Walter Reuther (1907–1970)

images

CREDIT: Associated Press/stf

“WE ARE the vanguard in America of that great crusade to build a better world,” Walter Reuther told about 3,000 members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) at the union’s 1947 convention. “We are the architects of the future.”

The forty-year-old UAW president was preparing his members, many of them military veterans, for another kind of war, one that would pit unions and their progressive allies against the increasingly concentrated power of big business, a war whose battlefields would be the shop floor, the bargaining table, the voting booth, and the halls of Congress.

As a union activist who rose up from the factory floor, Reuther built the UAW into a major political force for a more humane society. He was UAW president from 1946 until his death in 1970. Under his leadership, the UAW grew to become the nation’s largest union, with more than 1.5 million members. After World War II, he pushed for a large-scale conversion of the nation’s industrial might to promote peace and full employment. Reuther played a key role in raising Americans’ living standards and creating a mass middle class. An intellectual as well as an activist, he championed industrial democracy and mobilized union support for the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Born in Wheeling, West Virginia, Reuther was one of five children of Valentine Reuther, a German immigrant, a Socialist, and an activist in the brewery workers’ union. In 1919 Valentine took Walter and his brother Victor, ages eleven and six, to visit Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs at a prison outside Wheeling, where he was being held for his opposition to World War I. The visit made an indelible impression on both young Reuthers, who became committed Socialists.

Reuther quit high school at age sixteen and became an apprentice tool-and-die maker. He moved to Detroit in 1927, drawn by the Ford Motor Company’s promise of high wages and a shorter workweek. He quickly established himself as one of the most skilled toolmakers at Ford’s massive River Rouge plant. He characterized the industry at that time as a “social jungle” in which workers were “nameless, faceless clock numbers.” Working nights, Reuther earned his high school diploma at twenty-two and took classes at Detroit City College, where he was joined by his younger brothers Victor and Roy.

The Depression deepened Reuther’s already radical outlook. In 1932 he campaigned for Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas and was promptly fired by Ford, which kept a close eye on its employees’ nonwork lives.

The following year, Walter and Victor embarked on a world tour, hoping to work at the Soviet Union’s huge Gorki automobile factory, which Henry Ford had equipped. The brothers spent a year helping train the Gorki tool-and-die workers. Reuther was impressed by Russia’s quick transformation into a modern industrial society, but he also saw the repression under Stalin’s totalitarian regime, an experience that shaped Reuther’s anticommunism during the Cold War.

Reuther returned to Detroit in 1935, but he never worked on the shop floor again. Instead, he channeled his talent and ambitions into building the fledgling auto workers’ union. In 1936 he and Victor led a successful sit-down strike at the Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Company, a Ford supplier with 5,000 employees. The strike led to a settlement that doubled workers’ wages. Reuther’s reputation as a brilliant and courageous organizer was secured when he played a key role in planning the successful 1937 sit-down strike against General Motors (GM), a strike that crippled the company’s production. GM recognized the UAW, and Chrysler soon followed suit. But Ford’s antagonism toward unions meant that the third giant automaker would go to even greater lengths to resist the UAW.

On May 26, 1937, Reuther and other UAW organizers were passing out leaflets at a pedestrian overpass next to Ford’s factory complex in Dearborn, Michigan. Ford’s private police organization, euphemistically called the Service Department, attacked the union activists in what became known as the “Battle of the Overpass.” Newspaper photographers captured Ford’s thugs beating Reuther bloody. At a time of widespread pro-union sympathy, the incident was a public relations nightmare for Ford. Even so, it took almost four more years—until April 1941, when a huge strike shut down Ford’s operations—before the company recognized the UAW and signed a union contract.

In 1939, when GM stalled negotiations for a new union contract, Reuther (at the time head of UAW’s GM division) called for a strike, but only by tool-and-die workers. Faced with the threat of halting the retooling for its 1940 cars, GM agreed to a new contract.

In December 1940, with almost half of the nation’s auto-manufacturing capacity idle, Reuther proposed a bold plan to convert idle factories to build 500 military aircraft a day. A brilliant student of industrial engineering and planning, Reuther’s plan would put employees back to work, serve a patriotic goal, and put labor on an equal footing with business in planning the war economy. But the auto executives did not want to share decision making with government bureaucrats, much less with union leaders, and they rejected the idea out of hand.

Once the nation went to war, however, Franklin D. Roosevelt frequently consulted Reuther (whom he once called “my young red-headed engineer”) on wartime production problems. Anticipating the war’s end, Reuther proposed creating a three-part peace production board (with representative from business, labor, and government) to convert defense plants so they could produce railroad cars and workers’ housing. To many Americans, this idea seemed like common sense. But business viewed it, correctly, as a radical shift of power, reducing business’s influence in shaping the economy. One Detroit auto executive, George Romney (father of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney), understood Reuther’s genius: “Walter Reuther is the most dangerous man in Detroit because no one is more skillful in bringing about the revolution without seeming to disturb the existing forms of society.”

