Walter Reuther: The Flint Strike and The Mike Wallace Interview
Happy Labor Day 2022
Walter Reuther, left, and Richard Frankensteen, after being beaten bloody by Ford Motor Company's anti-union thugs at the "Battle of the Overpass," an incident depicted in the new documentary Brothers on the Line. (Wayne State University Reuther Library Archives)
[ Crossposted from Ours For the Taking: Social Democracy in the 20th Century ]
Labor Day 2022. This is a pretty remarkable Labor Day. As I write United and Delta pilots are picketing, while rail workers and UPS workers are both on the verge of major strikes. If those three groups of workers went on strike simultaneously, it would cripple the country in the rawest demonstration of worker power in our lifetimes.
In California, the state legislature has passed a ground-breaking law that would establish sectoral bargaining for fast food workers. That law awaits Governor Gavin Newsome’s signature. This is all against the background of a year that has produced extraordinary union activism with a wave of strikes last fall that was so visible it came to be known as Striketober and major organizing breakthroughs at employers at the companies that have defined the era: Amazon, Google, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and Apple, while Uber and Lyft driver held a nationwide strike for the right to unionize. Meanwhile, we’ve been seeing a trend that goes back a few years in organizing the white-collar proletariat of graduate students, non-profit and museum workers, journalists, and others.
None of this is a coincidence. Rather, it’s the confluence of pent-up frustration on the part of workers after decades of wage stagnation and lopsided employer power in issuing oppressive work rules around scheduling, workplace safety, surveillance, a work pace with a newly aggressive pro-labor National Labor Relations Board in the Biden administration. Unions are emboldened to strike when they know they have a good chance to prevail with the underlying unfair labor practice (ULP) charges that set the predicate for the strike. They are more likely to win elections when they can prevail with ULP charges or the bosses are less likely to commit acts of intimidation when they know they will be held accountable in a timely manner. Before taking a job with the NLRB, labor lawyer Brandon Manger detailed the aggressive rethink of labor taking place at the NLRB (see here and here). In March, NLRB chief counsel Jennifer Abbruzzo issued a memo urging board lawyers to seek 10j injunction relief much more often to quickly bring court orders halting employer law breaking.
All of which to say is that the labor movement very much feels like it is at an inflection point similar to 1936 when the Congress of Industrial Organization began organizing in earnest. When the CIO was formed the labor movement was flat on its back, much as hit has been for the last few decades, with membership even lower than it is now at 10% of the population.
For this Labor Day, we’ll look at two poles in the career of Walter Reuther the great leader of the United Auto Workers in their heyday, and the way they relate to twin poles in the construction of social democracy. With the Flint Sitdown Strike of 1936, we see Reuther emerging as an organizer and tactician in the CIO’s militant stage as the union wills itself into existence through just incredibly audacious tactics. Then we look at Reuther the elder statesman, head of a powerful union laying out his vision of a social democratic economy in a now legendary interview with Mike Wallace of CBS News from 1958.
Social democracy is always in tension between the inside and the outside game, between its insurgent activist base and the technocratic politicians who govern in its name. The goal is to become the status quo, but the status quo becomes flabby and sclerotic, it leaves people out and the process of expanding the Beloved Community starts anew with a fresh set of rights and resources to be won for broader and broader majorities of citizens. In the interview with Mike Wallace, Reuther has become an elite representative of a new status quo before it becomes flabby and sclerotic. In fact, he lays out a bracing vision of social democracy and the union under his leadership will play a central role in bankrolling the Civil Rights Movement that is just beginning and in brokering the laws to enshrine multiracial democracy in the halls of power.
WALTER REUTHER: FLINT SITDOWN STRIKE
In part one of this short documentary, we meet Reuther as a young organizer pioneering the sitdown strike, first at Kelsey Hayes Wheel Company and then at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. The Flint Strike was long for a sitdown strike and bitter. The police were called in to violently put down the strike but the strikers beat them back with slingshots shooting heavy car hinges. The National Guard was called in and the strikers faced them down through a higher level of commitment and willingness to suffer losses.
In much the way that the Amazon distribution center on Staten Island virtually self-organized under the leadership of Chris Smalls, workers all over the country organized sitdown strikes to join the CIO and the UAW went from 0 to 250,000 members in a year.
By 1946 Reuther had ascended to the presidency of the UAW and through a series of massive strikes, he bargained what would be known as Reuther’s Treaty of Detroit over the course of 1949 and 1950 with five-year contracts covering the Big Three of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Over the course of a decade, the UAW had gone from militant outsiders to a powerful force in shaping the post-War New Deal political regime which would hold until 1980, and the ascension of Ronald Regan to the presidency.
WALTER REUTHER: THE MIKE WALLACE INTERVIEW
In this 1958 Mike Wallace interview with UAW President Walter Reuther, he lays out an incredibly cogent vision of social democracy in his bargaining framework. We see the Keynesian vision of a demand-led economy driven by full employment and increasing productivity through technological innovation, a rejection of Marxist class war, a profit-sharing plan that prefigures the Swedish Meidner Plan of the 1970s, anti-monopoly and push for more open competitive markets, and a view that the new challenge of running the economy is managing abundance rather than scarcity.
