Thoughts on the Auto Workers' Strike
Harrington, Michael
WHEN the negotiations between the auto industry and the United Auto Workers began, the company spokesmen presented themselves as industrial statesmen. It was in the interests of the...
...Of course, it just happens that this disinterested logic leads to the conclusion that the workers in Detroit should not demand a big pay increase...
...That forced them to press for decent pay hikes, not in order to get a big, greedy share of the pie, but just to maintain their living standards or improve them a little bit...
...Union wage demands in recent years have been primarily defensive...
...The auto industry should stop pre tending statesmanship and start sharing some of those profits with the workers...
...If it had contented itself with average rate of return on investment in manufacturing industries, which is 21.3 percent before taxes and 11.9 percent after, there would have been a dividend of $27.4 billion which could have been passed on to the workers and consumers...
...It pushed for every extra dollar of profit and it behaved like the rest of American busi ness...
...The figures released by Leonard Woodcock, the UAW president, simply do not support the myth of greedy workers forcing civic-minded corporations into an inflationary spiral...
...It was in the interests of the American economy, they said, to have a noninflationary settlement and they, as responsible citizens, would exercise their corporate power toward that end...
...Between 1947 and 1969, Woodcock reported, the auto industry made $82 billion in before-tax profits...
...Vietnam, and in particular a $10 billion miscalculation by President Lyndon Johnson when he assumed the war would be ended quickly, is the other...
...WHEN the negotiations between the auto industry and the United Auto Workers began, the company spokesmen presented themselves as industrial statesmen...
...For between 1960 and 1970, the corporate cash flow (profits plus depre ciation) went up by a whopping 85 per cent, which was much, much faster than wages...
...Yet in fact, the average take of an employee in one of the three giant auto corporations in 1969 (and this was assuming no layoffs and even some overtime) was $9,599...
...The industry, in short, is ready to volunteer sacrifices on the part of its employees...
...What this adds up to is that society can no longer allow the crucial decisions about dividing up the national product to be made in the boardrooms...
...The auto workers are sometimes thought of as the well-paid aristocrats of mass production industry...
...They occurred when the workers discovered that Vietnam and corporate profit-taking were wiping out the gains of a normal labor contract...
...And this country should demand that the price-and-profit policies of the giant cor porations be made a matter of public record...
...But the auto industry didn't do that...
...For the auto industry's decisions to push its profit rates $27.4 billion above the average over a 22-year period, or steel's recent increases, which sent prices up in one year by more than they had risen in the previous 10, are not "private" matters...
...May I propose that those selfless executives and stockholders might also do something for their country...
...They have greater public consequences than most acts of Congress...
...That would be a better way for industry to prove its public spirit than its present custom of volunteering sacri fices on the part of its employees...
...This was one of the two major causes of the current inflation...
...Split 50-50, it would have lowered the price of every car sold during those years by $120 and raised the hourly wage of every worker by 45 cents...
Vol. 17 • November 1970 • No. 6
