THE UAW AT 50 STILL GOING STRONG

...400 The flaw in the union, however, is not paranoia or loss of heart or of the good sense that has usually guided it, but rather time, overload, and the assaults on it by various enemies and "friends," all of which leave it focused on survival at a time when it needs to get a grip on management's prerogative to cut jobs, close plants, manage badly, invest poorly —as well as some way to grapple with the crushing power of American corporations to buy elections, manipulate public opinion, pollute our living space, play dangerous war games, tilt riches and power ever upward, and scorn the need for planned world economic prosperity and stability...

...VICTOR REUTHER'S FALLING OUT with UAW leadership began with Walter's death and Victor's subsequent opposition to Leonard Woodcock's presidential candidacy...

...At the infamous battle of the overpass at the Rouge in May 1937, very near the UAW's birth date, Ford thugs seriously injured a score of UAW organizers, including Walter Reuther...

...Moreover, when the visions are labeled "unAmerican" as they have been by the press and inquisitorial committees, the public reputation of 399 unionism is clouded and its power reduced...

...The debates and commitments are missed, disruptive and sectarian as they often were...

...It cannot go it alone...

...The rule is not unreasonable since it is hardly fair to expect a board member to walk confidently into a convention only to be suddenly challenged by someone from his own staff...

...In 1985 the UAW's income was $422.8 million, of which some $85 5 million went to the strike fund, raising that fund's balance to about $680 million but, in case of a strike, the cost of benefits for GM workers alone would now run about $308 million per month, nearly half the fund's balance...

...Most UAW officers produce upwardly mobile offspring...

...To date the largest domestic obstacle to union growth and political clout has been the almost impenetrable anti-unionism of the South, so the Board had a strong point, one supported by a solid delegate vote at the convention...

...Stanley Aronowitz, for example, contributor to the reams of "New Left" critiques of unions, which helped turn a whole generation of leftleaning youth away from unions, has at last discovered some virtue even in Gompersism...

...but somehow they have pulled through and undoubtedly will again, though not easily...

...These struggles have changed, with some loss of public interest...

...Other UAW membership losses have been suffered in auto and parts, which now make up 68 percent of membership...

...Canadian wage rates, despite past U.S...

...320 people contested for 19 offices on the local's executive board...

...The departure from the union of some 140,000 Canadians is saddening, since they added a strong social democratic and international tone...

...We tend to personify big organizations, focus too much on their CEOs, hence the rash of Iacoccatype ads that link corporations with the personality of their top officers...

...Times change...

...So far only concessions have resulted, first in existing contracts, where losses have often been recouped, and now, it is charged, in contracts for plants yet unborn...

...in the old days, the kindest version would have been "getting into bed with the bosses...

...Agricultural implement has shrunk to about 6 percent of the total, while aerospace, 7 percent of UAW membership, has grown, along with the "other" category, which is now 19 percent...

...that the contested contract terms will not spread...

...But the new siege tactics have had a deadly impact on industrial relations...

...The union, especially because it is generally democratic, is a huge ganglia of politics and power relations, involving some inevitable dirty tricks, yielding far too little lingering recognition, and producing far more losers than winners in election contests...

...The board defended itself with a rule agreed to by the whole caucus (of which Tucker was part) that a staffer who runs for the board must declare at least ninety days before the convention and take a leave for that period in order to campaign...

...But neither did they use brass knuckles or steal votes...

...Thus, the major, though unscheduled, issue at the 1986 triennial constitutional convention in California June 1-6 was the UAWGM Saturn agreement, which involves building the small GM Saturn in Tennessee under a union contract that departs in some contested ways from the industry pattern and that, its critics say, makes wage and work-rule concessions that may spread to master agreements...

...The organizing campaign resulted this year in the creation of the second largest local among the union's 1,300—Local 6000, made up of 22,000 Michigan public service workers, about half clericals (90 percent female) and half human service workers (50 percent female...

...All five of Owen's children work in the shop and are UAW members, activists, and some of them local officers...

...Like Walter, Bieber's background is Germanic and like Walter, the "boy scout" as we called him, he is basically a smalltown person, optimistic, lacking any cynicism, rather puritanical, and worldly only in a political sense...

...Public interest seems to feed on struggle and scandal...

...What has changed is less the union than its context: the heavy siege laid on unionism by its opponents...

...The war is an old one...

...the vote, which may yet be reversed, was appallingly close...

...Woodcock's later crucial role in nominating Jimmy Carter (unintentionally netting Woodcock the Chinese ambassadorship but unionism only setbacks) did not heal the breach, despite Woodcock's good work in the UAW and public office...

...What is best about the UAW is that its shape and leadership are as much bottom-up as top-down...

...Local 6000 makes a strange mate for what has been, off and on, the union's largest local, the rough-and-tumble Ford Rouge Local 600...

...Getting it is the second big problem...

...At the convention, a young woman with a sectarian flair rose to charge the union with having a "symbiotic relationship with the company...

...Incumbents can be ousted and union leadership can become precarious enough to produce some cases of paranoia...

...Perhaps most special about him is his deep rootedness in the working class...

...Some of labor's critics, looking out at the vast void on the left and the malignant growths on the right, have softened their attacks on unions...

...American unions, less fortunate than their European counterparts in having American capitalism as their adversary, have always been heavily besieged...

...Even those supporting the incumbent seemed to agree that Tucker's election would improve UAW leadership...

...Having closely tracked the UAW for more than forty years of its fifty-year history, through two auto worker parents, three years on a Dodge main assembly line, a decade of working for it, and a husband with thirty-five years as member and staffer, I am convinced that the spirit of Walter Reuther is still alive in the UAW and that, despite some ups and downs, the union, which celebrates its fiftieth birthday this year, has held to the standards of performance set during the long Reuther years, though Walter's brother, Victor, disagrees...

