Walter Reuther's Great Big Union

A. H. RASKIN

THE United Automobile Workers is a union in search of a mission. What differentiates it from other unions in this respect is that, in the last few months, it has moved from lip service to action in acknowledging the necessity for a basic reassessment of labor’s goals and how to reach them.

Most unions are so lost in self-admiration that even Colonel Blimp would find their smugness extreme. The UAW, while still inordinately disposed to regard itself as a solitary pillar of virtue in an economic swampland, is turning a searchlight on all its preconceptions to determine whether it has changed enough in the past quarter century to meet the needs of labor and of the nation in a transitional society.

The most interesting aspect of this effort to restore the giant auto union to its old primacy as a promoter of fresh ideas in collective bargaining, industrial democracy, and social betterment is that it is going forward without any of the fanfare usually associated with projects initiated by the union’s highly articulate president, Walter P. Reuther, a man whose critics have accused him of almost everything but reticence.

In May the UAW opened a unique leadership study center on the grounds of Solidarity House, its modernistic international headquarters in Detroit. This is in the nature of a postgraduate school for all the union’s organizers and paid officials, most of whom got their education on the picket line. They will spend three to twelve weeks studying subjects ranging from labor morality to the language of computers and trying to develop new perspectives on the union and society. As Reuther told the twenty-three officials in the first class, “If you go back home and do everything the way you did before, this school will be a failure.”

The center will not stop with an effort to unlock the minds of those already on the union payroll; it will also attempt to attract into the UAW more college-trained youngsters of the kind who became the mainstay of union technical staffs in the early years of the New Deal but who now turn to betterpaid jobs in industry, government, universities, and foundations. To offset this drain of professional talent away from organized labor, the UAW plans to offer internships to five or six youths each year, with the choice to be made both from college seniors and from the union’s own members. The interns would receive grants of $5000 to $7000 a year and would divide their time between work at the union (in such fields as research, law, social security, education, or publications) and graduate courses at one of Michigan’s three state universities. The UAW is convinced that, even if in the end the interns decide to make careers outside labor, there will be lasting dividends in improved understanding from their association with the union.

The building that houses the leadership study center was once used by the Chrysler Corporation as an executive-training institute. However, the UAW has borrowed little from traditional techniques of management training except the idea that constant vigilance is essential to keep dry rot out of the mental processes of leaders at every level of responsibility.

A policy statement drafted before the center opened warned that insistence on a uniform viewpoint in all the teaching would stultify the whole experience. “The UAW must be prepared to welcome to the faculty persons who do not share the union’s point of view on all subjects — who in fact may be critical, either from the right or the left, of the union’s program,” the policy declaration said.

Among those the center hopes to have as participants in its seminars are such men as David Riesman, Erich Fromm, Daniel Bell, Seymour Harris, Mortimer Adler, Richardson Dilworth, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Representatives of management also will be invited periodically as lecturers, in the thought that both sides will learn from a candid exchange of opinions about how well they perform their duties.

Reuther and his colleagues on the twenty-sixmember international executive board have not exempted themselves from the obligation they have imposed on their subordinates to sweep cobwebs out of their thinking. In June the board held a weeklong meeting at Tamiment in the Poconos to talk about the union’s long-range problems and its internal communications.

The aim was not to adopt resolutions — the UAW already has these in mountainous supply, covering every subject from administered prices to the creation of a National Planning Agency in Washington. Rather, the discussion at Tamiment was geared to stimulating thought on where the union was going and what kind of world it hoped to build. There was nothing parochial about its range. It even encompassed the issue of disarmament, with Norman Cousins of Saturday Review to exhort a greater membership involvement.

More such sessions will be held in settings similarly remote from day-to-day pressures. One skeptical member of the executive board came away from the Tamiment parley convinced that the union high command would benefit as much as the secondary leadership from exposure to the training center and to the other methods Reuther is using to bring the union abreast of automation’s challenge.

“We’re all getting older,” is the way this board member expresses it. “You can’t keep talking to a guy about what happened in the depression when he wasn’t even born then. Why, we’ve got members who don’t even know about World War Two. And how are you going to get through to them? One of the things we learned at Tamiment was that the average person spends more hours than he ought to watching television and only twenty minutes a day reading — that goes for newspapers, magazines, books, every kind of reading. If we don’t take that into account in our communications to workers and the community, all we will be doing is talking to ourselves.”

