THE U.S.A. AND THE UAW
Rosenberg, Bernard
May 15-20. Dallas. No, not Dallas, a soap opera that holds much of the world's population in its grip. Same scene, no doubt, but a different cast of characters. On this occasion, 5,000 UAW...
...beware of decoy prostitutes who are really policewomen...
...More than any President in the past four decades, he has proven for all to see that whatever workers win can be snatched away by administrative fiat or legislative coup ....President Reagan has, consequently, done more than any other 20th-century President to mobilize working people and their unions for political action...
...A great many of the unemployed will neither be replaced nor reemployed...
...Wet or dry, we could make our way from hotel to convention hall...
...Union spokespeople call that Center the fulfillment of one man's dream...
...It's one's buddies who are in shock and oneself who may be next in the breadline...
...AH, BUT THERE'S THE COMPLEX and controversial issue of protectionism...
...wasn't exactly the theme, but some of these union representatives, who are not sure if they will ever attend another such gathering (their plants may be closed), looked funereal enough...
...This man, introduced by Fraser as his good friend, was no less a personage than the incumbent head of the Japanese auto workers union...
...Walter, the union's leader for 24 years, surrounded himself with only slightly subordinate officers whose intelligence and integrity organized labor will probably never surpass...
...Unions answerable to their members and firms beholden to their shareholders have to think in short-range terms, finding more jobs or turning quick profits...
...Pre-World War 1 socialists would have said no...
...Somebody at the UAW convention said no, and brought down the house with his affirmation of international solidarity...
...No union is better situated for encouraging the organization of blacks in South Africa...
...And planning for the 21st century demands an international outlook...
...A large majority would not let its "brothers and sisters" forget that other unions— not above fixing elections or using ruffians and, in at least one recent case, committing murder—all enjoy the benefits of one member/one vote...
...New, highly automated, jointly owned plants are opening in the sunrise states...
...The union issued its own warnings: avoid South Dallas and Near East Dallas...
...It certainly is when you're scrambling for members from the service sector, in hospitals and museums and universities, where resistance resembles that of the industrial sector before 1935...
...The UAW doubts Reagan would make good on his threat to veto this legislation if it came to his desk, because by then he will be seeking to regain the salvageable part of his blue-collar constituency...
...domestic layoffs in the auto industry amounted to 236,702, and in the aerospace and agricultural implement industries to 60,000 layoffs...
...On this issue labor is as close to unanimity as it was long ago, and to our everlasting shame, on the Oriental exclusion laws...
...He said it in a speech that went unheralded and all but unreported...
...Workers cannot prosper at home on the backs of other workers who are mercilessly exploited abroad...
...Then came Nader...
...Labor has lobbied day and night, none more vigorously than the UAW, for restriction of imports from Japan...
...None could educate us better on this score, arguing as much from self-interest as from altruism...
...Therefore the second slogan: "Organize the Unemployed," an idea hardly heard since the Great Depression, when it got nowhere even though there were 25 million jobless Americans...
...They have been trained in the Reuther tradition...
...The UAW is no exception...
...just join with the jobless in alleviating their problems as well as our own...
...Not after Vietnam...
...Ronnie's Pals—Millionaires, Military, Multinationals...
...He or his affluent allies will nevertheless claim that no one laid a glove on him...
...The internal structure of a truly democratic union is intact...
...This disease precludes concern with freedom, a political necessity about whose infringement they now and then prattle...
...295...
...In Dallas, working men and women were admonished to remember a maxim of the Reuther generation: "Essential to maintaining our union's democratic tradition is an informed membership...
...One caught a glimpse of this vision that could not be entirely obscured by the popularity of protectionism, even in darkest Dallas...
...And further penetration of the public sector is more difficult than ever...
...senator not running for president," put it very simply to the convention: "If the Japanese won't buy our baseball bats we won't buy their cars...
...There was as much talk as there had been before the present crisis of government-labor-management collaboration, this time to stop the Japanese bastards from taking our bread away from us...
...How odd...
...What can that mean...
...The resolution was soundly defeated...
...Slogans are also instructive...
...He added that it was as important to protect 15 or 20 workers as it was to negotiate with GM...
...Public education to inform and enlighten such a citizenry doesn't exercise federal administrators...
...These people are seasoned unionists with much experience in collective bargaining...
...It is too literally true of too many people...
...Ronald Reagan says, "Blame it on Jimmy," or "Blame it on Jerry," or "Blame it on Lyndon," or "Blame it on Harry," or Zachary Taylor or Millard Fillmore...
...Take two...
...But neither generational nor racial nor sexual division split delegates who heatedly discussed constitutional matters...
...The worker's spouse and children were to be included, for Walter assumed that they too must understand what the labor movement is and how much more it could be...
...Doug Fraser, on May 15, reported 36 small UAW strikes then in progress...
...That the enormously expanded military budget will create few, if any, jobs comes as a surprise only to the uninformed...
