UAW Faction Erects Roadblock to Industrial Democracy

A disturbing counterrevolution is being mounted in the United Auto Workers against the union’s drive toward industrial democracy.

After 54 years as a leading force in the UAW, Victor Reuther is now a furious leader of the battle against the union’s cautious acceptance of a plan that gives rank-and-file workers a significant voice in making decisions about the way their companies are run.

Reuther, 77, the retired brother of the late UAW founder Walter Reuther, is not alone. Other present and former UAW leaders are denouncing the idea and want to return to the traditional adversarial relations between management and labor.

But most officers of the 1-million-member union finally have accepted the plan that allows workers to join managers as decision makers. It is such a great idea that the counterrevolutionaries should have almost no chance of forcing the union to cling to the old confrontational ways that were indispensable when all companies struggled unceasingly to prevent unionization.

Where industrial democracy has been tried, even on a limited scale, its success usually has ranged from slight to phenomenal. Total failures have been rare.

Still, controversy swirls around it, and the next major battlefield for the counterrevolutionaries will be on the convention floor of the UAW convention in Anaheim in June when the union will elect officers and debate its future.

The dissidents are almost certain to reelect one of their most articulate spokesmen, Jerry Tucker, as a regional director. They hope to add momentum to their cause by electing more officers to top posts, or at least get enough support to slow the real progress being made in democratizing the workplace.

Before the national convention battle, there will be a small but interesting test of the dissidents’ strength. UAW members in Van Nuys will vote today for a new shop chairman, a top union job.

However, the outcome will not be a clean-cut decision on the popularity of workplace power-sharing systems.

True, one candidate, Paul Goldner, opposes the system. The other candidate, Richard Ruppert, supports it. Presumably, a victory for Ruppert would be a defeat for the counterrevolutionaries.

But a key factor influencing the vote could well be the failure of General Motors executives in Detroit to tell the Van Nuys workers everything about the widely rumored plan to shut down the facility soon. Many workers may vote against the candidate supporting industrial democracy because of their frustration with GM secrecy.

Mutual trust and complete honesty at all levels are essential ingredients in true labor-management cooperation.

Yet the critical decision on the life or death of the jobs of 3,800 GM workers in Van Nuys is being made, in secret, in the executive suites in Detroit.

As part of the new power-sharing system, the Van Nuys workers already have new supervisorial roles and full information about the financial condition and productivity of the local facility.

It will be difficult, but perhaps the workers will understand that the demeaning, foolish blackout imposed by top corporate executives about their tentative plans for Van Nuys does not invalidate the strides already made toward workplace democracy.

Workers should not turn away from workplace democracy by voting for people who would take a step backward. Instead, it must be vigorously pursued to help assure the future of the Van Nuys plant and to end the undemocratic way executives in Detroit are dealing with issues such as plant closure.

Potential management abuses of the system are always there. Some companies use minimal power-sharing as a ruse to trick employees into working harder for less money. Some non-union firms use it to persuade workers they don’t need a union to protect their interests even though management actually reserves almost totalitarian control of the workplace.

But most UAW leaders say the need for increasing workplace democracy is so important that they are ready to accept the risks.

Reuther fumes that many UAW leaders are “selling out the workers’ interests for some illusory tidbits of power they gain for themselves.”

He accuses most UAW officials of promoting the idea of workplace democracy by “brain-washing the members because our leaders haven’t the guts to stand up and fight the greed of corporate America.”

But Douglas Fraser, a highly respected past UAW president, says men such as Victor Reuther, Tucker and other “reactionary foes of labor-management cooperation are prisoners of history. They are stuck in the past and see no alternative to the old way of just slugging it out with management.”

Bruce Lee, UAW Western regional director and an architect of the highly successful cooperative team system at the GM-Toyota plant in Fremont, Calif., is certain that “the old-fashioned radicals will be defeated because the old ways just don’t work. We must watch out for management trickery, but learn to work cooperatively with management and work smarter, not harder.”

Reuther is convinced that men such as Lee will be “surprised as hell, by God, when the floodgates break and workers show they no longer trust the leaders who are betraying them.”

Union activist Eric Mann says the cooperative system is badly flawed because “the long-term interests of the working class and business class are inherently in opposition to each other.”

That sounds like old radical philosophy about inevitable class conflict. Of course, the interests of workers and owners are not identical.

But they are not diametrically opposed, either, and new tactics and strategies are needed to give workers more power and a sense of dignity that they rarely have had before.

Industrial democracy offers the best hope so far to achieve that admirable goal.