the unions in which they had a presence. These battles were particularly fierce within the UAW, many of whose white members had engaged in hate strikes to protest either the hiring or promotion of black workers in their plants and who had engaged in the massive race riots in Detroit in 1943. That battle inevitably became part of the larger battle between the Addes and Frankensteen group within the UAW, which the CP supported, and the Walter Reuther-led opposition. While each faction supported creation of a 'minority department' within the UAW to deal with the special needs of black and other minority workers and the education of UAW members generally, they disagreed over whether the head of that department should always be African-American. In the end, the 1943 UAW Convention defeated both sides' proposals on a voice vote after a heated debate in which many delegates opposed taking any stand on civil rights as being outside the union's economic sphere. The CP was more vocal and consistent in supporting the wartime no-strike pledge - a position that ultimately cost it much support within the labor movement. The CIO and the AFL each supported the pledge in general, particularly after the furor strikes in the aircraft industry and at Allis-Chalmers Company had provoked in the years immediately before the United States' entry into the war. But the CP and its allies now embraced the pledge with such fervor, at the expense of traditional union principles some said, that it made the Party's commitment to unionism suspect. Harry Bridges of the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) called for a speedup of the pace of work - which may not have been inconsistent with the union's goal of controlling the way that work was done on the docks - but certainly sounded strange coming from the union that had previous relentlessly fought employers on the issue. Bridges, Joseph Curran of the NMU and Julius Emspak of the UE even supported a proposal by Roosevelt in 1944 to militarize some civilian workplaces, but retreated when the rest of the CIO executive board reacted furiously against it. The CP also supported piecework systems in the electrical and automobile industries, which it defended as both necessary to boost production and a way to improve workers' earnings under the wartime wage control systems imposed by the War Labor Board, but which were still anathema, particularly to unionists