Mike Wallace is thoroughly overmatched here and displays his class alignment. He is unable to keep straight the difference between owners and management employees. I was a bit surprised that, in framing the profit-sharing plan as market-friendly, Reuther never points out the way it should align the interests of workers and owners nor does he highlight that, though it is being framed as a demand it can't be adopted unless freely agreed to by management, the same way executive profit sharing was.
WALLACE: Good evening. Tonight from Detroit, we go after the story of conflict between big business and big labor, between the automobile companies and the United Auto Workers. A struggle that promises to shape the future of our entire economic system. Our guest, is the president of the United Auto Workers Walter Reuther. His new profit sharing plan for union working men is being attacked by big business as a giant step towards socialism. Mr. Reuther in a moment I shall ask you to answer that charge, we'll get your opinion of the men who make it, and we'll get your views on unemployment now and in the year ahead. My name is Mike Wallace. The cigarette is Parliament, another fine product of the Philip Morris Company.
WALLACE: And now to our story. Yesterday, here in Detroit, Walter Reuther and his United Auto Workers, finished hammering out their plans for upcoming contract negotiations. The demands will include increased unemployment benefits, an undisclosed but apparently substantial hourly wage hike, and most controversial, a profit sharing plan that has outraged the big three: Chrysler, Ford and General Motors. When contract negotiations begin this spring, Mr. Reuther will demand that the big three, share twenty-five percent of what he calls, "their excess profits" with the union rank-and-file. He will also suggest, that the corporations take another twenty-five percent of these excess profits and distribute them to car buyers at the end of the year in the form of rebates. And so, Mr. Reuther, the first question I'd like to put you is this, what is the idea the philosophy behind this profit-sharing demand? If your union wants more money, why doesn’t it simply ask for higher wages, the way that unions have been doing all along? Why profit sharing?
REUTHER: Well, we have proposed profit sharing for 1958, because we believe this is the most effective way to expand purchasing power. And purchasing power, is the key to the economic future of the American economy. Our economy is in trouble. There is a serious and growing imbalance between expanding productive power and lagging purchasing power. And we believe that workers, consumers and farmers are being short-changed and that they are not getting their fair share of the fruits of our developing technology...
WALLACE: Well... I am...
REUTHER: The giant corporations are getting more than their share, they're getting a disproportionately large share. And because they are keeping more than their proper share, this is creating a serious imbalance out of which unemployment and recession is developing.
WALLACE: ...In your, in your answers... I don't want you to shorten them so... that there will not be sense within them... but if you can be just a little bit shorter in your answers. Mr. Brisch of the Ford Motor Company has suggested there are some hooks in your profit sharing plan. And I'd like to put to you some of some of the hooks that possibly been... maybe, er... within your plan and see if you can answer them. First of all, what does it do to of the principle of unionism a profit-sharing plan? Won't you be creating economic and class distinctions as between your own workers, let's say a man at Ford, is a lathe operator a man Studebaker Packard is a lathe operator: Ford, because they have a more attractive grill or for whatever reason, has a profitable operations Studebaker Packard let us say does not this year or next year have a profitable operation equal pay for equal work is supposed to be one of the tenets of unionism and yet the Ford man may make as much of a thousand dollars a year more than the Studebaker Packard man for doing exactly the same job.
REUTHER: (CLEARS THROAT) The question here is this: that if we formulate a set of economic demands, based upon the unfavorable economic position of some small company then we turn over the gravy train to the General Motors Corporation and workers and consumers are denied the equity that they have out in the greater productivity and the greater efficiency of the General Motors Company because, they are able to employ the most advanced technology in terms of automation, etcetera.
WALLACE: Well, still...
REUTHER: On the other hand if we have a uniform demand based upon the economics of GM we then inflict hardship upon the small company. And we say that, if a big company, because of the volume of production, because of the advanced technology they employ, if they make bigger profits. then why shouldn't the worker and the consumer share in those greater profits?
REUTHER: Well, I'm not sure what Reutherism is, but I can tell you what I believe. I believe to begin with, that free labor and free management have a great deal more in common than they have in conflict. And I believe that freedom is an indivisible value, that you can't have free labor without free management, and that we both need to learn to work and cooperate together to preserve our free society in a free world. Now, we reject the whole concept of Marxism and the class struggle. Because that philosophy was based essentially upon the struggle to divide up economic scarcity. We believe that free men, free labor, free management, working together within free government, in a free economic system, have the glorious opportunity of cooperating in the creating and the sharing of economic abundance. We believe that this is the first time in the history of human civilization that we can solve man's economic and material needs: food and clothing. And we can facilitate the growth of every human being, as a social being, as a cultural being, as a spiritual being.