This process began generations ago and the fight to organize the South remains as essential now as it was then. Robert L. Cruden, a former Ford line worker and fellow with the Labor Research Association, was a leading labor journalist whose writings on auto are now essential primary sources for the history of organizing that industry. Here, both workers and factories move south to Memphis in the first year of the Great Depression.

‘Auto Industry Moves South’ by Robert L. Cruden from the Militant. Vol. 3 No. 11. March 15, 1930.

DETROIT. Like all other industries, the auto industry is quietly moving south. This has been brought to light within the past week.

The Kelsey Wheel Co., makers of Ford wheels, have reopened their Memphis, Tenn., plant and are now planning extensive development. They are putting out Ford wheels more cheaply than Ford himself. As a result, the Ford wheel plant at Hamilton, Ohio is being shut down.

Southern workers in the Detroit Kelsey plants are being offered jobs “back home” at fair wages–but they fear that after a month or two their wages will be slashed to 35-40 cents per hour. That is the prevailing rate there at present. The Federated Press was warned, however, not to take these figures too seriously. “Just wait until they get the hill people and the southerners back from Detroit and wages will go down to 20-25 cents an hour,” your correspondent was informed.

Fisher Body–General Motors unit–is also building in Memphis. It is intended to develop a real manufacturing center there while Detroit will remain merely as a center of distribution for the northern region. Many Fisher plants in Detroit have been permanently closed. “Integration of manufacture” is the reason given by officials. Movement to the low wage south is the real reason.

The notorious sweat shop, Briggs, has also gone south. Reports here tell of plants opening in Memphis and other southern centers. Workers here are being offered opportunities to go “back home” and teach the “hillbillies” at 60 cents an hour. “Yeah, and how long will it last?” is the cynical question which never produces a quite satisfactory reply.

Nevertheless, thousands of southerner have left the city. Penniless and destitute they have gone away, bitter, cynical. Perhaps the auto masters may yet meet their Waterloo, not in world-famed Detroit, but in the unknown towns of the sweated south.

The Militant was a weekly newspaper begun by supporters of the International Left Opposition recently expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 and published in New York City. Led by James P Cannon, Max Schacthman, Martin Abern, and others, the new organization called itself the Communist League of America (Opposition) and saw itself as an outside faction of both the Communist Party and the Comintern. After 1933, the group dropped ‘Opposition’ and advocated a new party and International. When the CLA fused with AJ Muste’s American Workers Party in late 1934, the paper became the New Militant as the organ of the newly formed Workers Party of the United States.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1930/15mar1930.pdf