Walter Philip Reuther was an American leader of organized labor and civil rights activist.
Background
Walter Philip Reuther was born on September 1, 1907 in Wheeling, West Virginia, the son of Valentine Reuther, a brewery-wagon driver, and Anna Stocker. Both of Reuther's parents had emigrated as children from Germany. His father, who became an insurance agent in 1914, was an ardent trade unionist and Socialist, and was active locally in both spheres. Reuther's future career, as well as those of his younger brothers, Roy and Victor, was rooted in the working-class identification and social-justice idealism inculcated by Valentine Reuther.
Education
At the age of sixteen, Reuther left high school and became an apprentice die maker at the Wheeling Steel Company. In 1927 he moved to Detroit, found work at the Ford automobile plant, and swiftly acquired a high rating as a supervising die maker. While working full-time, Reuther resumed his schooling, finishing high school and in 1930 enrolling at Detroit City College (later Wayne State University).
Career
As the Great Depression deepened Reuther became increasingly active in politics both on campus and in the presidential campaign of the Socialist Norman Thomas in 1932. He also joined the small Auto Workers Union, an affiliate of the Communist Trade Union Unity League. Laid off at Ford (he suspected it was because of his union activity), Reuther set off in February 1933 with his brother Victor on a long-contemplated trip to Europe.
In Germany they witnessed the Nazi seizure of power and acted briefly as couriers in the underground resistance. They left Berlin on November 15, 1933, for their ultimate destination in the Soviet Union: they had signed on for jobs at the Gorki auto works, which had acquired Ford equipment and desperately needed experienced auto workers. Although troubled by the increasingly repressive Stalin regime, Reuther had not lost his basic sympathy for the Soviet experiment when he left after nearly two years. His own place, however, was within the democratic socialist Left. Reuther and his brother returned to the United States, via Siberia and Japan, at an auspicious moment in the history of the American labor movement.
The unionization of the mass-production sector, after a false start in 1933-1934, was about to commence in earnest. In automobile manufacturing, as elsewhere, the membership gains of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) period had mostly disappeared, but the United Automobile Workers (UAW) of America, part of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), contained the nucleus for the reorganization of the auto workers.
In October 1935, Reuther attended the AFL convention in Atlantic City, at which the labor movement split over the industrialunion issue. With the launching of John L. Lewis' Committee for Industrial Organization (after 1938, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO), Reuther moved single-mindedly to establish himself within the reviving UAW. Although he was jobless, he gained a card in early 1936 in the tiny left-wing UAW Local 86 at the General Motors (GM) Ternstedt plant on Detroit's West Side.
In April he went as the local's delegate to the South Bend, Indiana, convention, at which the UAW for the first time elected a president from its own ranks and effectively declared its independence from the AFL; soon after, it would affiliate with the CIO. The South Bend convention was made for a brash young fellow with well-honed debating skills and solid left-wing credentials. Reuther, never at a loss for words or self-confidence, played a prominent part in the proceedings and was elected to the general executive board. Reuther was quick to prove himself. He became president of the amalgamated Local 174, whose jurisdiction covered the entire Detroit West Side.
The potential membership, scattered in many parts factories and several major assembly plants, numbered 100, 000; the actual membership was less than 100.
In December 1936, Reuther and his brothers engineered a strike at the Kelsey-Hayes Corporation, a supplier of brakes and wheels for Ford; this started an influx of recruits into Local 174. From that point onward, the West Side provided Reuther with a secure base of support. A week after the Kelsey-Hayes settlement, there broke out the sit-down strike at Flint, Mich. , that led to GM recognition of the UAW. Although Reuther provided timely support, he was not centrally involved at Flint, but his brothers, Victor and Roy, were, and the great victory thereby redounded to the Reuther name.
On May 26, 1937, Reuther and other UAW organizers were brutally assaulted by Ford goons in the "Battle of the Overpass" in front of the Ford River Rouge plant. Vivid news photographs strengthened Reuther's standing: he had shed blood for the auto workers. Factional strife over the next two years tested Reuther's capacity for survival. The UAW divided into two great coalitions roughly along ideological lines. The left-wing Unity Caucus included the Reuther and Communist groups but also many others who had lost patience with the weak leadership of the union president, Homer Martin.
In 1938 the uneasy standoff ended. The Communists abandoned Reuther for the sake of an alliance with the most powerful faction of the conservative Progressive Caucus, the Chrysler locals led by the union vice-president, Richard Frankensteen. Instead of linking up with Reuther, the equally isolated Martin tried to use his presidential powers to crush the opposition. The effect was to split the UAW apart, with Martin leading his remnant following into the AFL in March 1939. Under CIO supervision, the political situation inside the UAW was stabilized, and a popular but neutral figure, R. J. Thomas, was installed as president. One of Thomas' first moves was to appoint Reuther director of the General Motors Department, which had become virtually a paper organization by mid-1939.
As on the Detroit West Side three years earlier, Reuther showed himself to be a brilliant tactician. He focused on the GM tool and die makers, pulling out the few militant shops and, as these strikes succeeded, extending the walkout to the tool and die makers in other GM plants. With retooling for the 1940 models thus stymied, GM gave in and recognized the UAW as the bargaining agent for the company's tool and die makers. The reorganization of the GM production workers quickly followed, succeeded by victories elsewhere in the industry and finally at Ford in 1941. Since Reuther emerged as the preeminent bloc leader, he became the focus against which rival factions coalesced.
