286 ChaPter^5
usually give labor at least some of its demands. Some corporate heads, most
notably Henry Kaiser, who had a huge airplane industry in California and
began one of the first major healthcare companies, Kaiser Permanente, was
considered pro-labor because he accepted unions and offered them good
wages and health insurance, an idea similar to Hoover’s concept in the 1920s
of creating a corporate state where industrial harmony, rather than strikes and
violence, would lead to more production, profits, and wages.
Yet profits always soared while wages were stuck, and thus workers took
action. Between Pearl Harbor and the end of the war, workers conducted
over 14,000 strikes, involving almost 7 millions workers. In 1942, strikes
accounted for over 4 million days of labor lost, and a year later over 13 mil-
lion. In 1944, there were almost 5000 strikes and about 370,000 steel and
ironworkers, almost 400,000 auto workers, 360,000 in the transportation
industry, and over 275,000 miners walked off their jobs. Despite the no-strike
pledge that the AFL and CIO both agreed to in 1941, workers took matters
into their own hands often and generally made gains in wages and work con-FIGuRE 5-14 Worker at the Briggs Manufacturing Plant in Detroit. The
factory had been converted from an automobile plant to wartime airplane
manufacturing.