Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times via A
United Auto Workers Local 551 President Chris Pena, center in sunglasses, and UAW President Shawn Fain, right, greet striking Ford workers, October 7, 2023, in Chicago.
Both prior to and then during the UAW’s strike against the Big Three auto companies, union president Shawn Fain all but summoned the ghost of his legendary predecessor, Walter Reuther, to inspire his members with tales (historically accurate tales, at that) of the union’s heroic past. As the leader of a slate of officers that had only recently ousted much of the incumbent regime, Fain’s invocations of the Reutherites helped to root his members’ and the public’s perception of his crew of insurgents not as malcontented rookies but as students of past victories, working to renew them on a very different terrain.
The UAW’s current victory is of a scale and scope that merits comparison with the victories that Reuther’s team won in the quarter-century that followed World War II. First, it’s important to note that both the Reutherites and Fain and his colleagues were upstarts who had to oust an opposing faction to win control of the union, and then deliver substantial gains to the members to justify their victory.
The core of the Reuther crew was comprised of socialists and social democrats, who for several years in the 1940s battled an incumbent regime that was backed by members of the Communist Party. (There being a very finite number of socialists and communists in the union, each was in coalition with numerous activists, secondary leaders, and so on who were neither.)
As the union’s vice president in charge of its General Motors division at the end of World War II, Reuther staked his claim to leadership during the 1945-1946 strike he led against GM, which featured some of the most radical demands an American union has ever made. GM, he argued, could raise wages (which had been held in check by law during World War II) by 30 percent without raising the price of its cars. When GM said it couldn’t afford that, Reuther demanded that the company open its books for public inspection, and even successfully prodded the Truman administration to do its own assessment. The UAW members at GM—more than 300,000 of them; GM was then the nation’s largest employer—stayed out for more than 100 days before accepting a wage hike just below the figure that Truman’s commission said wouldn’t cause prices to rise.
Reuther argued that there was a way to avoid future disruptions: reconstitute corporate boards so that they contained not just representatives of the shareholders, but also of workers, consumers, and the government. This was one helluva bridge too far for GM and American business, of course, though Reuther never fully abandoned it in theory if not in practice (it was never presented at any subsequent negotiations).
Building on the momentum of the GM strike, however, Reuther won the UAW presidency a few months after it had ended, though the board remained in control of the opposition faction. Following a year of brutal infighting between the two camps, Reuther’s legions swept the board elections at the following year’s convention. Then, in 1948 and 1950, the union won historic victories that set the standard for American labor for the next 30 years, with wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments (which were proposed by GM to forestall more sweeping union proposals), health insurance, additional annual wage increases keyed to increases in national productivity, and defined-benefit pensions.
The UAW’s current victory is of a scale and scope that merits comparison with the victories that Reuther’s team won in the quarter-century that followed World War II.
Like the Reutherites, Fain and his cohorts had to wrest control of the UAW from an incumbent regime, though the lines of this conflict did not, at first glance, seem to be drawn around political concerns. After a several-year period during which a number of UAW leaders, including two former presidents, were convicted of misappropriating funds (and in some cases, taking bribes from management), a reform movement called Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) took shape. UAWD saw their chance to elect a clean slate (in both senses) of officers when, as the result of a deal that federal prosecutors reached with the union, rank-and-file members, rather than convention delegates, would elect their leaders for the first time in UAW history. But the UAWD didn’t confine itself to demands for fiscal probity; it also became a force to reverse the downward spiral of wages and benefits that the union had failed to arrest for many years.
Just as the Reutherites had schooled themselves in Socialist Party conclaves and the militant working-class perspectives of Brookwood Labor College, the cadre in the UAWD and on Fain’s staff once he was elected had apprenticed at such institutions as Labor Notes publishing and gatherings and the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigns (a direct echo of Walter Reuther’s 1936 work on socialist Norman Thomas’s presidential campaign). Both of these cadres encountered some skeptical receptions as ostensibly exotic growths in the ranks of American labor, but both brought a level of militance and savvy that the labor movement of their respective times badly needed. Then, and more so now, a number of unions have had talented radicals on their staffs. But the number of unions with new regimes having to prove themselves in the manner of the 1947 and 2023 UAW is never very large. (In 1948, the sociologist C. Wright Mills actually wrote a book largely about Reuther’s newly installed socialist cadre at the UAW, called The New Men of Power.)
Some of the gains the UAW has made over the past two weeks simply restore Reuther-era gains that had been lost in recent times, like the COLA. Some eliminate concessions the union agreed to in the depths of the Great Recession, like the establishment of a lower-paid tier of workers. Some extend the scope of the contracts to include workers at new facilities, such as EV and battery factories. (The contracts in Reuther’s day included all new GM, Ford, and Chrysler factories; the companies hadn’t yet tried to weasel out under the cover of joint ventures, which didn’t exist at the time.)
The UAW’s contract with Stellantis even includes language affecting some of the company’s investment decisions, a goal that Reuther favored but never fulfilled through his proposed recomposition of corporate boards. In the proposed contract (on which the rank and file will vote, as they will on the contracts with GM and Ford), Stellantis commits to reopening its shuttered factory in Belvidere, Illinois, and to investing in new EV facilities that will be covered under the contract.
In the wake of such victories, Fain has vowed to roll the union on: to organize the “transplant” auto factories of German and Japanese automakers in the South, and the Tesla factories in California, Nevada, and Texas. During Reuther’s lifetime (he was killed in a plane crash in 1970), there were virtually no non-union auto plants in the U.S., but he was a constant advocate for organizing workers in any and all industries in the non-union South. That was one reason why he so irked AFL-CIO President George Meany, who viewed organizing, given labor’s strength at the time, as a waste of union resources.
I don’t mean to equate Reuther and Fain as such. When he talks to his members, Fain sounds a little more like the first UAW president, the Baptist minister Homer Martin, than he does like socialist autodidact Reuther. But there are some broader parallels between the climate in which Reuther worked and the climate today. For one, the early UAW benefited from support by the Roosevelt administration, which didn’t send in troops, as its predecessors would have, to break their foundational sit-in strikes of 1937. Today, if the UAW is to overcome the immense hurdles posed by the half-century of eviscerating workers’ protections under labor law, it will be partly due to the Biden administration’s efforts to revive those protections.
Moreover, as in the 1930s and ’40s, so it is today that the public’s support for unions is at a very high level. The yawning gap between the rich and the rest of us, which was so apparent in pre–New Deal America and so politically salient during the New Deal years, has again become an issue of public—not just labor and academic—concern at least as far back as 2011’s Occupy Wall Street movement. Like Reuther in the 1930s and ’40s, Fain uses the language of class war; like Reuther, he uses it at a time when it resonates with a hefty share of the American people. Like Reuther, he knows when the iron is hot, and the UAW will do what it can to keep it burning.
