The UAW-Over the Top or Over the Hill?
Swados, Harvey
A: The union and the nation In the midst of the great organizing drive of the CIO, which was to culminate in the solid establishment of industrial unionism in the United States, John L. Lewis...
...The simple truth is that neither the UAW nor any other union, no matter how large its membership, how influential its representatives on Capitol Hill, or how many millions it has invested in gilt-edged securities, has the capacity or the power to resolve problems of this magnitude, even when they affect the lives of its own members...
...Everyone is frightened...
...The simple truth is there has never been an over-all study of job conditions throughout the auto industry, much less an attempt to establish industrywide standards...
...Levinson explains, with admirable candor, stems largely from the organizational structure of the UAW, under which the union official having the major responsibility for conducting the negotiations and making final recommendations to the membership was not directly responsible to that membership or dependent upon them for his political position within the union...
...The immediate cause of his hysteria was his son's birthday: The boy had wanted a bike, like the kid next door had gotten for his birthday...
...The clause has created a stable work force but at the same time it has become a factor —along with automation and the cost of other fringe benefits—that forces companies to produce more with fewer people...
...there are workers to be organized in the new industries, and some of them no doubt will develop into natural leaders, as workers have in the past...
...Magnificent words...
...And in such instances we will find the UAW applying pressure, or at any rate attempting to convince key people in the Administration: what we will not find is the leader of one million two hundred thousand workers attempting to mobilize those workers for a program, much less mobilizing the unemployed...
...It is not only that General Motors is so rich that, if all of its plants all over the United States were to be simultaneously destroyed by some national disaster, it could in a year rebuild them all with its own resources and not even have to borrow money...
...I was struck by the near-unanimity with which the staffers insisted, wherever I encountered them, in Solidarity House, throughout Detroit, and in other areas as well, that the leadership was "ahead of the workers...
...But nothing is arising from the impatience, disenchantment, or bitterness of a nature to trouble Mr...
...See, for example, Diary of a Strike by Bernard Karsh...
...One test, it seemed to me, of the depth of the individual commitment to the union, to the labor movement, to the idea of that movement as a motor force in the impulsion toward a more reasonably ordered and more humane state of things, would be the encouragement by an individual of his own child to go into the factory and participate in the life of the union...
...As a result these weaker firms must—if they are serious about staying in the race—increase output per worker to keep their prices competitive, and to accumulate the capital with which to buy more efficient equipment...
...Whatever Reuther's earlier ambitions may have been—to enter national politics, to take over the AFL-CIO, to be appointed U.S...
...Not only was the Detroit Negro family's median income in 1959 $3,800 as compared to $6,400 for the white family, partially because the Negro wage earner has been unable to move into the skilled, or high-paying end of the auto industry, but his percentage of unemployment in relation to the total labor force is often double, and in some age brackets, triple that of his white brother...
...It is when people are in motion, and are led toward an ethical goal, that they are most receptive to challenges to received wisdom...
...Given his socialist background and his quick intelligence, no labor leader is more aware of this than Walter Reuther...
...In short, automation has not altered the fact that most production-line jobs do not produce the kind of occupational involvement or identification necessary to make work a satisfying experience...
...The problem in the UAW," says Prof...
...News & World Report observed on 11 March, 1963, "have a strong effect on total production...
...The consequences of this refusal to take on GM are what we must now consider...
...The enemy, they explain, is not the employer— himself a victim, like those in attendance, of circumstances...
...A: The union and the nation In the midst of the great organizing drive of the CIO, which was to culminate in the solid establishment of industrial unionism in the United States, John L. Lewis came to Detroit to address a mass meeting...
...As for the latter, it was inevitable that feelings which were originally prideful and perhaps even boastful should have been gradually replaced by attitudes which can often be characterized as at best patronizing and at worst contemptuous...
...What has been denied him, then, is not the right to publish his political opinions, but the alleged right to have them published by his local union...
...Berle and others assure us have developed social consciences unique in history, resort to such primitive methods of exploitation as stepping up the work pace, cutting back on lunch hour, cutting down on wash-up time...
...That is, the substantial slice of the economic pie that they have gotten for the dues-payer, and the trimmings too, the health insurance, pensions, and the rest, have made him into a pretty satisfied fellow, a member (whether black or white) of an elite, the aristocracy of labor, more concerned with paying off on his home and getting a boat to go fishing than with "taking on GM" or otherwise rocking the boat...
...But new leftists with grounded democratic principles and articulated social ideals...
...The UAW, as we have noted, has been in the forefront of Negro hiring for its own staff...
...The Regional Directors and the International Reps, if not the staff technicians of the UAW or the executives at the management end, come from the ranks (in fact their very jobs are often looked upon as "retirement" from "work," and have more than once been conferred upon secondary leaders and defeated local officers as a reward for faithful service to the International among the recalcitrant ranks...
...Not only is it a mixture of native stock (originally lured from southern and border states by promise of high wages) with immigrants and their children from central, southern, and eastern Europe...
...it has had to buck Southern white prejudice time and again, from the Detroit race riots of June 1943 down through the years...
...It is when struggles are postponed or aborted that the fabric of democracy must deteriorate...
...Briefly: One million more vehicles produced by 184,000 fewer workers...
...Last year the Chrysler Corporation demonstrated its ability to rejoin the profit makers of the industry, aided by a union desperately anxious to keep the company solvent and its workers employed...
...The question was greeted with embarrassment, with amusement, with derision...
...The UAW leadership functions with what might be called a socialdemocratic outlook...
...Thus, Case 64, as summarized by the Board in its annual report, concerned the complaint of a member that the editors of his Local newspaper "in refusing to publish his articles relating to the 1960 presidential campaign denied him his guaranteed personal freedoms and violated the AFL-CIO Code of Ethical Practices...
...Reuther's contention that if the President can't get action from Congress on this problem Mr...
...In TULC's handsome headquarters, Freedom House, on Grand River Avenue (where a key club is maintained which helps considerably with finances), such leaders as Buddy Battle, Ernest Dillard, and the hard-driving and politically sophisticated Horace Sheffield, direct the most active segment of Detroit's Negro population (whose militancy parallels that of their Southern counterparts) in a multipronged assault on white prejudice in management and unions alike and on Negro passivity in politics and racial exclusion...
...Actually, the Kennedy Administration very often proposes measures legislatively in advance of anything the unions, which are steeped in 19th-century rhetoric, have conceived...
...Obviously if the employer is determined to maintain those pressures which originally aggravated the workers, the situation is not going to be resolved by the use of Madison Avenue techniques...
...This may seem like purposeful misstatement, in view of the facts: that employment in the auto industry has always been seasonal because of model changes and the need for retooling, that long hard-driving periods of overtime have inevitably been followed by long uncertain months of unemployment, and that the auto industry has always been quick to feel the backlash of recession and depression...
