The UAW Turns 50
The 1.1-million-member United Auto Workers celebrated its 50th anniversary Monday, retaining its reputation as one of the nation’s most innovative unions, willing to experiment with new ideas in labor-management relations that often set patterns for the entire country.
The celebration Monday at Solidarity House, the UAW’s headquarters in Detroit, was attended by AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, UAW officials, political leaders and two of the 200 delegates who were at the union’s founding convention held in Detroit on Aug. 26, 1935: George Addes, retired secretary-treasurer, and Clem Holewinski, former president of Local 12 in Toledo, Ohio.
In its early days, the UAW was among the most militant unions, having to do battle, often physically, against company guards known as “goons” just to gain recognition as the bargaining agent of auto industry workers.
As the years went on, union-management battles continued, but the union won such pioneering programs as the first pensions for hourly employees to be fully paid by the company and supplemental unemployment benefits.
Auto assembly workers now earn a base rate of $13.18, plus about $10 in fringe benefits, making them among the nation’s highest-paid workers.
Today, the union, acutely aware of foreign competition, is concentrating on ways to restore and keep jobs, relegating economic gains to the back burner.
The UAW, under its current president, Owen Bieber, is now experimenting with concepts of labor-management cooperation that, in some cases, partially tie workers’ wages to productivity and profits and give them a significant voice in company decision making. Agreements for the most innovative of such experiments have already been reached with General Motors for its Saturn plant in Tennessee and the GM-Toyota plant in Fremont, Calif., and the union has worked out new, if less dramatic, cooperative agreements with Ford, Chrysler and other companies.
The days of labor-management battles may not be over, but, if the new cooperative relationships work, as Bieber believes they will, the UAW will again have been a successful pioneer in labor relations.