REUTHER VERSUS MEANY

The quietness with which the union is engineering its self-examination reflects the recognition that no magic carpet is going to carry the UAW over the hurdles that face all major unions in this automated era. Any tom-tom beating about “departures from familiar paths” could lead only to exaggerated expectations about how much could be accomplished how soon.

But beyond this realistic deterrent to self-advertisement may lie factors more intimately related to Reuther’s estimate of his personal role as a shaper of the destiny of the UAW‚ of labor generally, and of the total society. Recognized as the possessor of one of the most fertile minds and eloquent tongues in any branch of American life, even by those who like him least, Reuther has found himself increasingly excluded in recent years from any position of real creativity and influence in the affairs of organized labor.

Much of the dynamism that carried him to the top rung of the auto union, over the opposition of the porkchoppers in the entrenched union bureaucracy and their allies in the union’s proCommunist wing, has been wasted in sterile power feuds inside the AFL-CIO. Relations between Reuther and George Meany, the federation’s president, deteriorated sharply after the merger in 1955 — a merger that never could have taken place if Reuther, as president of the old CIO, had not stepped aside to allow the chief post in the fused organization to go to Meany, his AFL opposite number.

Wrangles over the federation’s failure to make significant headway toward its target of organizing the unorganized grew into a general indictment by the Reuther faction of stagnation and purposelessness in the AFL-CIO headquarters. The proMeany majority in the federation’s executive council saw nothing in the record of the Industrial Union Department, under Reuther’s leadership, that indicated it had a better formula for pinning union buttons on the millions of workers outside union ranks.

The net effect of the bickering was to convince Meany and his partisans that Reuther would never be content until he moved into the number one job, an ambition not at all to Meany’s taste. The downward spiral of their relationship culminated in a schoolboylike series of jousts between the two leaders, almost all of which wound up badly for Reuther and none of which was calculated to contribute anything notable to the general advancement of labor.

The designation of a labor member of the United States delegation to the United Nations was a case in point. For many years organized labor had argued that the presence of a prominent trade unionist as a spokesman for this country in the UN General Assembly would do much to counteract Soviet charges that Wall Street controlled everything here. President Eisenhower finally accepted this point in 1957, and Meany was named the first delegate.

When Meany’s year ended, Reuther, who is by far the best known of American unionists in the developing countries of Asia and Africa, hoped the AFL-CIO would recommend him for the following year. Instead, Meany proposed George M. Harrison, chairman of the federation’s International Affairs Committee. A year later Meany took the post again, thus effectively continuing the Reuther freeze-out until the end of the Eisenhower term.

Soon after President Kennedy’s inauguration, Meany learned secondhand that Reuther expected to be appointed to the post by Ambassador Stevenson. The AFL-CIO president sent discreet word to the White House that he would welcome reappointment. Confronted with the necessity for choosing between two of its most resolute political supporters, the Administration chose neither. It did away with the notion of having any labor member on the delegation; the precedent labor succeeded in establishing under a businessman’s Administration was lost when labor’s candidate took office. As a consolation prize, both Meany and Reuther were made special advisers to Stevenson — posts with no defined duties.

A similar contretemps developed over the designation of an Under Secretary of Labor to fill the vacancy created last year when W. Willard Wirtz moved up to succeed Arthur J. Goldberg as Secretary. Reuther began lobbying for Jack T. Conway, formerly his administrative assistant at the UAW, who had gone to Washington as deputy administrator of the Federal Housing and Home Financing Agency. Meany made no secret of his high regard for Conway and his conviction that Conway would be an excellent Under Secretary of Labor, but he felt it more important to demonstrate once again that there was only one head of the AFL-CIO and only one man entitled to speak officially for it at the White House.

Accordingly, he put into nomination as his candidate Thomas E. Harris, the federation’s associate general counsel. Again the White House stepped away from the necessity for a choice. It persuaded Meany to come up with another name — that of John F. Henning of the California AFL-CIO, a virtual stranger to all the union bigwigs in Washington. The upshot of this and several similar contests was a presidential decree that Meany was to be recognized as the federation’s sole authorized ambassador to the United States government.