...Is the characterization still valid...
...If we talk to the workers about the leaders, we find the latter referred to as "they...
...And it is George Edwards, himself an old UAW man and a first-rate Police Commissioner of Detroit, who has observed that one-third of this city's out-of-school teen-agers can be characterized as "uneducated, unattached, and unemployed," and available for leadership by "such racist groups as the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens' Councils and the Black Muslim movements...
...Reuther wants to try to close this gap in 1964 bargaining by raising the overtime penalty to double-time pay...
...The UAW responded by introducing the short week clause, under which a worker gets partial payment for hours not worked...
...When the organizer once again becomes the hero of the labor movement, when that movement extends to the unemployed as well and is once again animated by the idealism which marked the 30's, and which is an absolute prerequisite when unemployment coexists with "prosperity" and you do not have the spur of an external menace (as in the 40's) driving masses into factories and unions, then perhaps large-scale organizing drives will succeed...
...When I think that it was one of the most impressive intellectual lights of the UAW, an ironist of exceptionally subtle insight but a liberal still devoted to Reuther and the UAW, who was most emphatic in insisting to me that "the leadership is ahead of the rank and file," I can only refer once again to my analogy of the second-generation son and his greenhorn father...
...Their attitude, I think it not unfair to say, can upon occasion be compared to that of second-generation Americans who are troubled and embarrassed by their immigrant parents and devote considerable energy to pondering about how best to "handle" them, how to "make" them pursue or desist from a certain line of conduct, in short how to "sell" them, since they are not educated enough to realize it themselves, on what is best for them...
...Levinson's somewhat more elevated language, the "relative lack of emphasis on political considerations...
...In 1957 a group of 17 Negro trade unionists got together to raise money to spur voter registration in Detroit's Negro precincts...
...Employers now find it less costly to work overtime than to schedule in new workers...
...Or in Marquis Childs' column (Washington Post, 27 March 1963) written from Detroit: "It is not hard to find in this city that gave President Kennedy 70 per cent of its vote in 1960 a deep disenchantment with the Kennedy administration...
...Which brings us to our final parallel, and one which should lead into the problems of these men and their union...
...And indeed the grievance procedure, backed up ultimately by the right to strike, for which the union fought so hard, supposedly humanizes the work situation, and nicely countervails management's pressures for increased productivity, or for profits based on the exploitation of labor...
...This distinction is fundamental and dispositive of the issues here...
...When Walter Reuther himself comes out strong for a big tax cut for the lower-income groups, and for increased federal expenditures for housing and education, one can only applaud...
...A man would have to be a fool, or what amounts to the same thing, imbued with a mystic faith in the purity as well as the progressive historical mission of the proletariat, to deny that auto workers, like other workers and like most other Americans in fact, are shot through with racism, jingoism, a pervasive narrow-mindedness, and a conservative resistance to new ideas...
...The retirees, who retain certain voting rights, are becoming so numerous that they now hold the balance of power in many local unions and in consequence are going to have to be relieved of those voting rights by the working members...
...When Vice President Leonard Woodcock, Walter Reuther's putative successor, recently ran for re-election to the Michigan State Board of Regents, he was endorsed by the Detroit Free Press as a responsible executive (he is an appointee, after all, to the Executive Board of Telstar) who puts duty to the community above more particular interests (indeed, several academics observed to • Research for this article was carried out with the aid of a grant from the Philip M. Stern Family Fund...
...If this is so, it may be at least partly because Reuther has done little to keep a social movement alive within his own union...
...It was the union which used to resist profit-sharing schemes when proposed by management, out of fear that they would dilute workingclass militancy and, by giving workers the feeling they were little capitalists with a stake in labor efficiency, would convert them into individualistic eager beavers...
...Kennedy will be defeated for re-election in 1964...
...If it got really tough, he went on relief and sweated it out until things picked up and he was called back...
...Nevertheless, it is part of the industry...
...more than that, they themselves become innovators, and discover that they are capable of an inventiveness and an intellectual audacity of which they themselves could scarcely conceive in less adventurous times...
...If we are lucky, some of these young men and women will throw themselves into the organization of the new unions among the new workers, the white collar people and the technicians: the teachers' unions, the unions of government employees, and the like, which have a potential as great or greater than that which once energized the Steel Workers Organizing Committee or the UAW itself...
...It is another to marvel at the quiescence of the jobless and at their reluctance to turn away from the narcosis of their TV and to turn out for your rallies (I was told that TV viewing time in Detroit has achieved the status of a full-time occupation, with sets tuned in an average of 351/2 hours a week), when in fact you have given no indication that you have any new perspective to offer them...
...Briefly: The Buick plant in Flint, Michigan, is now turning out about the same number of cars that it did six years ago, with about half the number of workers...
...Reuther's most recent extra-curricular activity has been his service on the ten-man committee directing the March on Washington...
...TULC's most startling achievement so far has been its leading role (acknowledged by everyone) in electing Jerome Cavanagh Mayor of De troit in 1962 over a candidate endorsed by the UAW, which awoke the day after election to discover that its man had been well-whipped by TULC's...
...For an outsider, the immediate question arises: Why doesn't the UAW attempt to challenge GM's production standards, not just for the benefit of the GM workers, but to take the heat off the Chrysler and Ford workers...
...Those who incline to excuse the behavior of other union leaders with the comfortable reflection, "at least they deliver," might try to remember that Walter Reuther and the UAW have been delivering, too, without having to deliver themselves or their dues-payers into the hands of goons or mobsters...
...The hiring of such young men and women, and their visibility in the Negro community, is desperately important if there is to be any substantial progress in motivating young people to stay on in school and to batter at the doors of company and union training programs for upgrading the unskilled...
...It used to be known as the class struggle, and it provided part of the motor force for the original growth of the UAW...
...Michigan AFL-CIO News, 14 March 1963...
...One searches in vain through the roster of staff members involved in research, planning, public relations, etc., etc., for a single man whose primary responsibility is for the unemployed...
...he usually lives in a decent home in a decent neighborhood...
...but it is also made up increasingly of the very old and the very young...
...2) The inalienable right of the workers to strike over those production standards (and over health and safety matters also), if the grievance procedures have been exhausted...
...Mr...
...But just as no one can go around Reuther's left in the UAW, who wants to try going around Kennedy's left in the nation...
...While the top officers of the union may attempt to convince the membership that prevailing standards are relatively low, they must overcome work habits which have been established and accepted over a long period of years...
...Even the oldtimers, who are over the hump and safely on the secure road to retirement (you need 17 years' seniority to be reasonably sure of your job at the Ford plant in Detroit), and supposedly both snug and smug, are frightened for their sons and their sons-in-law...
...When this Southerner was laid off, his savings, including the money he had realized on the sale of his house, melted away...
