What Would Walter Reuther Do?

There is an interesting article in the Sunday Times Magazine on the effect of auto shutdowns on the the Black Middle Class. Their route to the middle class, believe it or not, was through the assembly lines of the Big Three in Detroit. Now it is disappearing. I wonder what some of those radical union leaders of the thirties and forties would do in the face of this calamity.

Take Walter Reuther for instance. He was a Social Democrat to his core. As the President of the UAW from ’46 until his untimely death in an airplane crash in 1970, he was probably the most outstanding labor leader in the country. He firmly believed in a healthy industry that would be able to pay its employees (his union members) a living wage and give them decent working conditions.

Okay, so here’s my guess. Reuther would have called on all the unions with workers in the auto industry to unite around a common platform to save our jobs by saving the industry. He understood very well that his members’ security was directly related to the health of the industry. As soon as the cracks in GM’s finances began to appear, he would have called a national conference to save our jobs by saving the company. Would he have held the custodians of GM accountable? Indeed he would have, and that might have lead to much needed change in GM leadership back when it really mattered.

Some years ago the UAW GM Division under the leadership of Irving Bluestone, like Reuther a committed Social Democrat, initiated the creation of the Saturn Division of GM. It was an experiment in worker self-managing work teams. Its early success had Saturn buyers going to the plant to receive their cars as they came off the assembly lines so they could thank the workers for their effort in making an excellent automobile.

At the time, I was up to my ears working with companies on empowering their employees to take increasing responsibility for their work. Saturn was our model. So what happened that now puts Saturn on the GM bankruptcy dump list? It was sometime around 2005 that the GM leadership decided to just let Saturn revert to the classic “command and obey” style management that prevails pretty much in GM today. I believe there was simply not the kind of committed leadership in the UAW or GM to keep the Saturn experiment going.

All this speculation leads me back to my notion that at least some of our present economic sickness derives from the fact that we no longer have a strong Labor Movement in this country. Those workers who are losing their path to the middle class (black, white or otherwise) simply have no organization with any real clout to stand with them. It is interesting to look at what happened with the same industry in Germany. There the Metal Workers Union have permitted limited outsourcing, but have refused to let the companies do so at the expense of plant closings. Could that have happened here? I believe that with a powerful enough Labor Movement to put a couple of million workers in the streets to defend their jobs, their very livelihoods, that could have changed the outcomes.

F.D.R. had that kind of Labor Movement. It is Obama’s big disadvantage that he doesn’t.

Thanks Kate. N.H.W.Y.