These included the Communists, by now implacably opposed by Reuther; their sympathizer at the top of the union hierarchy, the secretary-treasurer, George Addes; and the president, Thomas, along with his diverse following. The coming of World War II offered Reuther a wider stage. As the nation struggled to rearm in 1940, he put forward a bold plan for reaching the defense goal of "500 planes a day. " Drawing on his tool-and-die-making expertise, he argued that auto plants could be converted to aircraft production.
His plan also called for granting labor an equal voice with management in the direction of the reconstructed industry. Company opposition doomed the plan, although its technical feasibility was amply demonstrated once the country actually entered the war. A succession of other proposals established Reuther's reputation as the ablest of a new generation of trade-union leaders. He was clearly seeking to exploit the wartime emergency to bring about reforms that would guarantee a full-employment economy and enlarge labor's voice in industrial and national affairs.
This progressive campaign culminated in his battle against GM in the reconversion period. Reuther made company pricing a bargaining issue. When GM responded that it could not give a wage increase (the union was demanding 30 percent) without a price increase, Reuther proposed that the company "open the books. "
No other union, not even the other UAW units, followed Reuther's lead. While striking GM workers held out for 113 days in 1945-1946, the rest of the labor movement settled for substantial increases with no restraint on pricing. Thus undercut, Reuther's effort at reforming collective bargaining failed. Reuther was more successful in advancing his trade-union career.
In 1946 he narrowly defeated Thomas for the UAW presidency. It required another year of furious politicking to seize the other national offices from the Thomas-Addes caucus. Reuther then mercilessly purged the union hierarchy of his opponents and established himself unassailably at the helm of the UAW.
On April 20, 1948, Reuther barely survived a shotgun attack that crippled his right arm, and a year later, his brother Victor was similarly assaulted and lost an eye; neither crime was ever solved. For Reuther, one of the burdens of success became a lifetime of confining security arrangements. Once he had consolidated his position within the union, Reuther went on the offensive against the Communists elsewhere in the CIO. The issue, Reuther argued, was over priorities: Were the Communists first of all trade unionists or party adherents? Their support of the Progressive party in 1948, despite CIO endorsement of the Democratic ticket, provided Reuther with the ammunition he needed. He took the lead in the expulsion of eleven Communist-dominated unions from the CIO in 1949.
He became a prominent figure in the anti-Communist Left. He was a founder of the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947 and two years later led the CIO delegation to the London conference that set up the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
Thwarted in his hopes for a broader industrial role for the UAW, Reuther became a brilliant practitioner of collective bargaining. He was a supremely skilled tactician.
Exploiting the automakers' competition, his strategy was to single out one firm for strike action and then to extend the gains achieved there to the rest of the industry. Innovative in the bargaining goals he set for the UAW, he aimed above all at extracting from employers the security protections not forthcoming from the state--adequate, employer-funded pensions (beginning in 1950 at Chrysler), medical insurance (beginning at GM in 1950), and supplementary unemployment benefits (beginning at Ford in 1955). Productivity gains and cost-of-living allowances also were forthcoming, although initially at the suggestion of GM in 1948. In an era of economic expansion, Reuther in effect collaborated with the industry in the exchange of monetary and security benefits for labor peace and shop-floor discipline. The UAW was the largest union in the CIO, and Reuther was, by common consent, the most gifted of its leaders.
When CIO president Philip Murray died in 1952, Reuther succeeded him. An advocate of labor unity, Reuther played a crucial part in the negotiations that led to the merged AFL-CIO in 1955, but labor unity never fulfilled Reuther's hopes for a revival of labor's flagging organizing zeal or for a renewal of the social vision of earlier CIO days.
Reuther found himself increasingly at odds with AFL-CIO president George Meany, who was a product of labor's conservative craft traditions. Their differences crystallized around foreign-policy issues. Although striving to remain loyal to the Johnson administration, Reuther grew disillusioned with the Vietnam War and clashed repeatedly with the hard-line Meany.
Even more fundamental was Reuther's conviction that organized labor was out of step with the emergent reform movements concerned with the environment, peace, and minority rights. In early 1968 the UAW left the AFL-CIO. No other unions followed, and the Alliance for Labor Action that Reuther founded in 1969 was a strange marriage of opposites, for it included only the UAW and the powerful Teamsters' Brotherhood, which Reuther had helped expel from the AFL-CIO in 1957 for corruption.
Reuther and his wife were killed in a plane crash at Pellston, Mich. , near where the UAW was completing a favored project of Reuther's, the Black Lake recreation and education center. The isolation in which Reuther found himself at the time of his death suggests that, had he lived, he would not have been able to materially alter the future course of the labor movement.
Reuther never adopted the hard-line stance of AFL leaders. He was not one to boycott Communist unions abroad or to accept reactionary regimes as legitimate allies against Communist subversion. Within American politics, Reuther moved toward the center. In 1939, after a decade of activity (including a run for the Detroit City Council in 1937), he left the Socialist party.
Although reluctant to join the Democrats, he became a consistent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and other New Deal candidates. After Harry Truman's unexpected victory in 1948, Reuther came to accept the fact that the Democratic party was the only viable instrument for labor politics in America. His desire, never fully realized, was to help bring about a restructuring of the party system along class lines so that the Democratic party would take on the role that labor and social democratic parties played in European politics.
He became a major force within the Democratic party: he was instrumental in John F. Kennedy's campaign for the presidency in 1960 and in the shaping of the civil rights and welfare legislation of Lyndon Johnson's administration.
Connections
On March 15, he married May Wolf. They were to have two children.