...But as I have already tried to indicate, it is very, very far from being a corn plete explanation for the malaise afflicting an organization which was in the very recent past so magnificently combative and so uncompromisingly democratic...
...In former times, when a worker was laid off he took his gun and went hunting, or he drove back down home to the old folks' farm until word came that they were hiring again...
...And when he turned up at the Local hall, he said to Bishop, "They tell me I got to go on relief, but nobody in my family ever went on relief...
...Hardly...
...Nor can one find, in a union brimming over with schemes for getting people to register, moving in on this or that primary, supporting school bond issues, etc., etc., an unemployment program...
...but it has not succeeded in convincing the Negroes that they do not need their own parallel organization to fight for their own ends...
...We live in an epoch," B. J. Widick has written, "in which trade unionism increasingly cannot solve union problems...
...Seventy-eight per cent of Detroit's Negro youth are unemployed...
...When Walter Reuther announces, at the beginning of 1963, that Jack Conway has returned to the labor movement, to become his administrative assistant once again, this time to take charge of an organizing drive in the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, one can only applaud...
...conservative...
...In December 1962, the best month since 1956, this local had 13,022 members...
...When one considers the record of the UAW itself, one can only be doubtful...
...It may also explain why in 1956, when there were 200,000 men out of work in the Detroit area, the UAW could draw only (as a UAW leader told me) 2,000 people to a meeting on the West Side, and only 1,300 people to a meeting on the East Side...
...Thus, the introduction of supplemental unemployment benefits (financed by company payments of a nickel an hour worked)—eligibility for which depended on the auto worker being laid off for a week—caused the auto makers to schedule four-day weeks, often for months on end...
...It is by no means certain that Horace Sheffield could have stayed on the staff of the UAW—for the time being he seems invulnerable—if his mayoralty candidate had been defeated...
...The middleaged climbed aboard when it looked safe, but now that they're getting old they like to think that they participated in the early growth of the union...
...Levinson puts it so well, "a long and difficult one," and since, as he also observes, it is "a very delicate one to handle," we find the union resorting to sophisticated techniques of salesmanship...
...So it seems from the outside...
...It conceives the job of the union to be to improve the lot of its members under the going social order, and when the occasion demands, to shore up the more unstable elements of that order...
...The total drop was 18 billions...
...Most important from the worker's point of view, GM has utilized its gigantic capital accumulation to install in its plants machinery and equipment far more efficient than those of Ford and more particularly of Chrysler...
...Throughout that union, one is continually being reminded of the great role played by radicalsWobblies, Socialists, Stalinists, Trotskyists of various persuasions—not only in building the union but in maintaining through the 40's and even the 50's the kind of democratic ferment that raised the persistent notion not merely of trade unionism but of a movement with goals...
...Automation does not appear to have significantly altered these characteristics of production-line work," says Professor William A. Faunce of the Labor and Industrial Relations Center of Michigan State University, in "Automation and Leisure" (Chapter 25 of Automation and Society, Ed...
...do not have an opportunity to consider and discuss policies and to make their choices known...
...From the Ford Agreement: "Management shall have the right to deny vacation, upon payment of vacation pay as provided in Section 26 of this Article, if in its judgment the exigencies of production so require...
...The Board found: "His sole complaint is that his articles were rejected by the local union publication for what he considers to have been an invalid reason...
...And when dignified pot Iatches are scheduled there are engraved R.S.V.P...
...C: Insecurity But if job dissatisfaction remains as a practically insoluble grievance, one which goes back to the installation of the conveyor belt system and will apparently continue into the incalculable, or workless, fully automated future, job insecurity is a much more recent and terrifying phenomenon...
...Suppose we narrow this down somewhat...
...The fact is that—whatever the reasons—it has not...
...The UAW-Ford Agreement states: "The right of the Company to establish and enforce production standards is recognized...
...Not only is this a fact that can hardly be called into question, it is one that should always be kept in mind in any evaluation of the present situation and the future prospect of these typical Americans...
...It remains to be seen whether money and skill will suffice to implement them, without the elixir of masses in motion and leaders stirred by the heady fragrance of that movement...
...For his pension is only one of the constantly-expanding fringe benefits which cushion him against the shocks of illness, hospitalization, and old age...
...If both of these aspects of the auto worker's position —his increasing well-being and his endless frustration and bitterness on the job—are taken into account, perhaps we shall approach somewhat more closely an understanding of what has become of his union...
...It is taking on such varied interests as the Michigan race tracks and the brewing industry (and its lily-white unions) in an effort —by means of pressures ranging from community appeals to the threat of "selective withholding of patronage"—to gain employment for Negroes and to train younger Negroes as multipliers...
...Controversial articles of any kind," Prof...
...One cannot complain, as one might with almost any other union, of an absence of intellect, or of lack of application of that intellect to the problems of our age...
...There have been abortive attempts to attack the ailment on an industrywide basis—Emil Mazey submitted a 10-point program on production standards to the 1961 UAW convention, which received it quite coolly—but it seems clear that unless and until there's a determination to take on GM, in each of whose 135 separate bargaining units disputes on working conditions are settled separately, auto workers will continue to thrash about blindly, often sacrificing job conditions they had earlier won in years of militant struggle...
...In terms of salesmanship: The Regional Director and the International Rep move in on the workers, after having themselves been presold at Solidarity House, whose front lawn is appropriately graced by a larger-than-life auto worker sculpted in a style which might be described as Stalinist Modern...
...In short, the available evidence indicates that what is known in the auto industry as the "improvement factor" works to improve the lot of those fortunate enough to hang on to their jobs, but, far from creating new job opportunities, serves to insure that those whom it disemploys will never again be needed in the industry...
...More to the point is that this organization, which was built by an alliance of radicals and disaffected workers, was characterized in 1947 by Walter Reuther himself as "the vanguard in America," as "the architects of the future...
...This is the highest rate in six months...
...In the years since then, these retirees have increased, and in many of the new plants the production work is being taken over by young men...
...The UAW is far from being a jobholders' protective association, like certain of the craft unions...
...You can strike one week over standards," a leader of the union said to me, "and next week they'll introduce new standards...
...It's Mr...
...This is a fact which ought to be borne in mind in all those tiresome discussions on "big labor" and its abuses of the privileges accorded it by a softheaded public...
...What has happened over the years has been a codification of two basic articles in the endless struggle over the conditions of the job: 1) The inalienable right of the company to establish production standards...
...Not long ago, when 60 vacancies were announced in the Detroit Post Office, 10,000 people lined up to apply...
...As the years pass, it finds itself serving not only its members, but the weaker firms in the auto industry as well...
...In such circumstances, one can hardly wonder at the prevalence of cynicism and apathy among UAW members, or at the fact that job dissatisfaction continues to be a running sore in the automotive industry...