This still left Reuther plenty of access in his separate capacity as president of the UAW‚ but there was a perceptible dip in his prestige in the powerconscious upper echelons of both labor and government. One of the President’s closest advisers suggested last spring that the best way to relieve the White House of the embarrassments created by the tug-of-war between Reuther and Meany would be to designate the auto union chief as ambassador to India. Another ranking Administration official summed up Reuther’s status in the single word “pitiful.”

Somewhere along the line the message seems to have got through to Reuther that there might be a more effective way to operate. Ever since spring he has been comporting himself with a blend of serenity and decisiveness that may signal the emergence of a new Reuther at age fifty-six. If the change denotes a recharge of imagination and industry, rather than the resignation of a frustrated man prepared to settle for frustration, it will be the best of good news for a labor movement groping for new directions.

AID TO UNIONS OVERSEAS

The UAW is the most zestful of America’s big unions, the least sunk in bureaucratic detachment from its rank and file. Most of its qualities of excitement have stemmed not from its strikes or even its trailblazing exploits in collective bargaining and politics, but from the caliber of its officialdom. It has been less afflicted than most huge unions by the loss of good secondary leaders who leave their union jobs discouraged by the blocking off of channels for advancement. The average age of its executive board is just under fifty. This is at least ten years below the average in most other unions spawned by the NRA and the Wagner Act.

But Reuther is still the pivotal force in the UAW’s affairs, its most prolific generator of ideas, its bridge to stronger rapport with the membership and the community. That is why his apparent decision to invest much more concentrated attention in the UAW is of profound importance. He has been talking inside the union’s board of establishing a mandatory retirement age of sixtyfive for all officials. That would leave him only nine years in which to fulfill all his dreams for labor and the country.

The global compass of these dreams was given tangible expression in the decision of the UAW convention last year to earmark the interest on the union’s $50 million strike fund for aid in building free labor organizations and in reinforcing their drives to improve wages and working conditions. One of the early allocations from this worldwide Marshall Plan for labor was $25,000 in financial assistance for workers in France’s nationalized coal mines when they were striking against General de Gaulle’s restrictive wage policies last March. At the same time, $1000 went to striking metalworkers in Turkey.

The foundations for this drive are not all altruistic. They are predicated on a hardheaded realization that American labor standards cannot keep on advancing if sweatshop conditions continue to prevail in competitive industrial countries abroad. “You no longer work for American corporations; you work for world corporations.” This is the credo Victor G. Reuther, director of the UAW’s international affairs department, has been seeking to pound home at regional UAW conferences on the mission of the Free World Labor Defense Fund.

“All over the world, in the most remote parts of Asia, South Africa, throughout Latin America, General Motors has its plants,” Victor Reuther declares. “Ford has its subsidiaries and Chrysler its associates; and so have International Harvester and thousands of other firms. This interlocking worldwide control which vast corporations have means that their policies — fiscal and otherwise, as they affect your jobs — are determined not in the light of what is best in your home community, what is best for the United States, but in terms of what is best for General Motors.”

By way of making the message of interdependence even more explicit, the UAW’s chief envoy to world labor asserts that when American corporations set up shop overseas “they don’t act like American employers who know something about labor relations.” Instead, he says, they suddenly acquire all the bad habits of the local employers and are quite happy to pay the lowest wages and enforce the longest hours.

Despite such grim warnings that the survival of free unions in the United States depends on the strengthening of their struggling counterparts in underdeveloped lands, the immediate problems of the UAW in collective bargaining and in its efforts to offset the job-killing impact of new technology on existing employment opportunities are quite remote from those of unions in Sierra Leone or Tanganyika.

MORE GAINS FOR FEWER WORKERS

The gravest danger for the UAW at the bargaining table is that it will find itself doing more and more for fewer and fewer workers, and thus engender a tremendous incubus of resentment among young people and others shut out of jobs. This danger is envisaged with special grimness by Leonard Woodcock, vice president of the auto union and director of its General Motors department.