...GM and Ford have held fairly constant, with GM alone at nearly a third of all members...

...Walter Reuther probably would have resisted their departure, unlike brother Victor who, again using the "concessions" issue, actively encouraged the Canadians to leave...

...Debates in the union over concessions are real, legitimate, and healthy, but they cannot ignore the obvious: that unions strike best from positions of power, that is, on the up-cycle of the industry, not the down...

...Though not a convention delegate, Victor Reuther joined the opposition to the agreement (and to a few other executive board positions), charging that it cannot be initially ratified by Saturn workers since they have not yet been hired, and also that it introduces merit pay, reduces job classifications, and moves the union back...

...That, in a big nutshell, is the problem, one that lies in an advanced case of economic autocracy, the cure for which requires some rapid movement toward economic democracy...

...Also unnoticed in the Moberg piece was the defeat of another incumbent at that convention by a staffer, John Flynn, who abided by the caucus rule and was subjected to barely a murmur of board protest...

...Nor should they detract from the UAW's remarkably successful record, against heavy odds, in holding its membership at more than one million (from a recent low of 920,000 in 1983 and a high of 1.5 million in 1969), and in rescuing countless jobs in auto that otherwise would have gone down the deindustrialization tube...

...When Woodcock won board nomination against Fraser by one vote, Victor fell into disfavor...

...THE FACTIONS AROSE FROM IDEOLOGICAL more than power struggles, and as such may never return...

...Owen Bieber's exposure to social ideologies has apparently come much more from his devout Catholicism than from ideas on the secular left, yet in some ways he resembles Walter Reuther more than his predecessors, Doug Fraser and Leonard Woodcock, both of them ex-"altar boys" heavily exposed to socialist ideas...

...The UAW—a private sector, largely auto, blue-collar and male union—has been organizing "others" who tend to be public sector, white-collar, and female...

...Instead, the Moberg report, "Why unions wane: a UAW report" sees only wrongdoing: interference by the board with the board candidacy of Jerry Tucker, a highly regarded, innovative staffer who lost by a margin of two-tenths of a vote...

...Compared to pauperized left groups, the UAW is wildly affluent—as indeed are most unions in the Western world compared with even their most successful political parties—but compared with the corporations they must engage, their assets belong in piggy banks...

...While embattled more than ever, the union no longer stands outcast and starving, and the factionalism that once drove UAW activists is, except for some forlorn remnants, a thing of the past...

...Perhaps only those who have felt the high of working for such a cause, in such a dynamic and influential movement, can know the pain of separation...

...The virtues of such factionalism, however, were also vices for, as Sam Gompers saw, short-term goals can be shared far more easily than long-term visions, and internal conflicts can tear a union apart...

...The "other" is a hot organizing arena, and some startling victories have been scored there...

...The Reuther era in the UAW was expansionist, organizing new industries, pioneering socialist-inspired contract demands, and generally prevailing over assaults of employers...

...THE UNION'S EXECUTIVE BOARD insists that the agreement is a good one, the best in the South...

...but as President Owen Bieber told the convention, after deploring such conduct, "The only place you can find a million people and no corruption is in the cemetery...

...They have pushed the UAW back, forced it to contract some operations, and changed what was once an annoying leakage—the runaway shop —handled in the union by a small "competitive shop" department, into a massive hemorrhage of plant closings, overseas investment, and invasion by anti-union foreign industry...

...The ten top officers of the new local include four women...

...and board members who were against him, mainly because they dislike seeing incumbents so easily opposed, did not wear kid gloves...

...401...

...Although Reuther remains strongly devoted to the UAW, he is actively critical of the current leadership and the estrangement continues, as it does with too many others...

...At times the union bled from internal conflict, but it also enjoyed greater growth during that period than at any other time in its history...

...Of course, there is much to criticize in union behavior, but when looking at the UAW convention, for instance, one might notice, as David Moberg in In These Times did not, that almost every resolution considered (even on foreign policy), every speaker chosen, almost every opinion expressed might have come as well from a Democratic Socialists of America convention, and that moreover the convention procedures were, if anything, more democratic than DSA's...

...Fortunately, the bottom-up flow in the UAW, and the familiarity of voters with candidates, mitigates the worst of personality cultism, but some longing for heroes and messiahs, where mere good examples should suffice, persists even there...

...Local 6000 came into being less violently but with no less union rejoicing over a victory fitting its fiftieth anniversary...

...that successful precedents exist for such prenatal agreements (as in the Toyota plant at Fremont, Califor398 nia)—and of greatest importance, that the agreement gives the union its first big toehold in the "right to work" state of Tennessee...

...The passionate and persuasive oratory is not there but it may be coming, as indicated in Bieber's spirited defense of the Saturn agreement and his adroit handling of his first convention as president...

...Unionism has always needed to protect its political and patriotic flank in conflicts with employers...

...They sharpened wits and skills, and for a time turned attention away from shop grievances and toward larger issues and fuller visions of what a society should be like...

...Struggle has been the union's daily fare, involving in the old days not only companies and locals but the union's warring factions...

...Both sides played some fairly hard ball...

...With businesses, that may be all there is, but the bottom-up thrust of most unions requires a deeper look at other layers and also at the cult of personality and celebrity that is overwhelming us all...

...concessions, given present currency exchange rates, lag some $3 an hour behind those of the U.S...

...On its side, the union cannot afford the separation or loss of any former or prospective support...

...Some of the latter has afflicted the UAW recently, most notably in the form of kickbacks from compensation lawyers to one board member (now banished from office...