...If, however, we examine only B and C—job dissatisfaction and insecurity—a combination almost as peculiarly American and as unpredictable in its effects on the system as apple pie a la mode, we may learn more about the situation of these particular Americans than by psychoanalyzing their leader or pressing bouquets on the UAW for being what any union ought to be to start with: honest...
...What has their union done to vanquish these specters...
...A few figures will indicate what technological innovation and automation are just beginning to do to the automotive industry: "In 1953," according to Newsweek, 1 April 1963, "917,000 auto workers turned out 7.3 million cars, trucks, and buses...
...What also makes the auto workers seem so typical is that they manufacture the product which more than any other—with the possible exception of the cowboy movie—has represented America to the rest of the world in the 20th century...
...When he is aroused to his old-time fervor by the onrush of the Negro revolution, he is capable of characterizing (on 13 August 1963) hidebound George Meany's weasling AFL-CIO executive council statement, with...
...It is the unofficial contention of the UAW officialdom that their very success in negotiations over the last ten or fifteen years has in a sense foreclosed the possibility of their being "the vanguard in America...
...Since it is precisely in these firms that the workers are apt to be most squeezed and therefore most restless, it becomes the self-imposed responsibility of the union to persuade those workers that their very livelihoods depend on the yielding of concessions to make their employer competitive...
...certainly it is not going to instruct the average rank and filer, or even the leadership of the UAW in the extension of democracy to such areas as the union's press...
...People who are being manipulated, even by those whom they admire (and there is no question but that speaking generally the UAW membership does admire Reuther and his lieutenants even more than the electorate at large, say, admires Kennedy and the New Frontiersmen)—such people can hardly be expected to identify, in the old-fashioned fraternal sense, with their manipulators...
...The enemy is GM...
...Kennedy is prepared to undertake...
...They must tell President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev that no nation has the right to use the sky as an open sewer," one must applaud this plea for an end to the Terror Olympics...
...It was rather that they would be "chopped up" by the bureaucrats, and their energy and idealism dissipated in an endless series of petty struggles...
...They try to remind me," he said, "of the good old days when we fought together to build the union...
...It is in this process of cooperating that a series of fascinating developments takes place...
...The Public Review Board of the UAW, a group of distinguished citizens which hears complaints of those who feel they have been treated unjustly and cannot obtain redress within the union itself, has been hailed as one of Walter Reuther's most honorable accomplishments...
...For there is one other basic fact about the structure of the auto industry which cannot be overlooked, and that is the absolute dominance of General Motors...
...Berle told the Herald Tribune Book and Author Luncheon on 29 April, 1963...
...What one can say, I think with justification, is that the UAW leadership no longer takes its own demands seriously...
...Just so, one can read about Reuther's political impatience in U.S...
...But to say this is hardly to say everything...
...From this small group arose the formidable Trade Union Leadership Council, which has swiftly become a political, social, and economic force in Detroit, with its leadership taken from Negro UAW veterans, and its membership of about 10,000 also drawn substantially from UAW members, their wives and families...
...Such was the question that I posed to myself a few months ago...
...So the man said, sobbing, Why should I go on living when I can't even face my son...
...Reporting on a new study of the gross national product by the Commerce Depart ment, the magazine noted that: In the 1957-58 recession, for example, the auto share of gross product dropped 6.3 billions...
...not only is it a mixture of urbanites and their country cousins, the latter displaced from the land by spreading suburbia or in search of an occupation more central than farming...
...And respectable the UAW surely is...
...Just because they are involved in the mass production of a product which is universally regarded almost with veneration, it does not follow that they derive unalloyed satisfaction from their involvement, or that they do not feel alienated from their tasks...
...Those swings have a powerful effect on the general course of business activity...
...It fell to 13.9 billions in 1958, swelled to 20.8 billions in 1960, dipped to 17.5 billions in 1961 and rose to 21.5 billions in 1962...
...In the meantime Walter Reuther's impassioned and repetitive appeals for the extension of democracy must seem not only tiresome but hollow, coming as they do from a union which has preserved the democratic form and all but lost its spirit...
...First because Conway is universally respected as a top-notch administrator whose talents were going to waste in the New Frontier...
...But one will look in vain for the UAW to exert any pressures on the President of the United States in this regard...
...In our economic system, production must supersede everything else...
...Levinson says that "the union was more willing to provide relief to individual firms through adjustments in productivity rather than hourly compensation since the former technique could not be as easily known to outsiders and, hence, involved less possibility of adverse secondary effects...
...and indeed if such a Board were to be established by certain other Al LCIO affiliates we might see some notable changes in the labor scene...
...Not so now...
...Nor is it any secret that for years Walter Reuther never even bothered to confer with his Director of Organization...
...and that the servicing is done not simply for the dues-payers but for the corporations as well...
...it would seem that they find the careers of their parents boring, old hat, and...
...Since the workers are no more privy to the production standards that will be set by engineers, time and motion study men, and plant supervisors, than they are to such other management prerogatives as product design or pricing, they are continually off balance...
...Some ten thousand people crowded into Olympia Stadium to hear him promise them that they were not alone in their battle to build the United Auto Workers against the thugs and spies of the auto corporations...
...And although he goes on to call for nationalization of transit facilities, hospitals, public utilities, all national resources and financial institutions—" TWU's position is clear...
...The renewed efficiency of the corporation was no doubt a source of considerable satisfaction to its stockholders...
...If it has not organized the white-collar people in its own bailiwick (Stieber, Governing The UAW: "Total UAW white-collar membership probably does not exceed fifty thousand out of an estimated potential of 250,000 within the union's jurisdiction"), how will it be able to go out and organize white-collar workers in unrelated fields...
...One personal experience of a Negro standing at your side in a strike instead of scabbing on you is worth a thousand Hollywood movies on the charm of Negro children and the rectitude of "tolerance...
...His own full-blooded participation in the March reflects not only Reuther's reaction to the restiveness of the Negroes in and around his own power base, but his eagerness to play a role in the revolution: if any labor leader has the insight to grasp the implications of a future linkage between socially rebellious Negroes and economically rebellious disemployed, it is Walter Reuther...
...Manipulation has for so long taken the place of mobilization that one may wonder whether the latter is even being considered, or whether it could be made effective with a membership—and a staff— which has time and again seen demands sabotaged by being tied to the economic line of the Kennedy Administration...
...And the distance between staff and membership keeps growing too, as the leaders increasingly get their information on the mood of the workers not from the workers themselves, but from the International Reps and the Local Presidents, themselves less and less in contact with union members who do not even bother coming to meetings...
...he has a patient, almost a disinterested, understanding of the way in which the whole bureaucratic mechanism operates...
...the possible adverse political repercussions on the international representative because of a belowpattern settlement in any one unit, or even in several units, is small as compared to the total number of units within the entire union...
...The hackneyed but basically meaningless programs adopted at union conventions year after year, with some legislative tinkering and tailoring, are being enacted into law...
