Rebuilding the UAW

June 18, 2010

You have to wonder what Walter Reuther would think, if he could come back today and see what has become of the union he did so much to build all those years ago.

You have to wonder even more what he would advise his latest successor, newly elected United Auto Workers President Bob King, to do. The UAW held its convention in Detroit this week for the first time in a long time; an embattled union in the battered city where it and its core industry started long ago.

Forty years ago last month, the man who did more than anyone to make that union, flew up to Black Lake, the union’s recreation complex in northern Michigan. They had built it for the workers he had led from poverty into the middle class. Reuther, who saw himself as one of them, didn’t seem to spend a lot of time in introspection.

He was proud to be the lowest-paid union president in America. But if he had been thinking about his life on that May evening, he would have had the right to be a little self-satisfied. When the UAW had been founded in 1935, you could get fired for trying to join.

Workers had few protections. If they got hurt, they lost their jobs. Paid vacations and health insurance didn’t exist. But the union Reuther helped build changed all that. He’d been beaten up at the Battle of the Overpass and shot in his own kitchen.

His brother lost an eye, and some comrades had been killed. But the UAW had hung in there, won the contracts and powered Michigan’s workers into the great middle class.

They built the weapons that won World War II, and then built the cars and trucks that made the good life possible. The UAW was near its all-time high of 1.6 million members that evening.

They had arrived. Sadly, Reuther never did that night; his pilot missed the runway, and everyone on board was killed.

Four decades later, he might find what has happened to his beloved union hard to believe. The UAW has less than a quarter of its peak strength. It counts only 355,000 members, fewer than a third of whom work for the no-longer-so-Big Three.

A third work for suppliers and auxiliary companies, and another third aren’t in the auto industry at all. Some are health care workers, some part-time college professors.

And that is where Bob King sees his union’s future — organizing outside the auto industry. He told an interviewer this week that he thought the UAW’s best chance for “really high growth” is in higher education and the casino industry.

That may sound desperate to some, who remember when General Motors lost focus in the 1980s by diversifying into financial services and other non-automotive areas.

But Harley Shaiken, a leading labor economist, is cautiously optimistic. “I think Bob King is a very capable, even visionary leader,” he told me. “These have been troubling times, but I think it is a moment of real possibility for the UAW,” said Shaiken, a Detroit native who is now a professor at the University of California/Berkeley specializing in labor issues.

Shaiken thinks branching out may be just what the doctor ordered. “What do state workers in Lansing have in common with auto workers in Ohio? They both want good wages and stable wages and benefits.” Shaiken thinks reminding the world and itself that is what unions are all about might help the UAW gain focus.

The industry and its unions have been going through a period that in some ways was like the Great Depression, if not as severe, said Shaiken, who was reportedly considered for labor secretary.

The conventional wisdom about unions was wrong then, he notes, and could be wrong now. He thinks the UAW may even find a way to be successful organizing the “transplant” factories that Japanese automakers have built in this country.

“The transplants are going to be squeezed in unexpected ways by the global economy. They can no longer count on the safety valve of continued growth.”

Harley Shaiken was quick to add that there’s no guarantee the UAW will be successful. One drawback that Bob King faces is that he is already 63, the same age Walter Reuther was the night he died.

That means that under UAW rules, he will be limited to a single four-year term, not a lot of time to figure out how to survive and prosper in an era of independent contractors and global markets.

Doug Fraser was the last UAW president to have known Reuther well. Shortly before he died in 2008, I asked Fraser what Walter Reuther would have done, faced with today’s problems.

He said he didn’t know; that nobody could know. But he said he knew that Walter would have been fighting as hard and as shrewdly as he could for the working man. Today, old-timers have to be hoping there’s a little touch of Reuther in Bob King.

Veteran journalist and national Emmy Award winner Jack Lessenberry teaches at Wayne State University, serves as Michigan Radio’s senior political analyst and writes regularly for several publications. He also serves as The Toledo Blade’s writing coach and ombudsman and is host of the weekly television show Deadline Now on WGTE-TV in Toledo.