Tell the Bosses We're Coming. Shaun Richman

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      The Routine of Collective Bargaining

      Management has no divine rights. —WALTER REUTHER, 1948

      A HUGE PART OF THE SYSTEM in which we are trapped is the routine of collective bargaining.²³ In contracts that last anywhere from three to seven years, unions trade preservation of wages, pensions, and health insurance for significant concessions on workplace protest and the boss’s ability to run his business as he damn well pleases. The result is cutbacks in pay and benefits for which unions bear most of the blame, a decline in our power, and the perception by workers, inside and outside the labor movement, that unions can’t be the change agents that workers want them to be.

      Much of this is reinforced by our lousy labor law regime. But this is not an area where we are helplessly shackled to an out-of-date model. No, we’re still following Grandma’s pot roast recipe even though our kitchen looks nothing like hers.

       The Treaty of Detroit

      Unions bargain like it’s still 1950. That’s the year the United Autoworkers settled a landmark collective bargaining agreement with General Motors that set the postwar pattern for labor relations. It’s often called the “Treaty of Detroit.”²⁴ The agreement covered an unprecedented five-year period. It guaranteed there would be no work stoppages during that time. It gave wide latitude to management’s rights to direct its business, setting product prices, for example. It guaranteed workers’ wages that would keep pace with the cost of living and rise with productivity. It included a private welfare system of employer-paid pensions, health insurance, and other fringe benefits. This probably sounds awesome to a modern reader. But it involved significant trade-offs that have only worsened with time, and it was not the goal with which the union started.

      The union began the postwar period with an audacious demand: a 30 percent wage increase accompanied by no rise in the price of cars.²⁵ This demand was put forth by Walter Reuther, then a vice president of the union, a few weeks after the Japanese surrender that ended the Second World War. At the time, people were understandably worried that the country would return to an economic depression once wartime spending on production was phased out. Reuther was convinced that the key to staying out of a Depression was to put more money in workers’ pockets so that their rising living standards would drive the demand for consumer goods and keep the factories humming.

      This was a demand for income redistribution. It’s the demand that earned Reuther the sobriquet “the most dangerous man in Detroit.” He was so christened by George Romney (father of Mitt), who headed the auto industry association, because “no one is more skillful in bringing about the revolution without seeming to disturb the existing forms of society.”²⁶

      Workers who had long experienced price increases in food, shelter, and consumer goods that eroded whatever wage gains they were able to win rallied to the cause. The strike, which began on November 21, 1945, was the first time that the UAW completely shut down production at all of GM’s facilities. Workers at Ford and Chrysler stayed on the job, so that GM would lose business to its competitors and be more likely to settle what the union hoped would be a pattern for the other car companies.

      But the UAW was not the only union on strike. The bitter winter of 1945–46 saw a strike wave that put two million workers on picket lines. All the strikes were motivated by the same kind of worker demands for a bigger slice of the pie.

      When the Steelworkers signed a deal with U.S. Steel that gave its members an 18½ cents an hour raise, with a corresponding rise in the price of steel, a pattern was set. Most strikes came to an end within a few weeks of the steel settlement, with similar raises. The GM strike lasted 133 days, the longest of all the strikes that winter. For their efforts, the GM workers got a penny more an hour than the Steelworkers, but GM still raised the price of its cars.²⁷

      That was a one-year contract. Most collective bargaining agreements were one-year deals back then, and they were fairly bare bones. They were basically an agreement over what that year’s wage rates would be, with a dispute resolution process spelled out for the period of a truce in which the union promised not to strike.

      For every year that followed, the UAW would single out one of the Big 3 auto companies for strike preparation and wage and benefit demands that aimed for significant, permanent improvements in workers’ standard of living. In 1949, Chrysler bore the brunt of a 104-day strike after refusing to match Ford’s fully paid pension. Out of this annual turmoil came the Treaty of Detroit. General Motors wanted five years of labor peace, and the UAW made them pay for it with pensions and health insurance.

      Unions had begun to negotiate fringe benefits during the Second World War. After the War Labor Board froze wages to combat inflation, it exempted fringe benefits from the restrictions. This “Little Steel Formula” gave unions wiggle room to make some material gains for their restive members.²⁸ СКАЧАТЬ