...Import quotas did not stop them from joining hands with General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler redivivus (at the workers' and taxpayers' expense...
...That method does not appear to interest the unemployed this time...
...The fate of PATCO made that "perfectly clear," as they used to say...
...Who cares if it is the tornado season...
...We'll see...
...Not for the sake of El Salvador...
...And yet this witness to the events in Dallas, who grew up amid the Motown sounds of Walter Reuther, admiring them as much as he was repelled by those of Jimmy Hoffa, is deeply impressed with the UAW in transition...
...One, "Organize the Unorganized," is favored by many labor leaders who constantly repeat and seldom implement it...
...The consumer bought Japanese and other small foreign cars...
...When Ted Kennedy refused to be present so close to the 20th anniversary of his brother's assassination in this hospitable city, few could fault him...
...It will turn largely on whether the UAW is allowed to organize new factories in which neither partner to the international enterprise is enthusiastic about unions...
...Solidarity Day, September 19, 1981 in Washington, now is viewed as a massive indictment of Reagan's first eight and a half months in office...
...How could it be otherwise...
...And "at this point in time" as they still say, robotics and electronics, runaways and takeaways are simply ruinous to the old American working class...
...GIVEN A GLOBAL ECONOMY and the obsolescence of nation/states, does it make sense to pit country against country, worker against worker...
...Never mind...
...Why care more about schools than about the physical infrastructure (bridges, roads, whole cities) that is likewise no business of theirs...
...One shrinking segment of organized labor will do its little bit and agitate for government to do its task...
...so is further unemployment...
...Old plants are closing in the sunset states...
...The dominant attitude remains: rules are there to obey until a majority overturns them...
...Their views were once again aired with vehemence...
...Hours were devoted to a debate over an amendment perennially favored by a few locals...
...They know who's killing their movement...
...A fair—some would claim an inordinate—amount of time was given over to minority views...
...Came the VW from Germany...
...They support a one-member/one-vote system of elections instead of representative union democracy...
...OPEC...
...The signs are there...
...don't hail taxis...
...Abolish the Department of Education...
...Apparently, in Washington ignorance, like unemployment, is not a problem but a policy...
...Direct democracy of this kind for the Teamsters, the United Mine Workers, and the Steel Workers spelled no democracy at all...
...Not so with Walter's dream, which was to educate the worker for leadership...
...Is Doug Fraser whistling in the dark when he asserts that labor owes one debt to President Reagan...
...They rang through Convention Hall, its corridors and environs...
...Only World War II finally rescued them...
...In hard times (and these are very hard times, except for an elite that will celebrate the so-called recovery now taking place), industrial workers want job security and hope to attain it through passage of a "domestic content" bill that stands some chance of passage through the Congress...
...Fraternal relations of this kind provide the nucleus for a long-range plan to raise living standards abroad instead of lowering them in the United States and Canada...
...but they did not, and given their age could not, go through the deeply formative experiences of the generation that built the UAW in the 1930s...
...Apart from the selection of a peculiar site, this country's best union did itself proud...
...and disaster in Detroit...
...The American consumers would buy only behemoths, argued management, with plenty of chrome and lots of mechanical defects...
...294 The new leaders come to office with a strong tradition behind them, but also with a weight of problems and difficulties that is enormous...
...And theirs are worse...
...No union is more alert to the use of sweat labor in many parts of the Third World...
...Walter Reuther died in a plane crash en route to Black Lake, Michigan, where 13 years ago the UAW established its Family Education Center...
...The spirit, the organization, the tradition are all so palpably strong that they can stand a touch or two of mediocrity...
...More to the point of UAW succession and why it's not to worry about: "Since our last convention, 20,000 rank-and-file activists have passed through our leadership institutes...
...Let our children pray their way to knowledge...
...But their cars are here, capturing an ever-larger part of the domestic market...
...They will look after their own while the public schools crumble...
...Only 18 percent of the work force is organized...
...Man, this is gun-totin' country...
...Well, says Fraser, His Administration has demonstrated that the bread box and the ballot box are inseparably linked...
...Nothing old-hat...
...Others, however ravenous for reading matter, were able to sidestep the world's most famous Book Depository...
...Corporate profitability in two countries is assured...
...The clarion call for opposition to ideologues who have failed on every front can be heard equally well from union and nonunion, employed and unemployed types...
...Pretty soon, Nissan, Toyota, and Datsun were here...
...This last official pronouncement of a fine president who neither postures nor sways with the wind is proof enough that the sons of Valentine Reuther built well...
...Organize the unemployed...
...Doug Fraser now has every reason to boast that more than a quartermillion UAW members and their families, along with other trade unionists and visitors, have taken advantage of the facility's training programs...
...Some of us went our advisers one better: we avoided almost all of Dallas, rode on buses, and didn't so much as smile at a waitress...