When the war ended, Reuther determined to put the labor movement on a more equal footing with corporate America. In 1946 he led a 116-day strike against GM. Autoworkers’ buying power had eroded during the war, and the UAW demanded a 30 percent pay increase without an increase in the retail price of cars. When GM insisted that it could not meet the union’s demand, Reuther challenged the company to “open its books.” GM refused, but the UAW won an 18 percent wage increase.

But Reuther was making a larger point, one he would return to many times, particularly after he was elected UAW president in 1946. By demanding that GM freeze its prices, Reuther was appealing to consumers as well as to UAW members. He argued that the automobile industry—the largest and most profitable companies in the world—had a responsibility to society as well as to its stockholders and its workers. And it was the labor movement’s responsibility not only to look out for its members but also to use its influence—at the bargaining table with business and in the political realm with government—to make America a more livable society for all. “What good is a dollar-an-hour more in wages if your neighborhood is burning down?” Reuther asked. “What good is another week’s vacation if the lake you used to go to is polluted, and you can’t swim in it and the kids can’t play in it?”

Using the UAW’s clout within the labor movement and with the Democratic Party, Reuther pushed a progressive postwar agenda that included national health care, economic redistribution, full employment, and job security for all.

Reuther’s call for a progressive social contract among government, business, and labor was too radical for most Democrats, especially as the Cold War was heating up. So Reuther sought to achieve similar goals at the bargaining table, creating, in effect, a private welfare state for those Americans lucky enough to work for the nation’s biggest corporations and to have a union contract. In 1948 the UAW got GM to agree to a historic contract tying wage increases to the general cost of living and to productivity increases. Over the next two decades, UAW members won unprecedented benefits, including enhanced job security, paid vacations, and health insurance. In 1955 the UAW won supplemental unemployment benefits that enabled UAW members to earn up to 95 percent of their regular paycheck even if they were laid off. Reuther hailed that provision as “the first time in the history of collective bargaining [that] great corporations agreed to begin to accept responsibility” for their workers during layoffs.

The union used strikes—or the threat of work stoppages—to gain these victories. It took a strike at Ford in 1949 to establish the union’s right to have a voice in the speed of the assembly line. It took a 100-day strike at Chrysler in 1950 to win a pension plan.

As a result of these victories, UAW members were able to buy homes, move to the suburbs, send their children to college, take regular vacations, and anticipate a secure retirement. The UAW set the standard for other unions to win similar benefits from other major industries.

The UAW was on the front line of the civil rights movement. Reuther marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in Mississippi and elsewhere. The UAW helped fund the 1963 March on Washington (which the AFL-CIO refused to endorse) and brought many of its members to the historic protest. Reuther was one of the few white speakers at the march. The UAW used its political clout to lobby for passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act. Reuther was also an early and generous supporter of Cesar Chavez’s efforts to organize farmworkers, marched with Chavez on numerous occasions, and supported the boycott of nonunion grapes and lettuce, long before other union leaders recognized the importance of the farmworkers’ struggle.

Reuther advised Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to champion a bold federal program for full employment that would include government-funded public works and the conversion of the nation’s defense industry to production for civilian needs. This, he argued, would dramatically address the nation’s poor, create job opportunities for African Americans, and rebuild America’s troubled cities without being as politically divisive as a federal program identified primarily as serving low-income blacks.

Both presidents rejected Reuther’s advice. They were worried about alienating racist southern Democrats and sectors of business who opposed Keynesian-style economic planning. LBJ’s announcement of an “unconditional war on poverty” in his 1964 State of the Union address pleased Reuther, but the details of the plan revealed its limitations. Testifying before Congress in April 1964, Reuther said, “While [the proposals] are good, [they] are not adequate, nor will they be successful in achieving their purposes, except as we begin to look at the broader problems [of the American economy].” He added, “Poverty is a reflection of our failure to achieve a more rational, more responsible, more equitable distribution of the abundance that is within our grasp.” Reuther threw the UAW’s considerable political weight behind LBJ’s programs, but his critique proved to be correct.

In 1952 Reuther was elected president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and three years later brokered a merger with American Federation of Labor (AFL) president George Meany. By then about one-third of America’s workers were union members. Reuther hoped that the AFL-CIO would spearhead a new wave of union organizing, but he was constantly frustrated by the indifference of many unions to organizing the unorganized or to mobilizing their members for political action. The conservative Meany was part of the problem, but Reuther shared some of the blame as well. As part of the Red Scare, Reuther had expelled many of the most radical and experienced organizers and leaders from labor’s ranks.

In 1966 Reuther said, “The AFL-CIO lacks the social vision, the dynamic thrust, the crusading spirit that should characterize the progressive modern labor movement.” Two years later he withdrew the UAW from the AFL-CIO and forged a new labor group, the Alliance for Labor Action, with the Teamsters union. Reuther had big plans for the organization, but before it could launch any initiatives, Reuther, his wife, and two others were killed in a private plane crash in 1970.