Paying Dues for Half a Century

An Interview with Victor Reuther

Together the Reuther brothers - Victor, Walter and Roy - did much to transform the U.S. labor movement. Beginning in the 1930s when they traveled to Detroit in search of work in the automobile manufacturing industry, their history became inseparable from that of the United Auto Workers.

They organized both workers and the UAW at a time when the major unions were still unwilling to organize industrial workers. In the following years, Walter would become first president of the UAW and then president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Victor would serve as the UAW's director of organization and would become the international representative for the union.

Now, on the 50th Anniversary of the Flint Sit-Down Strike which resulted in the first UAW contract with General Motors, Victor Reuther is still filled with the fire and conviction of a labor organizer. Today, he is deeply concerned that all he had struggled for is being undone and he fears that the battles he and many others fought long ago will have to be fought again. The Multinational Monitor talked with Reuther about the crisis facing organized labor and the future of the U.S. labor movement.

There is not a single U.S. car firm that has not bought into the Japanese, and now they're buying into the Korean firms. So what do they mean, foreign competition? They're competing with themselves. And they have encouraged this foreign competition by their incredible investments abroad. Multinational Monitor: How do you account for the decreasing number of unionized workers in the United States?
Victor Reuther: As a preface to answering that, there's an interesting contrast between what's happening stateside and what's happening across the border in Canada. About 10 years ago, the percentage of the work force that was unionized was about the same in both Canada and the United States, running around 26 to 27 percent.
In the intervening years the percentage of unionized workers in the United States has fallen to somewhere between 17 and 18 percent, while in Canada it has gone up to about 38 percent. They work in Canada for essentially the same corporations: basic industries owned by U.S.-based multinationals. They have different labor legislation, and that has a profound impact on the success or failure of trade unions to grow, to exert their influence in society. We lag behind most democratic countries in the world in passing labor legislation.
Today, the trade union movement is confronted not only with a clearly anti-labor administration in Washington, which openly breaks strikes as they did in the Professional Air Traffic Controller's strike, but it's confronted with a very shrewdly devised corporate strategy to pit one plant and one local against another and pick them off one at a time. One would have thought that the trade union movement, which uses so often the slogan "Solidarity," would see the danger of this threat, and would organize a counter-strategy to block it. This, sadly, has not happened.
The multinationals in the United States have used the issue of foreign competition as a club, to squeeze out of American workers concessions which they have fought long and hard in the past to win. Foreign competition is no new threat. It existed in the thirties when we organized. There was never a time in the history of this nation when wages and salaries were set in terms of what was paid in Mexico, or in Brazil, or in Taiwan, or in Japan, or anywhere else. They were set in terms of what the ability of the corporation was to pay, and what its actual costs of marketing and production were.
There is not a single U.S. car firm that has not bought into the Japanese, and now they're buying into the Korean firms. So what do they mean, foreign competition? They're competing with themselves. And they have encouraged this foreign competition by their incredible investments abroad.
Monitor: How can the trade union movement develop a broadbased constituency to mobilize popular support for legislation protecting worker health and safety and protecting worker rights?
Reuther: The trade union movement has become too ingrown, it is responding as a frightened bureaucracy, thinking that if they can just hang on to what they've got they'll be doing very well, and if they have to give up some of that, it will come out of the workers' and the consumers' pockets.
The trade union movement has been at the forefront of a great social crusade, and it disappoints me because in recent years it has turned its back on others.
The labor movement has fought hard in the halls of Congress and in state legislatures to support tax reform [but it remains] silent when the great multinationals try to shift their tax burden onto local municipalities and states, and on individual taxpayers who are already bearing too large a burden. General Motors in particular, is a classic representative of corporate arrogance.
They never did pay their proper share, and now of course, under the threat of closings, of shifting operations to other communities, they're going very methodically into every community where they have operations, and are threatening and blackjacking the local communities into further tax concessions.
