The UAW Returns to Its Strike Roots in Dayton Action

Ground-breaking strikes in U.S. history have characteristically occurred during periods of union weakness, not strength. In 1937, when a few hundred auto workers sat in at General Motors’ complex in Flint, Mich., the vast majority of workers neither belonged to the United Auto Workers nor felt sufficiently secure in their jobs to risk a more traditional strike. The National Labor Relations Act had yet to be upheld in court, so the union resorted to guerrilla tactics. The workers prevailed--and initiated an industrial union movement that, in time, gave America its postwar middle-class majority.

But it was hardly smooth sailing after Flint. Two years later, splits within the union and the effects of the 1937-38 recession had reduced the UAW’s strength at GM to 6% of the auto maker’s work force. The new head of the union’s GM division--a 32-year-old former tool-and-die maker named Walter P. Reuther--conceived a bold strategy to restore the union’s strength: He would call out his fellow tool-and-die makers, the skilled craftsmen whom the company could not easily replace, in an effort to shut GM down. It was a high-risk gamble. But within days, GM agreed to recognize the UAW as the sole bargaining agent for all its production workers.

The 17-day strike at two GM brake-parts plants in Dayton, Ohio, that was settled Friday is directly descended from the UAW’s earliest strikes. The balance of power between GM and the UAW that existed for 30 years after World War II is gone, shattered by a new global corporate order and U.S. businesses’ two-decade assault on unions. During this 20-year debacle, moreover, unions frequently were complicit in their own demise, devoting fewer resources to organizing as their membership declined from a postwar high of 35% of the private-sector work force to the current 10.4%.

During the past six months, though, unions have begun to emerge from their Rip van Winkle coma, with the Dayton action signaling that smarter, more strategic, even occasionally victorious strikes are in the offing.

Nowhere has the turnaround been sharper than at the UAW. When Steve Yokich assumed its presidency last summer, he inherited a union that clearly had fallen on hard times. Membership was down from 1.5 million, in 1979, to just 800,000. The UAW was embroiled in a doomed strike at Caterpillar Inc., where it had never had a plausible plan for victory and didn’t even seem to have a workable exit strategy.

Yokich began by cutting his losses. The only choice at Caterpillar was between a quick or a prolonged surrender, so he opted for quick one. But he also embarked upon an ambitious strategy to rebuild his union. He announced that, by the turn of the century, the UAW would merge with steelworkers and machinists to create an industrial union with some real clout. He authorized a series of work stoppages at selected GM factories, both to force the company to hire, rather than compel workers to put in overtime, and to limit GM’s campaign to outsource its parts.

Any strike undertaken in the last 15 years has been an uphill battle. The law has tilted in favor of business; the expansion and diversification of corporations into other markets--and nations--have given employers greater leverage. But Yokich’s strikes have cleverly maximized what strength his union still possesses. With corporations preaching the gospel of “lean is good,” many companies have adopted just-in-time inventory methods that leave them vulnerable to job actions, particularly when their competitors remain unstruck. Dayton was just the latest and most prominent of small strikes the UAW had waged against GM in the past year that exploited the company’s lean-and-mean weaknesses. Eventually, the supply of brake parts ran out and the entire company skidded to a halt, without the union having to reach into its strike fund, except for the two locals in Dayton.

At Dayton, though, the company also decided to stand and fight. Hard-liners on the GM board of directors wanted to make clear the company’s determination to outsource more of its parts. GM makes far more of its own parts than Chrysler and Ford, and its labor costs are correspondingly higher.

When the smoke cleared Friday, the result was a stand-off: GM would go through with its plan to move some of its brake work to a non-union, German-owned plant in South Carolina, but also committed itself to some compensatory hiring and payments, a diminution of forced overtime and continuing investment at Dayton. The battle over outsourcing will be renewed when in the national contract expires.

And yet, a stand-off is a step-up for unions in the new-age economy, in which most unions dare not strike at all. Weak though the UAW remains in comparison with its glory days, the Dayton strike saw a return of one key factor that had impelled the Flint brigade and Reuther’s die makers to victory--public sympathy.

When Patrick J. Buchanan, campaigning in Michigan, throws his support to GM strikers, a seismic shift is occurring in American public attitudes. The media coverage of the GM strikers was the most sympathetic in years. Partly, that’s because the UAW is a private-sector union. As the unions have shrunk, their members are increasingly concentrated in the public sector, where wage increases are linked to tax hikes. Support is far more likely to go out to workers in the private sector, where profits (including GM’s) are at record levels, than to those in the public sector, where the demonization of government continues apace.

More important, though, the anxiety about downsizing, declining wages and the continuing export of American jobs, white collar as well as blue, is finally beginning to register politically, and not simply in a nativist backlash. GM came later to outsourcing than its rivals, and if the company is to embark on that struggle now, with public antipathy to such policies at all-time highs, it may find it will have a tough time succeeding.

But even with a shift in public sympathy and with more able and aggressive leaders guiding unions in the post-Kirkland era, the objective side of the equation--the balance of economic forces and the nature of labor law--still tilts strongly toward employers. Yokich and his crew will need all the ingenuity of Reuther, and then some, if they are to arrest the polarization of the national economy and begin the rebuilding of the American middle class.