...The UAW-General Motors Agreement puts it this way: "Production standards shall be established on the basis of fairness and equity consistent with the quality of workmanship, efficiency of operations, and the reasonable working capacities of normal operators...
...The answer is devastatingly simple...
...This relative freedom from the reprisals of an aroused membership, Mr...
...In other ways too, the composition of this union, whose members now earn an average of perhaps $6500 a year, parallels that of the United States...
...Whether the 30,000 workers laid off in 1962 as a consequence of this efficient management took similar satisfaction is to be doubted...
...and he can look forward to retirement not with trepidation but with honest expectation...
...Neither can the union leadership ignore a long history of union organization and strike action against the so-called "speed-up...
...the total, 8.4 billions...
...The new army of American unemployed will not use kid gloves and will not be as gentle and easy-going as the unemployed of the 1930's," says Mike Quill, President of the Transport Workers Union, in TWU Express, April 1963...
...Clearly, it is both reasonable and ethical that the UAW work for the abolition of overtime, which is certainly unconscionable during a period when despite new records in auto production some 90,000 auto workers are jobless...
...But to say this is hardly to exhaust the subject...
...Kennedy, who has never been charged by anyone with being a poor politician, knows perfectly well that Walter Reuther has no place to go...
...And even if the president of the IUD-AFL-CIO should choose to walk out, where would he go...
...For if ever a union was typically American, that union is the UAW...
...What is more, his union has won him these benefits (many younger workers, probably thousands of them, really believe that the benefits have been "given" by the companies rather than wrested from them) without having to be corrupt, crooked, or collusive with the corporation with which it negotiates...
...It is not even that Ford and Chrysler continue to stay in business by sufferance of GM, which is presumably dissuaded from driving them out of business only by that corporate conscience which has become the ethical governor of our economic machine...
...These people, these invisible TV viewers, these suddenly visible civil service job-seekers and day laborers, have been through the UAW in the thousands as dues-payers for shorter or longer periods...
...he is not terrorized by ruthless bosses...
...And just as the short week principle plugged a gap in the social security structure, so has it opened another...
...News & World Report (11 March 1963), which says darkly that he "is prepared to urge more forceful pressure on the part of President Kennedy to cure the unemployment problem...
...during the worst of it he lived in a freight car for a year...
...He looked, said Bishop, like those men you read about who go off their rockers and shoot up their entire family, then commit suicide...
...which, except for a house, is the most expensive object that they themselves ever buy...
...By and large that cooperation has been forthcoming: the UAW is not an anti-capitalist organization and is committed to holding as many jobs as it can for its members...
...Seen from the outside, nothing could be more reasonable...
...Bishop did not know what had become of these two men...
...The auto worker has made tremendous progress, thanks to the UAW and Walter Reuther...
...It is a tribute to TULC, which would seem to be the liveliest and most stimulating new organization in the motor capital, that the Black Muslims are making no particular headway in the Detroit area...
...What good does it do to win a battle for yourself or for your fellowworkers if you discover after victory not only that the war goes on but that the rules of war have been changed all over again, unilaterally, by your opponent...
...in 1963, 723,000 workers produced 8.3 million vehicles...
...they have learned from the bitter experience of recent years that seniority, far from guaranteeing employment, has come to serve as a roster for layoffs...
...What has it not done that it might have...
...Stieber says of the union press, "are notable by their absence...
...This particular official is not a manipulator...
...In the two locals at Willow Run, the average age is about 24, and at Toledo, where there is something like a fiftyfifty balance between old and young, all the younger men are under thirty (and all too many of them, as UAW Treasurer Emil Mazey put it to me, "don't know the difference between unionism and rheumatism...
...The fact is that most of those guys who are retiring now, and were middle-aged then, never lifted a finger to help us when we were young and reckless and had nothing to lose...
...delegate to the United Nations—they do not now seem relevant to me...
...this was during the 1950's—it is said that the highwater mark of migration to Michigan from the South was not in the days of the Model T but in 1955...
...If, in 1962, the total profits of the Big Three, after taxes, came to a little over two billion dollars, nearly one and a half billion of those dollars were earned by General Motors...
...It is these twin specters—dissatisfaction with the job ranging from boredom in some cases to downright hatred in others, and the fear that one may be severed from the job and so severed from any possibility for gainful self-respecting employment—that remain characteristic of the auto worker as they do of millions of other Americans...
...As for presenting both sides of an issue . . . this is virtually unheard of in UAW newspapers...
...In one instance a UAW official told me wryly how the son of one of his colleagues (not in the Teamsters or the Operating Engineers, be it remembered) had come to him to inquire which of two universities had a better school of business administration...
...It is a best which we are all going to need very badly in the years ahead...
...But as it is now constituted in the UAW we can hardly expect it to be much more than an additional resource for professional unionists...
...B: Job dissatisfaction This is a problem which began with the industrial revolution and did not end with the Russian revolution—as we have been reminded by East Berlin, Poznan, and Budapest...
...But as the rate of change increases, these assurances have become somewhat muted...
...In consequence, the corporation is charging the 11,000 workers at its Milwaukee plant with a slowdown...
...It is also a tribute to the UAW that the leadership of TULC came from its ranks, and that this leadership has not been harassed (much less fired from staff jobs in the union) because of its opposition to political candidates officially supported by the UAW...
...The machinery is coming in too swiftly to be absorbed by the shrinkages resulting from withdrawals, retirements, and deaths (this attrition is called "nutrition" by some workers, but though they may mispronounce the word, they do not misunderstand its implications...
...A quarter of a century has passed since I sat among that throng of workers and their wives and watched them weeping unashamedly as Lewis exhorted them to stand fast against the corporations and to stand together for a better life...
...I know of no more elegant explanation of the process than that of Harold M. Levinson, in his article, "Pattern Bargaining by the UAW," in the September 1958 Labor Law Journal...
...And this is why, it seems to me, Kempton's judgment that Reuther has "fallen out of history" may be cruel—but it is not unjust...
...And the fact that the auto industry is currently enjoying one of its best years, and that sales records are being broken month after month, does not mean that the vast majority of its workers are enjoying a real sense of security...
...Especially for labor leaders it is difficult even to think of walking out on a pleasant host who happens to be President of the United States and who calls you by your first name...
...This is the most successful economic system the world has ever seen," Mr...
...The Flint, Michigan, Buick plant is, because of its age and other factors, not an average or typical plant...
...D: The union and the future The head of an AFL-CIO union sympathetic to the UAW has described Walther Reuther to me as "ambitious without a specific ambition," and as eager to be at the center of a social movement, but no longer having a social movement in which to function...