I must say this doesn't come as a surprise to me. What shocks the hell out of me is that there is silence on the part of the unions about this clear ripoff. [GM] didn't [announce] the decision to locate in the hills of Tennessee until they went to just about 30 states and said to governors and state legislators, "What are you offering us to put [the] Saturn [plant] in your backyard?" How else can one interpret this except as a bribe? What they were asking for out of the pockets of the taxpayers of the state, out of the treasuries of the state and counties, was a straight handout to a private, profit-making corporation. (See "What's Good for General Motors..." the Multinational Monitor, Vol. 7, No. 6)
The trade union movement itself, in days not too distant would have come down hard on the corporation that tried to pit one state against another, one city against another, all at taxpayers' expense. But there was dead silence in Solidarity House [the international headquarters of the UAW] on this one. I suspect the [UAW] was frightened that they might not locate in the states at all, that they might totally outsource to Mexico or Korea, and if one accepts that script and yields to it, well there's no end.
I needn't tell you that the UAW has been silent on too many occasions when it felt that its long historic fight for safety features in cars stood in the way of meeting foreign competition, because it might add a few bucks to the cost of the car. That's losing sight, of course, of what is a very important role - saving lives as well as jobs, and making common cause with the rest of the nation.
Monitor: To what extent are GM site location decisions made on traditional concerns: labor force, proximity to major markets, infrastructure, and the like? In other words, is it possible that the company is playing one community against another to try to get the incentive package when the site is already chosen?
Reuther: They do not make a decision on where to locate on the basis of who is offering the most. But they use that as the carrot and stick approach to force tax concessions in every state where they have some kind of operation. It's the most brutal, arrogant act of Corporate America; that the labor movement remained silent at the time was an abdication.
Many of these concessions are being justified by some trade union leaders as a minor giveback in exchange for a great historic breakthrough on giving workers a voice in how the plant is run, worker input at the shop-floor level. One cannot argue against the importance of giving workers a say in how their work is done, and a voice in the management of the operation. Every study and every experience will show that where workers are given a significant role in decision making, the productivity, the efficiency, and the morale all go up. Now since this is such a boon and such a great benefit to Corporate America, why don't they just advocate it on its own merits?
Monitor: The agreement that the UAW entered into with GM on the Saturn plant has been hailed as a historic labor relations breakthrough by both GM and the UAW but it offers lower wages, fewer benefits and incentive work clauses. What do you think about the agreement?
Reuther: The fact that this so-called historic breakthrough was negotiated in secret and the text of the agreement was not distributed to General Motors workers who had a direct interest in it is appalling. It's an affront to every democratic concept to which the UAW and the labor movement has been committed - much more damaging than a 20 percent wage cut and the change in job classifications. And all that results is the destruction of the internal organization of the union inside the plant, the substitution of joint decision making by the company - the so-called team approach to the settlement of grievances - as [opposed to] a duly elected trade union representative on the shop floor who can carry the grievance to the company.
Monitor: Some of the most creative and ingenious strategies that unions have initiated in the last several years have come from locals. In fact, many locals seem alienated and frustrated by the lethargy of their internationals. What steps would help to lessen the number of locals that are tragically forced to butt heads with their parent union, as in the case of the UFCW Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota?
Reuther: I think it's inevitable that there will be more and more tragedies of the P-9 type strike if the national union leadership continues to grant concessions which are not fully discussed and voted on in a democratic way by the rank and file. If they continue this course of retreat, and continue to climb in bed with Corporate America seeking some security through that, then these kinds of uprisings by the local leadership will grow.
Of course, it's very difficult for a local union to battle simultaneously against an entrenched corporation and its own national union leadership. Workers should never be put in that tragic position. Leadership has to be developed which will be sufficiently ingenious to develop a tactic to assert pressure on both the union leadership and the corporation.
Monitor: How do you view the fact that the UAW in Canada broke away from the UAW in the United States?
Reuther: The thing that surprised me was that the Canadians remained as long as they did as sort of an appendage to the larger organization stateside. It is normal, it is natural all over the world that the trade unions within a sovereign state have their own organization. I'm afraid that Detroit looked upon this as a weakening of the whole sort of bureaucratic stronghold, as a setback in solidarity. There is an awful lot of hurt ego in this, and they must look beyond that. I'm very excited about the developments in Canada. I think it unleashes them to be more imaginative and creative, since they are not as hamstrung as we are by money matters.