“The automobile industry is in its second boom year, but it is meeting much of its additional production through overtime hours of the existing force simply because it is cheaper to do so,” Woodcock told the Industrial Relations Research Association in Pittsburgh last winter. “The costs of pensions, insurance, vacations, holidays and supplementary unemployment benefits are all tied to the individual and not to the hours worked, which means that costs are reduced when overtime is worked by fewer individuals. Thus we have the callous spectacle of overtime and sharp unemployment existing side by side in America’s booming automobile cities.”

The forecast of trouble unless the UAW broadened its bargaining sights to provide more job opportunities for those on the outside looking in was made sharper still when Woodcock met with delegates representing the 338,000 hourly-rated workers at General Motors in June to take a forward look at preparations for the 1964 contract round. He noted that joblessness among young people was running at nearly triple the rate for older workers, and he warned of mass discontent among these dispossessed youngsters if they saw the UAW and other unions focusing their energies on protecting the job security of those who already had jobs.

“Whom did Hitler first mobilize?” Woodcock asked. “He mobilized the young men. The Storm Troopers, the Brown Shirts were made up of kids who had no hope in the German Republic in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. Who is going to exploit this dissatisfaction against the labor movement? It is going to be the extreme right, which is gathering political force in this country. It is going to be the Barry Gold waters or probably somebody else whose name we have not yet heard who will mobilize the young people. And if to them the labor movement stands as a group of selfish people concerned only with themselves and not with their plight, then we are really going to get the business.”

The seriousness with which the UAW regards the necessity for turning the bargaining table into an instrument for full employment was indicated in the letters it sent to all the major auto and agricultural implement manufacturers last March, requesting that joint study committees be set up a full year in advance to begin work on problems that would require solution in next year’s contracts.

Even before expressing its general desire to provide greater security and higher standards for the existing work force, the union stressed the need for joint action to “make such contributions as we can to the creation of new job opportunities for younger workers, for older workers still too young to retire and for members of minority groups in the face of automation and accelerating technological advance.”

BARGAINING WITHOUT A CRISIS

In the past the Big Three auto makers have shunned anything resembling year-round joint consultations with the Reuther union for fear that these might become an entering wedge for co-determination or some intermediate form of union encroachment on management prerogatives. The vigor with which Reuther has campaigned for a government board to conduct public hearings on proposed price increases in autos, steel, and other large industries has kept such fear alive, despite the cordial day-to-day working relationships that have long existed between the union and the corporations.

The companies would probably not have agreed to sit down with the union this year if the success of the Human Relations Committee, established in the steel industry after its disastrous 116-day strike in 1959, had not touched off what amounted to a tidal wave of support for experiments in continuous dialogue in other key industries. A refusal to accept the Reuther bid would have exposed the auto giants to pressure from President Kennedy and Secretary of Labor Wirtz, both strong advocates of year-round labor-management discussions. Rather than risk more government intrusion in the industry’s affairs, the Big Three said yes, without any outside push.

Under the rules laid down for the joint study committees, all the proceedings are off the record and neither side is committed by anything that is said. However, Woodcock gave the GM union delegates a peek behind this curtain of secrecy when he reported on the initial session. He said GM had been most cautious about the subjects to be canvassed in the talks and had made it clear that it might reconsider its agreement to participate if it found itself led into areas that impinged on politics, rather than those in which decisions could be made directly by labor and management. The union’s comeback was that its biggest worry involved jobs, and that obviously the answers to fuller employment lay partly in collective bargaining and partly in government policy. All of this lent point to the observation of one rank-and-file delegate at the GM conference that when the union called for the joint study, “the guys in the plant thought this was a wonderful proposal, but when GM accepted, they wondered what was the matter with it.”

The wonder may grow even stronger if the UAW seriously endeavors to use the 1964 auto contracts as the vehicle for a basic assault on unemployment, with the primary focus on creating openings for those who now have no jobs rather than on additional security and benefits for those who do. This would mark a radical shift from the prevailing orientation in collective bargaining, which treats present jobholders as a preferred group to be shielded against technological displacement but does nothing directly for the hundreds of thousands of youngsters cascading into the job market or for the four million workers already idle. The unemployed are made wards of the general community while the union and the industry concentrate on protecting the ingroup.

