There's a moment during a 1958 interview with famed TV journalist Mike Wallace when then-UAW President Walter Reuther is pressed to defend a controversial union proposal.
It was an idea, Wallace said, that had outraged the Detroit Three automakers — Ford Motor Co., General Motors and Chrysler. But Reuther, a towering figure in U.S. labor history then and now, spoke like a man who saw the future, or at least some of it.
Reuther told Wallace that the auto companies would one day brag about profit-sharing just like they did with the pensions the union had to fight for. Profit-sharing would expand purchasing power, which Reuther said was the key to America's economic future.
UAW leader Walter Reuther took a few minutes off from negotiating to speak at Cadillac Square, Sept. 4, 1961.
“I predict they’ll talk about this one of these days in glowing terms,” Reuther said.
While the carmakers may have changed their views on pensions, which are again being championed today by the union, they eventually did get behind the idea of profit-sharing. The compensation model based on company earnings — meaning worker bonuses — didn't become part of UAW contracts until decades later at a time when the industry was facing serious challenges. Today's UAW demands also have sparked dire economic predictions and pushback by some even as supporters say they are long overdue.
In this year’s contract talks, the automakers have repeatedly pointed to those profit-sharing checks — which ranged this year from $9,176 at Ford to $14,670 at Chrysler-parent Stellantis — to argue that employees have shared in record company profits in recent years.
The United Auto Workers union counters that those checks, which don’t go to every autoworker, are not enough to offset union concessions made over time — or for the skyrocketing cost of living in recent years.
Workers at the Chevrolet Assembly Plant No. 1 in Hamtramck leave after their shift on Sept. 15, 1970, uncertain how long it will be before their next day of work. More than 175,000 GM workers struck for over 100 days and halted production at 84 GM plants.
The views on profit-sharing in the auto industry in the 1950s, a time when prosperity is now viewed as the theme of the day even though the economic picture was more mixed, show how the connections of the current moment reflect different parts of the 88-year-old union’s history. Today's so-called Stand Up Strike against the Detroit Three hits the one-month mark on Sunday, with a strategy that the union and its president, Shawn Fain, have connected to the earliest days of the union, although with a twist. At about four weeks so far, the Stand Up Strike certainly exceeds many UAW strikes of the past, some only a day or two long, but it's well short of the longest strikes, which have lasted months.
The name itself is a nod to the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936 and 1937 that garnered the union recognition by GM and helped lay the groundwork for the union to eventually represent workers at Chrysler and a few years later at Ford, despite aggressive resistance. That aggression was exemplified by what came to be known as the Battle of the Overpass in 1937 with Ford security attacking union organizers and providing the bloodied photographs of Reuther and others.
Workers at two GM plants in Flint began a sit-down strike the last week of December 1936. The strike ended on Feb. 11, 1937, with General Motors recognizing the UAW as having the right to represent workers.
Erik Loomis, a professor of labor history at the University of Rhode Island, said he sees echoes of the past in what the union is doing today.
“I do think that the Flint strike is relevant and, you know, Shawn Fain has talked a lot about Flint. … That foundational moment is pretty central to the way the UAW is framing this, this action in a way that I don't think it has been in, in quite a while,” said Loomis, author of the book, “A History of America in Ten Strikes.” “I think that although economic circumstances are very different than they were in the mid-‘30s, obviously, you know, we're at a moment of very high income inequality.”
Times were tough on the shop floor in the 1930s. As the UAW notes on its website, “the conditions in the GM plants were deplorable. Workers weren’t allowed bathroom breaks, and many soiled themselves while making parts.” These days, workers might not experience the same level of deprivation, but autoworkers, including the thousands of temporary or supplemental workers, report a demanding environment where they are often forced to work much longer than a 40-hour week that separates them from family and home more than they’d like.
A worker in Fisher Body, Plant No. 1 is back at work again after being off for 43 days while a sit-down strike was in progress.
Autoworkers, like much of the rest of the workforce, hear the reports of CEO compensation hundreds of times what the average worker makes at a point of high inflation when many workers feel they’ve been asked to sacrifice too much, and they might not find the union’s message and demands as unreasonable as the companies and Wall Street analysts say they are.
“I think that a lot of people are sort of seeing this UAW strike — and here I'm thinking, you know, really throughout the nation, not just people connected to the auto industry — as one of these kinds of moments in which they are really cheering for the UAW, and cheering for these workers in part because they're seeing it as kind of a proxy for their own lives and are … hoping for a world that’s more equitable for themselves as well,” Loomis said.
Steven Greenhouse, who was a longtime labor writer at The New York Times and currently is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, explained that this moment for the union connects to multiple periods even as it diverges from others.
“Several things strike me. One, it's in ways that throw back to the original UAW, the 1930s, which was much more militant, much more in your face, much more willing to stand up and fight. Second, it's a big break from what came in the 10 or 20 years before when the UAW was less militant. You know, it was in a position when concessions were demanded,” he said.
