Shawn Fain Had a Forerunner Who Failed

T he best forecaster in America right now is Shawn Fain.

Unlike the Federal Reserve, or most economists, the United Auto Workers president is showing the guts to acknowledge both recent inflation and the likelihood of strong inflation in the future. Fain provoked this month’s historic UAW strike against automakers with his opening demand of 40 percent wage increases.

Well, to Fain and UAW workers, 40 percent sounds just about right. The amount at least represents insurance against the unknowns. Forty percent sounds about right to many of the rest of us, too. Forty percent might even have sounded all right to Milton Friedman, whose Permanent-Income Hypothesis held that workers are not lab rats. Fine economists themselves, workers gaze past short-term gimmes — the payroll protection, this year’s wage increases — to seriously consider their long-term income prospects. And act, or demand, accordingly.

Too bad for the workers, then, that Fain reduced his demand of the Big Three to 30 percent. And too bad he dressed up his demands with assaults on an array of targets including executive pay and a great generality, “the billionaire economy.” As Fain said before the strike, “if we don’t get our share of social and economic justice, I can guarantee you one thing. Come September 14, we’re going to take action by any means necessary.” With the last bit, Fain channeled Malcolm X and his legendary refrain, “by any means necessary.” It all struck observers as plenty daring of Fain. Commented one analyst, Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities, “This is not your grandfather’s UAW.”

And yet, it is. In fact, the UAW has a long tradition of pursuing wild national goals that range beyond the needs of its constituents. That tradition hasn’t strengthened its membership: Fain can claim around 400,000 working members, a quarter of what the union boasted back in 1968, when Fain’s predecessor, Walter Reuther, led his 1.6 million out of its umbrella organization, the AFL-CIO, to escape “rusty-bottomed” conservatism. The nature of this turn becomes clear in The Life and Times of Walter Reuther by James Ten Eyck, a new edition of an older biography of the union leader.

Reuther (pronounced “ROOTH-er”) makes for a compelling figure. He arrived in Detroit — not yet 20 — on the final Saturday of February 1927 and found a post in a night shift at Briggs Body Works. As Ten Eyck notes, “the pay was low,” 60 cents an hour, “the working conditions were bad,” and Reuther quickly moved on to earn $1.05 an hour as a diemaker at Ford’s River Rouge plant. He worked twelve, sometimes 13, hours and managed to collect a high-school degree at the same time. In 1932, Reuther and his brother Victor headed to Soviet Russia for a stint at Molotov Auto Works in Gorky. Victor, especially, was enchanted, writing, as Ten Eyck reports, to a friend of a factory party: “Imagine Mel, Henry Ford throwing a big party for his slaves.”

Arriving back in the States amid the Great Depression, the brothers sobered up and played leading roles in the brutal, successful battle to unionize the Big Three. In a second rough conflict to gain leadership of the new United Auto Workers, they chased out communists and again emerged victorious. Walter became the boss; Victor led policy. Both were shot by would-be assassins and survived. Friendly with the health minister of the British Labour government that instituted Britain’s National Health Service, the disciplined Reuther was determined to build his own social-democratic nation for autoworkers. Over multiple rounds of negotiations, the dogged Walter — he brought his toothbrush to signal that he would work through the nights — wrested then-unprecedented concessions such as health care and pensions from the immensely profitable automakers.

At the time, it looked like the automakers could afford the extras. Ford, GM, and Chrysler faced scant competition from abroad. In 1958, Reuther pitched, among a string of bad to near-socialist ideas, a promising proposal that workers forgo some share of future wage increases in exchange for a program giving them a share of corporate profits. “Profit sharing” differs from the preferable stock-sharing and can certainly serve as a mere power grab by unions. But Reuther’s thought opened the possibility of aligning worker interests with those of management and shareholders. One can only wonder how much class war such an alignment would have spared the future.

Alas, this idea did not go over. Ten Eyck’s account of the nonsmoking Walter Reuther braving the smoke from TV host Mike Wallace’s Parliament cigarettes to bid for profit-sharing captures the spunk of the man. (This wonderful interview is watchable on YouTube.) Wallace also blew smoke at Reuther’s notions, almost mocking his profit-sharing idea. “If your union wants more money, why doesn’t it ask for higher wages?”

“Reuther’s Bombshell,” as the New York Times characterized it, likewise struck the Big Three as radical, especially as it came packaged, as Fain’s proposals are, with some other disconcerting demands such as that “giant corporations” automatically rebate profits at year’s end to car buyers. The president of American Motors, Mitt Romney’s father, George, termed the profit-sharing idea a “threat.”

The 1960s were different. Reuther still corrected policy-makers on economics, sometimes aptly. At one point he even mocked then-current government notions of inflation, as Fain is doing, advertently or inadvertently: When President Johnson referred to the “wage-price spiral,” a common notion of the time, Reuther edited him — it was a “price-wage spiral,” a suggestion that workers were only reacting to Washington’s economic and monetary policy. He cherished the work in his union sphere and tapped the union kitty to fund the construction of a summer retreat for workers on the shores of Black Lake, hiring his favorite architect, a Corbusian named Oscar Stonorov.

Reuther’s main goal in the 1960s was to reconfigure not just Detroit but all America on the social-democratic model. He built out the UAW education department and sent union members, willy-nilly, to collect votes in countless campaigns. The outcome of the 1960s election is disputed to this day, with many claiming Richard Nixon as the winner. Not disputed is that votes from the million-odd UAW membership gave Kennedy the numbers he did garner. Postelection, a grateful new president made a point of publicly praising Reuther’s expansionist vision, telling a vast group of workers, “This organization and this union has not interpreted its responsibilities narrowly. You have not confined yourself to getting the best possible deal at the bargaining table.”

