Walter Reuther
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Template:Cleanup-date Walter Philip Reuther (September 1, 1907 – May 10, 1970) was an American labor leader.
Reuther was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, the son of a socialist brewery worker who had immigrated from Germany. In his entire career he was close to his brothers and co-workers Victor Reuther and Roy Reuther. He worked for Ford, then worked 1933-35 in an auto plant at Gorky in the Soviet Union. While a committed socialist, he never became a Communist. He later claimed that he disapproved of the repressive Stalinist regime, but his reports from Russia and his lectures after returning home were enthusiastically supportive. Thus at the end of the trip he wrote, "the atmosphere of freedom and security, shop meetings with their proletarian industrial democracy; all these things make an inspiring contrast to what we know as Ford wage slaves in Detroit. What we have experienced here has reeducated us along new and more practical lines." [Lichtenstein, Most Dangerous Man p 44] With their American passports Walter and Victor Reuther were able to leave the Soviet Union in 1935; most of the other foreign workers were sent to the Gulag. Back in Detroit the three brothers all joined the new United Auto Workers (UAW). Reuther, who was unemployed at the time, was never a member of the rank-and-file, but jumped immediately into union politics.
In 1936 he became president of tiny local 174 (with 100 members), which on paper had responsibility for 100,000 auto workers on the west side of Detroit, Michigan. He had a highly publicized confrontation with Ford security forces on May 26, 1937. By this time, thanks to the sit-down strikes, UAW membership had exploded and Local 174 was a power inside the UAW. He worked with the left-wing Unity Caucus (which included the powerful Communist groups) to defeat the conservative president Homer Martin. As a senior organizer Reuther helped win major strikes for union recognition against General Motors in 1940 and Ford in 1941.
After Pearl Harbor, Reuther strongly supported the war effort and refused to tolerate wildcat strikes that might disrupt munitions production. He led a 113-day strike against General Motors in 1945-1946; it only partially succeeded. He never did receive the power he wanted to inspect company books or have a say in management, but he achieved increasingly lucrative wage and benefits contracts. In 1946 he narrowly defeated R. J. Thomas for the UAW presidency, and soon he had purged the UAW of all Communist and left-wing elements. He was active in the CIO umbrella as well, taking the lead in expelling eleven Communist-dominated unions from the CIO in 1949.
As a prominent figure in the anti-Communist left, he was a founder of the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. In 1949 he led the CIO delegation to the London conference that set up the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in opposition to the Communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions. He had left the Socialist party in 1939, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s was a leading spokesman for liberal interests in the CIO and in the Democratic party.
Reuther delivered contracts for his membership through brilliant negotiating tactics. He would pick one of the Big Three and if it did not offer concessions he would strike it and let the other two absorb its sales. Besides high hourly wage rates and paid vacations, the benefits included employer-funded pensions (beginning in 1950 at Chrysler), medical insurance (beginning at GM in 1950), and supplementary unemployment benefits (beginning at Ford in 1955). The labor contracts made automobiles more expensive, but since there was very little competition from foreign brands in his lifetime, the consumer paid high prices, the workers took home high wages, and the companies made high profits.
Toward the end of his life, however, when he took the UAW out of the AFL-CIO for a short-lived alliance with the Teamsters Union and marched with the United Farm Workers in Delano, California, Reuther seemed to be dissatisfied, looking for the ability to challenge the injustices that had made the union movement so vital in the 1930s. He strongly supported the Civil Rights movement; at the same time, commentators like former NAACP Labor Director Herbert Hill have sharply questioned the overall record of the UAW on civil rights under Reuther. Although critical of the Vietnam War, he supported Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in 1968. He was instrumental in mobilizing UAW resources to minimize the threat that George Wallace would win more than 10% of union votes. (He won about 9% in the North.) Reuther died in a plane crash in 1970 on route to a UAW summer resort near Pellston, Michigan.
He was included in TIME magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
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References
Secondary sources
- Boyle, Kevin. The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (1995)
- Goode, Bill. Infighting in the UAW: The 1946 Election and the Ascendancy of Walter Reuther (1994)
- Kornhauser, Arthur et al. When Labor Votes: A Study of Auto Workers (1956)
- Lichtenstein, Nelson. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (1995)
- Zieger, Robert H. The CIO, 1935-1955 (1995)
Primary sources
- Christman, Henry M. ed. Walter P. Reuther: Selected Papers (1961)