Marching 12 abreast, a policeman estimated 3,000 men and women circled the General Motors Building in Detroit on July 7, 1939, in a demonstration designed to impress GM officials who were in negotiation with the UAW-CIO. The demonstration was organized as part of the strike of tool and die workers in 12 GM shops.
Those concessions, many of them rooted in the Great Recession and the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler in 2009, have been a major part of the message from the union: Members sacrificed to save the companies, which have rebounded remarkably over the last decade, and it’s time for the companies to pay that back. Or as Fain has often said, union members deserve their fair share.
Resuming cost-of-living adjustments, reclaiming pensions, ending wage tiers and boosting wages are all part of the union’s push. The companies counter that they’ve made generous offers that would reward employees, but they warn that the cost of giving in to all of the union’s demands could jeopardize an already uncertain future where vehicle electrification rewrites the industry playbook. Analysts are quick to note that Ford, GM and Stellantis, owner of Jeep, Ram, Chrysler, Dodge and Fiat, don’t dominate the U.S. new vehicle marketplace like the Detroit Three once did and have plenty of nonunion competition.
Those messages of warning haven’t found much of an audience at Solidarity House.
The union and its leadership are instead sounding more like the UAW of old, clearly by design.
Standing in the bed of a Ford F-150, UAW president Shawn Fain speaks to the crowd of strikers at the parking lot of the UAW Solidarity House on Jefferson Avenue in Detroit on Friday, Sept. 29, 2023 during a rally.
“I think one could say five, 10, 15 years ago, the UAW (was) very much playing defense and now it's, you know, it's like feeling its oats and is playing offense again, and Shawn Fain, I would say is easily the most … confrontational, toughest, militant UAW leader in at least a generation,” said Greenhouse, who moderated several candidate debates during the UAW’s first direct elections that brought Fain and other leaders to power this year in the union. “He very much reminds one of the great Walter Reuther. I mean, OK, so, no, he's not the visionary that Walter Reuther is, but … he's willing to really fight, stand up and fight and rally people and, and, go out and have a serious strike.”
The union leadership's strategy, however, is not without critics.
“While we can all agree the hardworking and valuable union-represented workers for the Detroit Three have earned a pay increase, the overly aggressive tactics and demands by this union leadership place the state’s economy in serious peril and even risk the competitiveness of the U.S. auto industry," according to a statement from Sandy Baruah, president and CEO of the Detroit Regional Chamber. "Current Detroit Three wage rates are already the most generous in the global automotive industry. There is a very real limit to what the manufacturers can agree to and still produce vehicles in Michigan and the U.S. Now is past the time to get serious, get real and get an agreement.”
Although the UAW’s message now coincides with and benefits from a much more active U.S. labor movement as exemplified by increased strike activity and interest in organizing, the union’s leadership came to power on a pledge to separate itself from the more recent past, one marked by the lengthy corruption scandal that sent two ex-UAW presidents to prison. As he was running to unseat incumbent Ray Curry, Fain railed against what he called company unionism, which fostered the kind of relationship he said that made the union more of a partner to the companies than a champion for its workers.
UAW President Shawn Fain speaks to workers picketing at a General Motors facility in Belleville on Sept. 26 during a stop in Michigan by President Joe Biden. The UAW's approach to talks with the Detroit Three and in the union's messaging are reminiscent of earlier periods in the union's history.
Fain not only connected that approach to the atmosphere that fed the scandal, but he argued that the union’s failure to show that it could offer a better way forward for workers through good contracts left it with nothing to offer in places it has long struggled to organize.
“You look at history, when this union started, it started out of the Depression. People joined the union and started organizing like wildfire because they saw a better way of life. They saw a better standard of living. We used to set the standard. We don’t set the standard any more,” Fain told the Free Press for an article in January. “When you go to Nissan or Toyota or Hyundai now, they look at us and they look at themselves. Our members hire in as temps, theirs hire in as temps. … They look at what we offer and what they get, and it’s the same thing, so where’s the incentive? We have to bargain better for our people.”
Despite the way Fain and the union have sought to highlight the union’s struggles in its earliest days, Greenhouse said he sees parallels with another period in the history of the union and the country, shortly after the end of World War II, an era today that we might not associate with unionism.
Walter Reuther, then vice president of the UAW, speaks to pickets grouped around the sound truck in front of the Chevrolet Gear and Axle Plant in Detroit, Mich., Nov. 23, 1945.
The UAW launched what became a 113-day strike against GM in 1945.
Greenhouse, reflecting on how the past informs the present moment for the UAW, said that set the stage for gains in later contracts.
“I would analogize it most to right after World War II, I think, and greater worker militancy, you know, strong union leadership at the time,” he said.
Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Become a subscriber.