...Furthermore, one of Walter Reuther's finest negotiating achievements, SUB (supplemental unemployment benefits), which has been in effect since 1956, has made employers "think twice about mass hirings and layoffs" (the words are Business Week's, 2 March 1963), and the union's ongoing push toward the GAW (guaranteed annual wage) and an eventual white-collar status for its membership has succeeded so far in penalizing employers for short work weeks and is forcing them to stabilize employment and improve scheduling...
...But one is entitled to wonder whether this expedient too will result not in putting some of those 90,000 jobless onto the payrolls of the Big Three, but rather, in the long run, in accelerating the process of replacing workers with machines...
...He is also old enough to have felt the full force of the depression at first hand...
...As a rule, people are eager to associate themselves in memory with institutions which have grown to be not only acceptable but respectable...
...Labor leaders like to, often have to, talk big...
...Our own government should move into these industries now in orderly fashion, that would be completely legal, and so avoid the near upheaval that we had during the depression of the '30s"—it is doubtful that the capitalist class has been thrown into terrified disarray by this oratory...
...by H. B. Jacobson and J. S. Roucek): Machine operators in the automated plant, while having somewhat more responsibility in that there is a larger machinery investment per worker, do not need appreciably greater skill and many feel that they have an even less important part in the total work process than had been the case in plants using conventional machine techniques...
...Only the administration policies reach members in this form...
...If we are to understand fully the role of leaders and staffers in convincing the ranks of the necessity for sacrifice in order to keep their employers competitive, we must tear ourselves away from the cut-throat world of the parts suppliers, in which such euphonious public-relations labels as "Project Progress" are pasted onto sacrifices by the workers— who have no way of knowing the true position of their employers, or even whether their sacrifices will really prevent them from being driven out of business or simply closing down...
...If we talk to the leaders, and to the staffers at Solidarity House and in the various regions, we find the workers referred to as "they...
...One of his fellow-workers, a Southerner, had lived all his life in South Carolina, where he owned his own home, a small place but all paid up, until a GM hotel-room recruiter urged him to sell out, pack up, and come to Michigan, where a high wage job was waiting for him...
...unlike the International Rep who can lead a fairly leisurely life, he is the one who has to leave town, eat bad food, sleep in fleabags, argue, sweat, ring doorbells, work endless hours, and . . . have the results of his labors tabulated in naked figures, there for everyone to see...
...Or how come, in Mr...
...But for UAW," observes Business Week (2 March 1963), "the success of the short week brings problems, too...
...As Murray Kempton has observed, in connection with the 1962 UAW convention's resolution accepting President Kennedy's decision to resume nuclear testing (after Walter Reuther had earlier opposed test renewal), "it is the posture of the American labor movement to disagree with a decision of President Kennedy's only up to the point that it is made...
...And so I asked everyone I met, from officials to staffers to rank and file activists who indicated by their own behavior that the union was still important to them, whether they had indeed done so with their own children, whether they intended to do so, and whether they could honestly encourage an idealistic college student to go to work in an auto or aircraft plant (assuming that he could find a job) and work in the ranks of the UAW for the realization of his ideals...
...What one must be wary of is making too simple an equation between what a labor leader says and what he is able to do...
...he is not eager to bend the rank and file to his design...
...Any organization which strikes roots and acquires possessions will inevitably become as respectable in the community as any growing middle-class family...
...but they are not looking to the UAW to solve their problems or even to offer them a new way of thinking about those problems...
...It would be most instructive if some labor historian could one day compile a history of the instances in which locals have taken such strike votes, only to be worn down by the International into not putting the threat into practice...
...The difficulties posed by the fact that the union has no machinery to deal with production standards are simply insuperable...
...The problem "has never been the workers...
...This is also partly why the Negroes too are turning from the UAW (from which, as one highly articulate Negro leader put it to me, "the compassion and the commitment are gone") to their own organizations...
...Certainly even the most sophisticated observers concede this as a precondition for the efficient management of what A. A. Berle calls "the American economic republic...
...For years now, the organizer has been the low man on the UAW totem pole...
...it is also more efficient and more powerful than most states...
...And when Walter Reuther goes on to assert candidly that the job of organizing the unorganized has been characterized by a "lack of will on the part of the leadership of the whole labor movement," one can only applaud such virtually unprecedented frankness, particularly when one finds him adding, "I include myself in that...
...Auto's share of the gross product was 21.7 billions in 1955...
...Some might even have preferred the bad old days when their employer was losing six and seven million dollars a year—but was at least paying them wages...
...This was not during the 19th century, nor was the worker a European recruited to lay railroad ties across the American wilderness...
...When one of Reuther's aides commented sadly that the union and its leader sorely missed the spur of the socialist group led by Max Shachtman, I could not but reflect that not only had Reuther done a job on these political people, he had also domesticated some of them to the point where they are now to be found roaming the corridors of Solidarity House, on the payroll...
...Stieber, "is not that members...
...When they make telephone calls their wires go straight through to the top Administration people...
...This is partly why, in towns like Toledo, Owosso, and Flint, 60 NOW buttons are flashing on the lapels of aging auto workers...
...holding endorsement from the March, as "so anemic that you'd have to give it a blood transfusion to keep it alive on its way to the mimeograph machine...
...Seen from the inside, the matter is somewhat different...
...But the kid next door's father was working, and since the boy's father wasn't, he had wound up with only a cake...
...He earns a living that is well above the margin of poverty...
...The workers, like the immigrant parents, tend to evade such confrontations by using their only defenses, lethargy and negativism, and to regard their offspring as remote if conscientious, and hostile if wellintentioned...
...And indeed what often happens is that the workers, goaded beyond endurance, turn to their final resource, a strike vote...
...But while, thanks in part to an administration which is admirably free from racism, Negroes have been making excellent progress—Jack Stieber, in his Governing the UA W, quotes a forthcoming study on racial practices in unions to the effect that the UAW "probably has more Negroes in staff positions than all other major unions combined"—they are sorely dissatisfied, and have only recently succeeded in getting a Negro onto the Executive Board as a Negro...
...New members, yes...
...Even back in 1959, as Stieber points out, "ten years after the UAW negotiated its first pension plan, 84,000 of the 102,600 UAW members who had retired were still living...
...Kennedy's sleep...
...For a while, the sociologists, the labor-management people, and even some labor leaders were assuring us that technological change would raise the workers' levels of skill, responsibility, and initiative...
...If he is deeply frustrated, as he gives every evidence of being, from his compulsive journeying to the fringes of the "Free World" to his wearisome speechifying, that is more significant, for it reflects the impasse of a million-membered union without which he would be another Adlai Stevenson or Henry Wallace —or Harold Stassen...
...In the 1960-61 recession, the auto decline was 5.1 billions...
...The Local Management of each plant has full authority to settle such matters...
...Nor does the UAW know, except in a general way, what has become of the thousands who have been laid off—and for the most part will never work again...