...An informed electorate might not hurt either (and 291 Owen Bieber, the newly elected UAW president, is unlikely to forget that...
...No one in an Administration "of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich," as Fraser accurately dubbed it in his farewell address, has the slightest idea of how to preserve freedom by stressing simple, let alone political and cultural, "basics...
...Hard bargaining is ahead...
...But reactionaries may well gasp at the leadership's next plan—a possible large-scale, one-day strike to focus national attention on the tragedy of unemployment...
...Not that there was much evidence of it on the floor, where new blood mixed with old blood, and no one was any the worse for it...
...The bitter truth of this century is too often reducible to this: that in dreams begin irresponsibilities...
...The culprit, Ronald Wilson Reagan, never stopped getting his lumps...
...For they are infected with Reaganitis...
...And that's all some of us did...
...Management would not budge till it was too late—then manufacturers and workers joined hands, beseeching the patriotic consumer to "Buy American...
...The mid-term elections have added 24 humane congressmen to the House roster, and the Chicago mayoral elections a black mayor—all with effective UAW campaigning as additional proof...
...a Middle Eastern war...
...Undeterred by the memory of Smoot, Hawley, and Hoover, workers denounce free trade as a fraud and take truly "fair trade" to their bosom...
...Their suffering, poverty, untended illness, humiliation and demoralization are too obvious...
...These proceedings were, as always, exemplary...
...The outgoing president triumphantly announced success at Caterpillar after a seven-month strike without detailing the terms of that success or mentioning closures and failures elsewhere, notably at International Harvester...
...Maybe Dallas was the right place after all—and maybe the ILO should convene in Beirut...
...They go together, and where their absence takes us is suggested by recent UN figures, which, according to a recent issue of Daedalus, showed a shockingly low literacy figure for the United States...
...Retirees retain power in this union...
...Douglas Fraser's final report, The State of Our Union, condensed from two weighty volumes that deserve to be studied with care, is a superb document...
...And so it went, with passion and reason alternating among delegates who did not need to fear that the chairman's gavel would arbitrarily silence them...
...Organize the unemployed as well as the employed to "Fight Back Against Reagan's War on the Workers"— yet another slogan, this one under the heading of "Citizenship...
...The Detroit News did quote an anonymous old-timer who referred to a coming wave of mediocrity...
...That a union should just now be so heavily committed to education and not only in one sylvan setting but in a diversified and creative program is more than remarkable...
...Who killed American labor...
...the UAW is actively involved in that struggle...
...About the new UAW leadership—Owen Bieber, the president, Ray Majerus, the secretary-treasurer, and Steve Yokich, head of the Ford department —it is too soon to speak with any certainty...
...Plant Closings—a Capital Crime...
...To speak of the "dispossessed" is no longer a rhetorical flourish...
...How can that be...
...Now the union is willing to settle for a piece of the action...
...As of May 2, U.S...
...Payrolls—Not Welfare Rolls...
...Blue-collar disenchantment with right-wing Republicanism is all but complete...
...No matter...
...How posters and placards are worded tells part of the story: Jobs, Peace, Human Rights...
...Black Lake was designed to teach certain skills but, more important, to foster a sense of community—and responsibility...
...Thus the excoriations of Japan, which are easy to elicit from Americans...
...One can only wish them well...
...The founding generation was represented at this convention by an impressive group—all of whom were affected by the Reuther style of unionism and some of whom still regard themselves as democratic socialists...
...Only everything else...
...They debate and they vote, and they are treated as respectfully as newcomers...
...No one steeped in the Reuther philosophy, with its democratic and socialist roots, hesitates to use a word like planning even if neoliberals recoil from it with nearly as much horror as neoconservatives...
...At the same time it has kept an eye on the future...
...Victor Reuther spent much of his life cultivating that contact...
...He identified the common enemy, rapacious corporations the world over that, unchecked by capitalist and communist, left and right regimes, can do us all in...
...You would think the "Yellow Peril" was upon us again...
...No all-encompassing union...
...Fortunately, contact with labor outside our borders has always been the UAW's strong suit...
...On this occasion, 5,000 UAW people, half of them delegates, have assembled from every part of North America for their 27th Constitutional Convention...
...Stop Job Hazards—Health Is Not for Sale...
...No one listened to Reuther when he proposed, as long ago as 1947, that the auto industry manufacture small cars...
...It bodes well for the future that in so many other ways seems too disheartening for serious contemplation...
...SO WHAT IS TO WORRY ABOUT...
...Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, "the only U.S...
...The House majority leader, Jim Wright of Fort Worth, one of several political guests and a Texas liberal to boot, best explained Le Cowboy's technique: Harry Truman said, "The buck stops here...
...Today, however, the shibboleth has special urgency...
...To no avail...
...he may be right...
...The Japanese labor leader pledged his assistance to the UAW...
Vol. 30 • July 1983 • No. 3