Thus, the pioneering formula negotiated by the Kaiser Steel Corporation and the United Steelworkers of America for sharing the fruits of increased productivity at the company’s plant in Fontana, California, starts with a guarantee that no worker will lose his job because of automation. The formula also provides that the workers are to get one third of all the money the company saves as a result of greater efficiency in steclmaking. The shortcoming in this plan, as the UAW sees it, is that it treats those already on the Kaiser payroll as a group with a vested interest and makes those who never have been hired the victims of the shrinkage in total job opportunities that comes from being able to make much more steel with many fewer men.

The auto union has not even begun to formulate the specific demands through which it will try to make itself a spokesman for the outs as well as the ins in the 1964 negotiations. But if it does draft a program that breaks dramatically with the isolationism of “we must take care of our own,” it will mark a fresh crystallization of the line of fidelity to social responsibility that Reuther has always enunciated as the touchstone of his union philosophy.

His concept is that labor must go forward with the community, not at the expense of the community. It was on this basis that he insisted, when unions in steel and other key industries were cheerfully riding the wage-price spiral, that the auto workers wanted no wage increase that could not be supported without a price increase. On the same basis he urged that the companies couple price rebates for car buyers with higher wages for UAW members in a proposed profit-sharing plan five years ago.

This proposal proved no more popular with the Big Three than most of the other novelties Reuther has put on the negotiating table in the post-war period. But this has not stopped him from winning a good many more than he has lost — notably supplementary unemployment benefits, a markdown from his original project for a true guaranteed annual wage but nonetheless a long step forward in income security for laid-off workers.

THE PROFITS OF MANAGEMENT

One reason for the substantial gains the UAW has made since the days of the speedup and the sitdown strikes is the fantastic profitability of the auto industry. Unlike most unions, the UAW does not take the view that it should keep quiet about the prosperity of its employers. It says bluntly that it considers the profits of the auto makers too high for the country’s good, and it has compiled some arresting statistics to support its charge that workers and consumers are not getting their fair share of the pie.

The parent union has sent to all its GM locals charts intended to show that if General Motors had been content with a profit rate equal to the average for all United States manufacturing corporations in the fifteen years from 1947 through 1962, it could have cut the retail price of all its cars by $205 and also raised the wages of all its hourly-rated workers by fifty-seven cents an hour.

Taking GM’s record profit of $1,459,000,000 after taxes last year, the union asserts that the colossus of the Big Three could have cut the price of the 3,742,000 passenger cars produced in its United States plants by $100 each and still had a profit of 21 percent on its investment, or more than double the average for all manufacturers.

Still another chart is designed to contrast the relative rewards of working for GM or owning its stock. It notes that the average GM hourly employee would have earned $3009 if he worked fulltime in 1947. A GM stockholder would have received exactly the same amount in dividends if he had bought stock worth $52,846 at the beginning of that year. At the end of 1962 the cumulative dividends and capital gain on the stock would total $463,000. The worker’s aggregate earnings in the same period, assuming that he had never been laid off and that he had got all the union-negotiated wage increases, would have been $78,800 — roughly one sixth the shareholder’s gain.

Perhaps the most startling of all the UAW charts, and certainly the one most likely to irk General Motors top brass, sets the $15.7 million in salaries and bonuses received by 56 GM officers and directors last year against the combined salaries of $13.8 million paid to 606 top government officials. The men who ran General Motors got more for their efforts than all of these officials put together: the President, the Vice President, 100 United States senators, 435 members of the House of Representatives, the nine Supreme Court justices, the ten members of the Cabinet, and the governors of all fifty states. One concrete moral the UAW has drawn from these figures is that a profit-sharing plan would mean a lot to its members in the major companies. The UAW negotiated its first such plan at American Motors two years ago, and the plan has worked so well that the union hopes it will be extended to GM and Ford next year. On the basis of last year’s profits Reuther estimates that the American Motors “progress-sharing” formula would have meant an extra $915 a year in benefits and stocks for each GM worker and $845 for each worker at Ford. Woodcock put the prospect of extending the idea somewhat less circumspectly when he addressed the UAW National GM Council. “If we could get the profit-sharing formula from GM, it would be like getting the keys to Fort Knox after somebody had shot the guards,” he said.