...If the UAW member (particularly the Chrysler employee) is growing older, the UAW staff is growing older still—according to Professor Stieber, in 1961 16 per cent of the staff was over 55 years old and the average age was 49...
...In effect, therefore, the separately "rational" actions of the various parts of society are the same actions which, combined, are shaking our total socio-economic system apart...
...In terms of servicing: The union has found it expedient to cooperate with management to work out supposedly more reasonable production standards, particularly with the Chrysler Corporation, and more recently with parts suppliers...
...It is true that the various radical movements have, for the time, all but disappeared...
...Nurtured in the heartland of the United States, it has had to move with the decentralization of the auto industry, so that now well under a half million, or only about one-third of its members, are still in Michigan (and in consequence the seven great locals concentrated in the Detroit area no longer dominate the organization...
...But radical thinking has not, even within the precincts of the UAW, thanks to the presence in it of men educated in the left but not yet ossified...
...Second because organizing the unorganized, which was exhilarating in the 30's and a snap in the 40's, when unions were accustomed to winning nine out of 10 elections, became a nightmare in the 50's: a National Labor Relations Board report showed AFL-CIO unions won only 53.5 per cent of 5,049 elections in which they participated in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1962...
...Surely it is precisely those who have led workers to victory in struggles that are now a part of history who should be the first to understand how the struggles themselves function as educational forces for the participants— and the leaders...
...The government must encourage further investment: as the new equipment installed will usually be more cybernated than the old, this will also mean growing unemployment...
...Otis Bishop, President of Local 599, claims to be the best crankshaft lathe operator in Buick...
...Furthermore, it was the UAW itself which, by virtue of its color-blind struggle for seniority and job security, created a stable home-owning Negro working class, which in turn provided an economic base for the new Negro middle class of merchants, salesmen, and professionals, that must shrink in revulsion from extremist and separatist movements such as the Muslims...
...The answer lies in the structure of the auto industry...
...The productivity approach, however, [he goes on] is concededly a long and difficult one, and from the union's point of view is a very delicate one to handle...
...or to deny that their officers and technical advisers are more sophisticated, more free from bigotry and flag-waving, more hospitable to adventurous thinking...
...This was not during the 1958 recession, but in the midst of the 1963 boom, when you might also drive past the corner of Gratiot and Eight Mile Road any day of the week and observe the informal shape-up of Negroes offering themselves for employment by the day to cruising housewives who want their windows washed or their gardens spaded, or to non-union building contractors in search of below-scale laborers...
...But when we say such things about the United Auto Workers and Walter Reuther we have only said letter A. There remains not just an alphabet, but an entire encyclopedia...
...Thanks in part to this cooperation, Chrysler's share of the approximately two billion dollars' profit of the auto industry came to about sixty million dollars...
...More important, however, will be TULC's results in its anti-job discrimination campaign and its youth program—both of which are interlinked...
...If they cannot claim recognition and a role in the government with a voice in the decision-making, at least it is pleasant for them to testify personally that they have received tickets entitling them to places at an elegantly served table...
...If it is easier to obtain authorization from the International for a strike outside the Detroit area, you may find, as one International Rep pointed out to me, that "if you hit one plant for better conditions, the company will simply shift the work from the struck plant to its other factories...
...Now when we think of the distance between leaders and led, the conclusion seems inescapable that the use of manipulative techniques has been widening the gulf that separates the two...
...In February 1956, the alltime peak month of auto production, Buick Local 599 of the UAW had 27,635 dues-paying members...
...It is only within the past six or seven years that the impact of the second industrial revolution has begun to be felt in the auto industry (as it had somewhat earlier in the coal mining industry, and as it has yet to be, we are given to understand, in the vast white-collar, clerical, and technical areas of the economic republic...
...Our union was built by young men...
...But like the intelligent and analytical son who still cannot bridge the gap between the generations, in short cannot surmount his own role, he fails to quite see how the UAW's years of accommodation to the realities of capitalism (or, if it sounds better, to the realities of "the economic republic") have worked to deaden the ordinary member's enthusiasm, to drive him away from an organization which he comes less and less to regard as part of his life, and in consequence to conservatize him...
...Those children of social-minded unionists who are themselves of an idealistic bent are finding their way to the peace movement and to the Negro revolution...
...During the last boom auto production year, 1955, the jobless rate declined...
...And everyone is groping...
...The President's promises to 'get things moving again' are recalled with an edge of bitterness...
...Even the memories of the participants can be faulty: An officer of the UAW described to me how the elderly come up to him at public functions honoring those who (in increasing thousands) are retiring from working life...
...In these circumstances, and with the leftist political groupings dead or moribund, and in any case no longer "colonizing" the factories, it is difficult to see from whence will come the infusion of new blood that would be essential if the UAW were to raise aloft once again, for a new generation, the banner of the vanguard in America...
...Now, a layoff may mean that he will never work again...
...Another, also Iaid off, turned up in the Local president's office even more distraught, crying and sobbing...
...John Quirt, writing in the New York Herald Tribune of 13 May, 1963 on the decline of new car inventories, noted that "some industry observers persist in the suggestion that fear of increasing GM's market penetration has helped hold back the company's production...
...Rising auto output likewise contributes strongly to total output, auto output for this year thus promises to prop up local activity...
...Now, under a different nomenclature—whether as work standards, speedup, production standards, or whatever lingo is used to indicate a difference of opinion between boss and worker as to how hard or how fast the latter ought to do what the former is paying him for—it continues to plague the UAW as a nagging endless irritation, a sore that will neither heal nor even respond to such medication as participation in profits...
...Before I do that I'll shoot GM...
...They will draw, let us hope, not only on the financial resources of the UAW, which have always been so generously forthcoming, to the eternal credit of Walter Reuther and his union, but also on the intellectual resources of its staff—a group of dedicated technicians who are the envy of industrial managers—and on the collective experience, shrewdness, and savvy of its trained working class politicians, some of whom began their careers by fighting for democratic socialism and by organizing the unemployed as well as the unorganized, and who have not all forgotten what they learned then, who have not all grown old and slothful, who have not all ceased searching hopefully for a young movement to which they can contribute the best that is in them...
...One of the ironies of the economic republic is the way in which improvisatory solutions to pressing social problems succeed only in transferring the problems to other areas, or in raising newer problems...
...Armed with all the paraphernalia of entrenched bureaucracy—researchers, clerks, writers, mimeographs, in addition to superior education, oratorical persuasiveness and access to indirect means of suasion—they take over local meetings ordinarily devoted to ordinary business, and hammer away at the need for aiding the employer to become competitive...
...Again according to Solidarity, which seems somewhat uncertain as to whether its readers should be horrified or awed, "the money General Motors took in from sales in 1962 was equivalent to the total expenditures of these major states put together: California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Massachusetts, New York and Ohio...
