Having grown up in Michigan in the years which almost exactly coincide with Walter Reuther’s presidency of the United Auto Workers (1946-1970), it is shocking to read in the Detroit News how federal agents conducted searches last week in four states of homes and offices of eight individuals linked to the United Auto Workers and Fiat Chrysler. These raids are said to be part of a “four-year investigation into bribes, kickbacks and attempts to by auto executives to influence labor negotiations.”
The News further reports that the raids increase the possibility that “the federal government could assume oversight of the union under anti-racketeering statutes.” This would be similar to the federal supervision the Teamsters Union has been under since the 1980s.
Walter Reuther and the UAW were far from uncontroversial half a century ago. Reuther was a visionary liberal, a supporter of civil rights when other labor leaders like the AFL-CIO’s president George Meany was skittish. Reuther was a strong anti-Communist in the Cold War, but also an admirer of Scandinavian socialism, who sought to use the million-plus-member UAW as a force to build an American welfare state. Reuther was also an austere man who limited UAW officers’ and staffers’ salaries and perquisites far below those of many other unions, including the Teamsters headed by his Detroit-based rival Jimmy Hoffa.
Reuther was often attacked by Republicans, including Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and George Romney. But he was never accused of self-enrichment or taking bribes. The culture he instilled in the UAW was continued by his successors, Leonard Woodcock and Douglas Fraser, after his death in a 1970 plane crash. The three of them headed UAW for two generations, from 1946 to 1983.
Today, the UAW’s numbers have dwindled, probably to less than the 391,000 claimed in a hagiographic Wikipedia article, a number itself dwarfed by the union’s 580,000 retired members. Whatever the outcome of the federal searches and investigations, the union obviously has quite a different culture than it did in the Reuther-Woodcock-Fraser years. A Washington Examiner editorial this weekend argues that this is an inevitable result of the government labor laws that promote adversarial relations between companies and unions. “Labor law means unions gain their power through coercion and political power, rather than by offering value to workers and employees. Union leverage is thus the fruit of coercion and connections. It’s only natural that this is corrupting.”
Walter Reuther surely disagreed with that argument, but nevertheless worked hard to create an anti-corruption culture in the UAW, one which continued to prevail under his two successors as union president. Its apparent breakdown, in my view, has elements of tragedy.