GRIEVANCES IN THE PLANT

But not all the task of running a union of 1.2 million members in a period of meteoric change is concerned with mass decisions. The main business of the UAW, and in many respects its principal reason for being, is in its administration of the grievance machinery that protects the worker against petty tyranny at the plant level. The desire for individual dignity and a collective voice in a vast corporation was the spur for the union’s formation, and even with the enormous improvements that have occurred in personnel administration most UAW members have not lost their fear that “Once you let the boss start pushing, he’ll never stop pushing.”

UAW local newspapers are full of complaints about the irritations and frustrations of plant life. The correspondent at one Detroit factory in which management had appealed for teamwork to help the plant survive wrote this wistful comment on the results of the campaign:

“The Team, as the company puts it, set an alltime production of over 5 million pounds of copper tubing for the month of March, That, I would say, is a good Survival Team, but the Team became split up when it came to the celebration end of it. The hourly rate ate in the company garage off of chairs and the VIP’s dined and were entertained at the Lee Plaza, the latter is a good way to cut costs. Your entire bargaining committee clocked out at 11 A.M. and had their lunch elsewhere and clocked back in at 11:41 A.M. They were penalized for being late — what happened to THE TEAM — I wonder if the VIP’s punched a time clock in and also out upon entering and leaving the Lee Plaza Hotel?”

At a GM Fisher Body plant in St. Louis, with only 2800 employees, a backlog of 3000 individual grievances piled up. Early this year the accumulation of complaints grew so oppressive to both management and the UAW that a special union task force was sent in from Detroit to work with GM officials in ending the pileup. Five hundred of the grievances involved charges that foremen had put on gloves and done production work in violation of the contract.

The GM contract contains six hundred pages, and there are three or four supplemental contracts for every GM plant. This is shop law — law the workers have participated in writing through their union. Yet the rules are so well established that fewer than forty cases a year have to go to arbitration for final settlement.

“We deal for more than 300‚000 workers in GM,” says Nat Weinberg, director of the union’s special projects department, “but in negotiations we will fight, bleed and die for a word that won’t affect more than three people — perhaps not even one in the whole life of the contract. That’s what differentiates us from the corporations.”

How important the workers consider the rules and conditions in their own plants was driven home to Reuther and the other international union chiefs rather rudely in the 1961 negotiations. They were repeatedly overridden in local revolts when they tried to steamroller through a national settlement without allowing full time for the adjustment of local issues. In retrospect, the leaders say the rebellions were a healthy reminder that even the best national contract is no good if festering sores are left untended in the plant.

As an expression of its own recognition that maximum protection for individual rights is as essential inside the union as it is inside a corporation, the union acted in 1957 to establish an unusual Public Review Board, to which its members could appeal as a court of last resort if they felt they had been denied justice by the union’s internal machinery. The board consists of seven distinguished clergymen‚ educators, and jurists, and is completely free of any control by the UAW.

A study completed last year by Professor Jack Stieber, director of Michigan State University’s School of Labor and Industrial Relations, showed that the board had upheld decisions of the union’s executive board twice as often as it had upset them. Dr. Stieber said the board represented “the broadest grant of authority over its internal affairs ever given voluntarily by a labor organization — or any other organization — to an outside body.”

In a report at the 1962 UAW convention the board’s chairman, Rabbi Morris Adler of Detroit, declared that the union’s adherence to high standards of ethical and democratic practice could not be measured solely by the cases submitted to the board for review. “We have had no cases of organized corruption,” he told the delegates. “We have had no cases where an officialdom was in collusion with those who are enemies of the union. We have had no great instances at all of anything that was fundamentally undemocratic in the constitution in our structure.”

WHITE-COLLAR MEMBERSHIP

The high levels of auto production in the last two years, plus the UAW’s success in organizing scores of relatively small shops in many parts of the country, have brought its membership up nearly 200,000 from the low point of early 1961, when it slipped below the million mark. However, there is no prospect that it can keep climbing unless the UAW makes much more substantial progress than it has up to now in unionizing white-collar and engineering personnel.

In automotive plants the expectation in union circles is that it will be possible to make a million more cars by the end of the decade with 50,000 fewer workers than are now employed. In the missile and spacecraft plants, the dollar volume of contracts is higher than it was in the days of winged aircraft, but the number of production workers is a third of the old requirement in many plants. The union’s defeat in union shop elections at two aerospace companies last year has not enhanced its organizing drive in that field.