...Just as Reuther knows that he cannot resolve basic problems of the work situation without taking on GM (a struggle that many observers honestly feel could not be won against the giant of an industry that is geared to make 20 per cent profit in a 35-week year), so he knows that he cannot resolve basic economic problems without political action, and more political action than Mr...
...The UAW's ingenious efforts to convert its members from wage slaves into salaried human beings, can be seen in the light of this irony, which has been well-expressed by Robert Theobald in his highly suggestive essay, "Abundance, Threat or Promise...
...The workers, mostly young men, are complaining in turn about being made to work too hard, profitsharing or no profit-sharing...
...Opposition views are presented to individuals and groups in bits and pieces which occasionally find their way into the administration program, if the leadership senses considerable membership support for them...
...When I returned to Detroit recently with the aim of finding out what has happened to the powerful union built by those workers in the thirties and forties, I found first of all that it is impossible in the sixties to make the kind of generalization that used to come so easily...
...It is not clear how a union officialdom can regret the absence of "pressure from the left," or regret the fact that it is "ahead of the workers," and at the same time refuse to the ranks the right to quarrel in print, no matter how crankily, with the line as it is formulated and codified in Solidarity House...
...And, as we have observed, a strike can even be "won" with no result other than a displacement of pressure from the affected department to another within days after the supposed victory...
...But—despite a splendid program of activities ranging from summer encampments and UN Workshops to a brand new Labor Studies Center which, under the direction of Brendan Sexton, will doubtless be a model of its kind—the UAW remains, like the Longshoremen's Union, the Steelworkers' Union, or the Mine Workers', an organization of the employed, committed to its dues-payers and not to those who are steadily disappearing from the industry...
...It has always been in the leadership of the labor movement...
...How can the union leaders get away with this...
...me privately that, much as they respected Woodcock's abilities and preferred him to his opponents, his refusal of aggressiveness was precisely what had disappointed them about him...
...But why on earth should the management representatives of the economic republic, who Mr...
...In consequence politicians big and small have been making their way to Freedom House to address Saturday evening meetings or simply to socialize and show how concerned they are about the Negro...
...Thereupon it must program into its trans mission line, its Regional Directors and International Representatives, an understanding of the need to hold in line those most directly responsive to the ranks—the stewards and the activists—in order that production may continue uninterrupted...
...For one thing, the parts supplier companies, which are still important to the UAW (they continue to provide a substantial fraction of its membership), are always being economically squeezed, and in order to stay in business must minimize their labor costs, with or without the cooperation of the union...
...When one learns of these substantial steps toward civilized working conditions made by an aggressive and sophisticated union leadership, one is entitled to wonder how the worker can be more insecure now than when he was nothing but a warm body, bought up by the day and dumped often before the day, to say nothing of the season, was over...
...And surely, given the history of the UAW, one would be entitled to expect more from it than a more or less graceful (in certain instances exceedingly ungraceful) acquiescence to the upsurge of its Negro members, to their demand for representation on its Executive Board, to their struggle to cope with a series of economic facts which are all but overwhelming in their implications...
...What is curious, given leaders who once saw themselves as "the vanguard" in America, is that the salesmanship is directed not so much at the corporations as at the membership...
...invitations and places for union leaders...
...It is rather that they do not have a choice between alternate policies equally well thought out and developed by competent leaders with the assistance of technical staff...
...This task is, as Mr...
...One thing must be made clear at the outset...
...Attempting to answer it is not too unlike attempting to find out what has happened to the American dream in the years since 1947...
...Now that the union itself has taken the initiative in proposing and securing a profit-sharing agreement with the American Motors Corporation, both it and the corporation discover that the worker feels no greater sense of identification with management than he did before he was granted a modest share of the profits, probably because his tasks have become so rationalized that he sees little connection between them and the finished Rambler, or the year-end profit statement...
...With car production and sales once again booming, "Unemployment in Michigan jumped by 21,000 during February bringing the state's jobless total to 205,000, or 7.1 per cent of the labor force...
...Negroes make up perhaps 15 per cent (no figures are kept) of its membership, as they do of the population at large...
...These are the unions which will have to go in for a new kind of politics, and will have to make connection, and close connection, with the Negro revolution and the peace movement...
...When Emil Mazey declares to the UAW Workshop of World Affairs at the UN: "The peoples of the world need to exert counter-pressures...
...Shifts in auto output, as U.S...
...And what is the relationship of the leaders to the led...
...Yet he feels that the prospect of the laidoff, or more accurately the displaced worker, is more frightening now than it was then, and he told me several stories to illustrate his feeling...
...his children can and often do go to college and leave the working class behind...
...The strike, however, must be sanctioned by the International...
...In this connection, David Carper's words in DISSENT (Winter 1962) are well worth recalling: Among the hyper-actives in the industrial unions, the Kennedy Administration at the moment is a not unpleasant trap...
...this type of organizational arrangement does result in a diffused and indirect relationship between the political security of the union official and his success or failure in obtaining a pattern settlement in the specific units within his jurisdiction...
...in The Nation of 11 May, 1963: Labor unions must try to raise wages and therefore purchasing power: when men are competing with machines for jobs, this will cause growing unemployment...
...It was not that young people would be unable to take the assembly line pace, or the long dull perspective of working class life...
...Put another way, the worker is ultimately powerless to protect himself, even when supposedly he has the union behind him, against a management which is determined to tighten the screws on him and his fellows, first in one operation, then in another, first in one department, then—as he reacts by going out on strike unselfishly, not for himself but to protest against even a handful of men being abused—in another...
...TULC has a pilot program of 40 kids underway, and is setting up a series of self-help programs, among them a twice-weekly typing and steno class for girls, staffed by volunteers...
...The UAW newspaper, Solidarity, has expressed it with direct simplicity: "General Motors made more money in 1962 than any other corporation in the history of the world," This corporation is in fact not only more efficient and more powerful than just about any other corporation...
...Speaking of accommodations offered by the UAW to companies outside the Big Three (Ford, Chrysler, General Motors) in an effort to keep them competitive, Mr...
...and which is still enormously important to the American economy as a whole...
...By "political considerations" he refers to "pressures on the union leadership to obtain at least as much in negotiations as have other union leaders in order to retain the political allegiance of the membership...
...We are some eons away from perfection, but—without being Pollyannish—we have an American system which we can call truly great...
...They want the social security age lowered from 65 to 60 not just because they are sick of working, but because they feel that an early retirement program to remove from the labor market the seven million-odd Americans in their 60's now employed (`60 Now" has membership in 33 states, and can be seen as a latter-day variant of the Townsend Plan), would make some room for their sons in the factories which are being automated under their very noses...
...This lack is, as one staffer frankly conceded to me, "a most shameful abdication of the radical conscience...
...It is one thing to complain that workers are more interested in fighting crabgrass than in fighting for a better world...
Vol. 10 • September 1963 • No. 4