Monitor: In the last couple of years the U.S. Congress has attached labor rights provisions to several trade agreements. Such provisions require countries to meet certain minimum labor standards before the country is eligible for certain tax incentives. Although this will be effective in keeping jobs from going to the most repressive regimes, are there other ways to slow job flight?
Reuther: Penalties are needed for certain Third World countries which fail to respect minimum trade union rights and where there are clear violations of International Labor Organization [ILO] provisions. Although I think criticism from the U.S side would come with greater effectiveness and force if the U.S. Congress approved all of the various ILO provisions. We're way behind many other trading partners in dealing with this problem of unfairness in international competition. One of the things we ought to do is emulate European and Asian countries by enacting legislation which would restrict corporations in the United States from being free to export capital earned here willy-nilly to anywhere they choose in the world. You can't do that if you're an employer in Britain or Germany or Scandinavia. There has to be some legislation obligating Corporate America to reinvest where they earn profits.
We have to take a real hard look at what is happening to basic smokestack industries. This is a worrisome thing: what's happening to the guts of our industrial structure. Private industry in the United States is pulling stakes and shifting basic production to Third World countries, robbing the U.S. of its real industrial base. And one has to be absolutely without their senses to think that we can maintain our present standard of living, let alone build on it, by converting into a service economy. That's madness, absolute madness, and we should not permit Corporate America to make that decision for all of the country. Therefore, we have to have legislation against the outflow of capital, we have to have legislation on content, which is a way of policing stateside manufacturing of essential items, and third, we need a blueprint for the future of industrial growth in this country. The American people should have an opportunity to say whether or not they want to maintain the steel industry, whether or not they want to retain the textile industry, or whether we should let them go.
Monitor: One of the major concerns of the rank and file is automation. Studies have shown that 35 percent of the auto jobs will be gone in five or six years, and GM Chairman Roger Smith has said the most amazing thing he has ever seen is a robot picking up an egg. How can the UAW work to face automation and at the same time maintain their jobs and their children's jobs?
Reuther: I think it's quite remarkable when you look at the industrial growth of this country how the labor force has rolled with the punch of technological innovations. We have not had the tradition of mass resistance to the innovation of new technology as happened on many other continents. We have grown up in an atmosphere of frequent technological innovation. Every damn model change brought with it new tools, new materials, all of which impacted tremendously on employment, and on the nature of that employment as well as the numbers. Now, should we change that posture drastically and resist technological change as a defensive measure? No, it would be madness. We must welcome technological change provided the benefits that flow from it will be shared, and that the fruits of it will not be enjoyed by the few, and that the many will not pay the price in terms of unemployment or a lower standard of living.
How do you develop a formula to guarantee that the fruits will be spread more evenly? The very nature of collective bargaining should be a great contributing force to that. We have raised the slogan of the 30-hour week. When the American labor movement won the battle for the eight-hour day, we gave heart to the cause for a shorter work day to millions and millions of workers around the world. That's why they celebrate May Day. Having won the eight-hour day, will we go to a shorter work day, or maybe, a shorter work week? A reduction in the hours would spread employment among many.
It will be argued that we can't possibly do that and meet international competition. Isn't it strange that small countries like Norway with rather fragile economies dependent on foreign trade, have gone to a shorter work week - even at a time when their metal and shipbuilding industries have been hit by Korean and Japanese competition. The Germans led the fight for a reduction in the work week, and they broke through the eight-hour day. The 40-hour week is no longer a magic figure. They have to meet foreign competition, yet they're paying higher wages for labor today than U.S. industries pay. This business of meeting foreign competition is just an excuse for not facing up to the urgency of continued social change.
Industry must be more productive with a greater quantity of even more sophisticated products at a lower cost. That has , been the whole history of the growth of technology and the growth of mass production, where with higher volume you lower unit labor costs and prices and increase the availability of consumer goods.
Unless society augments its buying power as the new technology increases its capacity to produce, unless there's a balance, we'll be out on the sidewalks, looking into windows at things we've made and can't buy.