The effort to recruit office and technical employees in the automobile industry has been put under the direction of Douglas A. Fraser, one of the UAW’s most enterprising young international executive board members. He is making his greatest bid for workers in offices attached to strategic production units, where the union can use the strength of its blue-collar membership to maximum advantage in speeding company recognition. Five white-collar workers who served initially as volunteer organizers have been put on Fraser’s staff, and he is casting about for engineers interested in taking recruiting assignments. The whole theme of the approach to the white-collar groups is “Your Needs Are Different,” and stress is put on the distinctiveness of treatment they can expect as against that given hourly-rated employees.

No titanic forward thrust is in sight on this front, but the experiments now under way in year-round discussions with the Big Three, the inauguration of the leadership study center, and the importance of finding a key to white-collar organization present a sufficient challenge even for Reuther’s restless mind. He is also seeking to animate the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department, which has matched the federation itself for spectacular nonaccomplishment. Jack Conway, long Reuther’s chief aide in Detroit, has been installed as the department’s executive director, but he inherits a staff jaded by seven years of loud talk and little action, so the job of overcoming inertia will be monumental.

“The phones never ring,” complains one veteran official. “No one has any sense of purpose. You can’t have an effective staff without a leadership that is really on the move. Confidentially, I’m looking for another job — outside labor.”

Politically, Reuther always can find plenty to do. His conception of the interrelatedness of union and political activity is much more fundamental than that of most bread-and-butter unionists, who reluctantly accepted the idea that labor ought to have its own political machinery after the Taft-Hartley Act made it obvious that what they gained at the bargaining table could be lost in the legislative chamber. The UAW has become a major political force not solely in Michigan but in every Midwest state. Its influence is growing rapidly in California, where it has a thirty-eight-year-old regional director, Paul Schrade, who looks like an Ivy Leaguer but is a prototype of the labor leader of the future. Intelligent, eager, dedicated, he has all the drive of the union pioneers, plus the sophistication of a young man who lelt a scholarship after his junior year as a chemistry student at Yale’s Sheffield School because he wanted to acquire some field knowledge in economics.

He went to Los Angeles with the thought of Spending a year working in the experimental division of North American Aviation. He joined the UAW and learned that his department was only one percent organized. He became a volunteer organizer, then editor of the local union paper, vice president of the local, and finally its president. Reuther made him his special assistant, and at the last convention Schrade was elected to the international executive board as regional director for seven Western states.

Reuther’s ability to attract into his union and to move up to posts of authority men like Schrade is one of his distinctive attributes. A Reuther aide says, “Walter is a wholly moral man, a true believer. He makes countless compromises to serve his larger purposes, but he thinks of himself as a practical radical. In fact, he argues with European socialists that he is more radical than they.”

A glimpse of this phase of the Reuther character shone through a sentimental talk he gave when Paul Sifton, the former playwright, newspaperman, and unemployment insurance administrator, retired as the union’s Washington representative a few months ago. “Paul Sifton,” he declared, “has too much of what the American labor movement has too little of—social idealism.” Reuther told the last union convention, “A labor movement can get soft and flabby spiritually. It can make progress materially, and the soul of the union can die in the process.”

The implementation of this spirit is found in the UAW’s record of combating racial discrimination. It battled Jim Crow tendencies in its Southern locals at a time when most unions were giving lip service or no service at all to the principles of equal treatment. When President Kennedy called top unionists to the White House just before introducing his civil rights bill, Reuther cut through the Claghornlike speeches of many of his associates with a crisp declaration: “If we really wanted to do something about it, the men gathered in this room right now could do more for civil rights in one month than the whole government could in five years.” He was the spearhead in making $160,000 in labor funds available to post bail for Negroes arrested in the Birmingham demonstrations.

Now that he has apparently decided to curb his impatience to become head of the AFL-CIO, his standing with the rest of labor’s high command has improved markedly. When the sixty-nine-yearold Meany does leave his post, Reuther is the man most likely to succeed. But waiting for what may happen — if—is a poor occupation for a man whose talents can be applied so fruitfully in the UAW. Happily, the signs point to a more constructive application, in the best interests ot Reuther, the labor movement, and the country.