UNITED AUTOMOBILE WORKERS OF AMERICA
UNITED AUTOMOBILE WORKERS OF AMERICA (UAW) was the largest and most politically important
trade union during the heyday of the twentieth-century labor movement. Although the UAW held its first convention in 1935, its real founding took place the next year, when it became one of the key unions within the new Committee for Industrial Organization. After a dramatic, six-week sit-down strike at General Motors during the winter of 1937, the UAW won union recognition from that company, then the nation's largest corporation. Chrysler and numerous supplier plants followed within a few months, after which it took four difficult years to organize workers at the Ford Motor Company, an intransigent union foe. By 1943, the UAW had organized more than a million workers in the auto, aircraft, and agricultural equipment industries.
The UAW was a uniquely democratic and militant union for three reasons. First, under conditions of mass production, supervisors and unionists fought bitterly and continuously over the pace of production, the distribution of work, and the extent to which seniority would govern job security. Second, the UAW enrolled hundreds of thousands of Poles, Hungarians, Slavs, Italians, African Americans, and white Appalachian migrants for whom unionism represented a doorway to an engaged sense of American citizenship. Finally, the founders and officers of the UAW were a notably factional and ideological cohort, among which socialists, communists, Catholic corporatists, and Roosevelt liberals fought for power and office.
Homer Martin, who served as union president from 1936 until 1939, was a former Protestant minister whose maladroit leadership nearly wrecked the union during the sharp recession of 1938. He was followed by R. J. Thomas, who tried to straddle the rivalry that made the former socialist Walter Reuther and his "right wing" faction the bitter enemies of Secretary Treasurer George Addes and Vice President Richard Frankensteen and their communist supporters. Reuther won the union presidency in 1946, and his anticommunist caucus, which nevertheless embodied the radicalism of many shop militants and progressive unionists, took full control of the UAW the next year. Reuther served as president until 1970, when he died in an airplane crash.
During its first quarter century, the UAW established the template that defined much of modern U.S. unionism. In bargaining with the big three auto corporations, the union raised and equalized wages between plants, regions, and occupations. It established a grievance arbitration system that limited the foreman's right to hire, fire, and discipline, and it won for its members a wide array of health and pension "fringe benefits" when it became clear that the unions and their liberal allies could not expand the U.S. welfare state. The real income of automobile workers more than doubled between 1947 and 1973.
But the UAW was thwarted in many of its larger ambitions. During World War II, the union sought a role in administering the production effort and sharing power with corporate management. Immediately after the war, Reuther led a 113-day strike against General Motors not only to raise wages but also to pressure both that corporation and the administration of President Harry Truman to limit any subsequent rise in the price of cars, thus enhancing the purchasing power of all workers.
The defeat of the UAW on both of these issues paved the way for a midcentury accord with most of the big auto firms. The union abandoned most efforts to challenge management pricing or production prerogatives, in return for which the corporations guaranteed autoworkers a slow but steady increase in their real pay. But this industry–UAW accord was not peaceful. Individual UAW locals struck repeatedly to humanize working conditions and to defend unionists victimized by management. At the company wide level, both sides probed for advantage. Thus, long strikes occurred at Chrysler in 1950 and 1957, at Ford in 1955 and 1967, and at General Motors in 1964 and 1970.
Politically, the UAW was a liberal presence in national Democratic politics and in those states, such as Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, New York, Iowa, California, and Indiana, where it had a large membership. Until 1948, many in the UAW leadership supported forming a labor-based third party, but after Truman's unexpected victory, the UAW sought a liberal "realignment" of the Democrats. The union pushed for aggressive Keynesian fiscal policies to lower unemployment, fought for an expanded welfare state, and favored détente with the Soviets. The UAW funded numerous civil rights activities in the 1960s, despite or perhaps because its role in Detroit municipal politics and in numerous auto and aircraft factories was an equivocal one on racial issues. The UAW did not break with President Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam. But it withdrew from the AFL-CIO from 1968 to 1981, because of what Reuther considered the conservative posture and stolid anticommunism of that union federation and of George Meany, its longtime president. In 1972 the UAW vigorously supported the presidential candidacy of George McGovern.
Until the late 1970s, UAW membership fluctuated between 1.2 and 1.5 million, but the back-to-back recessions of the late 1970s and the early 1980s combined with automation, the deunionization of the auto parts sector, and the closing of many older factories slashed UAW size to about 750,000. When Chrysler verged on bankruptcy in 1980 and 1981, the union agreed to a series of contract concessions that for the first time in forty years broke wage parity among the major auto firms. The UAW eventually reestablished the industry wage pattern and won employment guarantees for many of its remaining members, but the concession bargaining of the early 1980s spread rapidly across industrial America with devastating results for millions of workers.
After the mid-1980s, the UAW no longer played the "vanguard" role within the labor movement once hailed by Reuther. Until 1983 it was led by Leonard Woodcock and Douglas Fraser, both union pioneers and labor spokesmen of national stature. The UAW voice was more muted during the subsequent presidencies of Owen Beiber and Steven Yokich. The union cooperated with the auto industry to dilute government-mandated fuel efficiency standards and to stanch Japanese imports. But when foreign firms built assembly and parts plants in the United States, the union could not organize the workers. For more than a decade the UAW accommodated management efforts to deploy team production and employee involvement schemes, which often eroded work standards and eviscerated union consciousness. By the early twenty-first century the UAW was the nation's fifth largest union.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boyle, Kevin. The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism,1945–1968. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Halpern, Martin. UAW Politics in the Cold War Era. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.
Jefferys, Steve. Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Lichtenstein, Nelson. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Moody, Kim. Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy. London: Verso, 1997.