Such endorsement was all the Reuther brothers needed to spend millions of union dues on national policy, entering areas a stunning distance from the shop floor. Urban legend treats a 1962 meeting of radicals, mostly in their early twenties, at a Port Huron, Mich., campground as a kind of declaration of independence by a new generation. In the schoolbooks, Port Huron is also well known as the event that launched college rebellions on campuses across the land. Among the attendees were the young Tom Hayden and Michael Harrington, the author of a book that made waves that year, The Other America: Poverty in the United States.

What most don’t know is that Port Huron was Papa Walter’s puppet show. Both the venue and funding for Port Huron were arranged by the mother of one of those young attendees, Sharon Jeffrey. Sharon’s mother was the indefatigable Millie Jeffrey, Reuther’s aide. The UAW supplied an additional $10,000 to start up what Reuther envisioned as a UAW college wing, the Students for a Democratic Society. “Whenever we were in trouble, and needed money or help from the elders,” Hayden would recall later, “the call would go out to Sharon’s mother, who was invariably on the road with Walter Reuther.”

Enabled by the president and his brother, Robert, the attorney general, Reuther became one of the nation’s civil-rights leaders and a dedicated friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. Reuther marched in Selma and in Washington. It was Reuther whom Robert Kennedy called to arrange payment of the egregious $160,000 bail set for King in Birmingham. “Reuther was genuinely curious as to why the Attorney General was calling him about the problem,” notes Ten Eyck. “Because we don’t know anyone else we can call” was RFK’s reply. As the astute biographer of the UAW, Kevin Boyle, reports, and oral histories confirm, UAW attorney Joseph Rauh assembled the money from various unions and sent men with it to Birmingham, their midsections bulging with cash. “We cannot defend freedom in Berlin so long as we deny freedom in Birmingham,” Reuther intoned. Ten Eyck reports an exchange that likely would not take place today: “Who is that?” one of the members of the crowd on the Mall at the Washington march asked about Reuther. “Don’t you know him?” answered another. “That is the white Martin Luther King.”

In time, as Ten Eyck notes, Reuther indeed became “the most visible white face in the drive for black equal rights.” When, at Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson became president, it was to Reuther that Johnson placed one of his first calls for help, telling Reuther: “I never needed it as much in my life.” The state Johnson selected to announce his vast Great Society program was, no accident, Reuther’s Michigan. Much of the city part of the Great Society’s plan to change “cities, countryside, and classrooms” would be scripted by Reuther’s teams.

The period was a dreamy one, at least for Reuther. But his civil-rights work and plans for European-scale federal benefits for all distracted him, and UAW management, from the realities. Japanese automakers presented a new threat to Detroit. So did the unexpected prospect of inflation, as it does today. For Reuther, another threat was his own restive members, who saw Reuther’s political action as off point and complained loudly about his use of dues for politics. African-American workers, more concerned with factory conditions than national civil-rights reform, proved especially angry: “Behead the Red Head,” a pamphlet would read.

Even the youth wing that Reuther had tended early on, SDS, betrayed him. Hayden dropped the kind of neighborhood-improvement project Reuther supported for protest of the Vietnam War and, soon enough, a now infamous trip to Hanoi. Even a dreamer like Reuther was practical enough to know that if he needed the Johnson administration’s support on other matters, his union and its acquaintances could not become a showcase for anti-war protest.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Reuther busied himself securing the nomination of the union-friendly Hubert Humphrey. Yet the violent confrontations between Chicago police and protesters won the headlines. How did it feel to know, as Reuther must have, that if he peered out his hotel window and craned his neck, he might espy one of his own intellectual offspring, Hayden, wrecking the party for Humphrey? The violent footage from Chicago appalled Americans, who handed the presidency to the man Reuther bitterly opposed, Nixon. Even the tragic manner of Reuther’s death, which came suddenly, several years later, underscored his failure. Reuther died when an early Learjet carrying him, his wife May, and the architect Stonorov crashed. Their destination that evening was Black Lake, his micro-utopia.

The 1970s brought the pain of reality home to Reuther’s successors, as they discovered, but only gradually, the penalty of placing high demands on the Big Three. Automakers floundered. So did their workers and so, of course, did Detroit, of Reuther’s and Johnson’s Model Cities program. In 1980, a stunning 45 percent of union households voted for Ronald Reagan. From the 1980s as well, UAW membership began the slide that brought it to Fain’s meager constituency of 400,000 active members.

Awareness of this story’s implications nowadays is scant. Another new book, Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol’s Rust Belt Union Blues, stages Reuther as a kind of lost prophet of “collective unity.” The book suggests that a kinder, gentler culture would enable unions to win a mass following again: “People still crave a sense of belonging to groups,” the authors write. “Families and their needs can still be put front and center in local and regional union programs and events.”

What families actually need most are strong economies, the kind that include plenty of billionaires and plenty of jobs. To get that, all parties, including the UAW, have to focus on inflation, taxes, and regulation. They need to discuss, as plenty of union members are ready to, whether environmental regulation is forcing upon the industry the prohibitive costs of electric vehicles. They need to talk about trade. The question we ought to ask is not whether Fain missteps, or whether the automakers do. It is: Where is that discussion of the economy in this strike?

Ten Eyck, James, The Life and Times of Walter Reuther: An Unfinished Liberal Legacy, Page Vision Press, 2023.