. No Local 5 newspaper of its own is named in the record reached for this chapter — the gap is printed — and the great labor stories of the plants, the cooperative plan's fall and the Bendix sit-down among them, stand in the Businesses and Studebaker chapters where they belong.

Sources:

1. Journal of the Society of Automotive Engineers, November 1924 — abstract of C. B. Lippincott's address on the Studebaker Co-operative Department, including its "Employee's Magazine," The Studebaker Co-operator; quoted in Edward Hatchel, "Just Folks: 'Cooperation' in the Studebaker Auto Plant," Labor Age, vol. 16 no. 3 (March 1927).
2. UAW Region 2B, "A Brief History of AM General and UAW Local 5" — Local 18310 in 1933, Local 5 from 1935, the first UAW Constitutional Convention at South Bend in 1936, and the local's standing as the UAW's oldest existing local.