Monitor: In the last election organized workers were treated as a special interest rather than a broad social class concerned about a whole spectrum of social issues. Unlike most European countries, the U.S. labor movement's ties to a political party are much more tenuous and much less essential. Do you think the United States needs a labor party? Do you think it's realistic to think that a labor party might evolve?
Reuther: The trade union movement has officially opposed the formation of a so-called labor or third party. It has shied away from anything moving in that direction, still pursuing, I think rather naively, the practice that you punish your enemies and reward your friends, regardless of what party label they fly under.
That is undergoing a change. For the first time in the history of the trade union movement in the last presidential election, the trade unions officially endorsed a candidate, even during the primaries. That was a step forward, because obviously the trade union movement in modern industrialist society cannot solve all of its problems across the bargaining table. It must seek relief and it must seek progress through legislation. We'll never complete our search for decent health programs just through collective bargaining. The vast majority of our citizens ought to have public health coverage and don't, and one way to get it is through political strength.
Obviously, if the American citizenry, including the trade union members, had a clear political choice, if there was a clear distinction between what the Republicans were advocating and what the Democrats stood for, one could reasonably hope that the Democratic Party might eventually emerge as the organization that would represent wage earners, low-income farmers, office employees - the working population. [But] the Democratic Party does not appear to want to clearly distinguish itself from the Republicans but rather to emulate the Republicans.
The reason I think there is such lethargy is that there is no exciting choice - there is no choice. And someday soon, maybe with the help of the trade unions, we will arouse the electorate of this country to say, "By God, it's time we were given a choice." I don't think that day has arrived yet, that's why it would be premature for a labor party to be formed. Arguably too, it would further divide the already too small Democratic vote, and guarantee that the Republicans will be in power for some years.
But I look across the border to Canada and I see a different approach there, where the New Democratic Party is a third party - it has the official support of all the trade unions including the conservative ones, and it represents a very fresh and exciting new coalition. That may be a model for U.S. trade unionists and U.S. citizens. I hope it will, because I really believe that our experience in the United States is not that different from the rest of the world, and all over the world the workers have had to rely upon a political party that in the political field stood for the kinds of things that their unions stood for in the economic field.
But we are less ideological than the European unions because our history is different. Most trade unions in Western Europe were organized by political parties [that] sought a factory base and they organized trade unions. The organizers in the early trade unions in Italy were socialists sent by the socialist party. The same is true in Great Britain where the labor party sent organizers out to organize trade unions. None of this is a part of our history. We began as economic instruments, organized to deal with economic problems. We had no friends on the political scene, and it was an initial liability to tie our type to a political party. And we're paying the price of that history.
Are we therefore non-political? No. On the contrary, as trade unions we assume a larger role in the political field than do the trade unions in Italy, or Germany or Great Britain. Why? Because they have the party structure to do their work, while we have to do our own political work. We have to talk about endorsing candidates, we have to raise funds for them. We can't rely on a party to do that. It's an enormous advantage to the trade unions in Europe to have a political movement that will be their voice in the halls of parliaments. We are greatly disadvantaged here without that. But that disadvantage reflects our own history. I think we're in the process of overcoming it now. We have to say to the Democratic Party, "Do you want our support? Earn it. We're sick and tired of chopping wood and carrying water for you, and then you want to 'distance' yourselves from these unions with their 'selfish' agenda. You either stand as loyal allies or don't accept any financial support from the trade unions. And if you want to give us a carbon copy of Ronald Reagan's program you can keep it."
We have to talk that blunt to the Democratic Party. Now that may hasten the demise of the party, but if it's going to continue down the road it's going today, it deserves to be absorbed by Reagan. And we'll fill the vacuum with a decent party.

The multinationals in the United States have used the issue of foreign competition as a club, to squeeze out of American workers concessions which they have fought long and hard in the past to win.

We have to take a real hard look at what is happening to the basic smokestack industries. Private industry in the United States is pulling stakes and shifting basic production to Third World countries, robbing the U.S. of its real industrial base. One has to be absolutely without their senses to think that we cam maintain our present standard of living, let alone build on it, by converting into a service economy.

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