Free Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein

battles were to be fought and won in the political arena. Previous labor leaders jealously guarded their independence from government. But Reuther rose by combining old-school shop-floor organizing, legislative-floor politicking to create a friendly legal climate, and precinct work to elect the politicians that believed in Walter Reuther’s grand left-wing vision, inherited from his father, that business, labor, and government, working together, could more rationally run industries than could private enterprise alone. He never saw his dream fulfilled. But with more and more labor-friendly politicians in Washington and the state capitals willing to back him up, he did manage to negotiate the most splendid contracts—and some of the most liberal laws—American workers had ever won. And that, to his enemies, was bad enough.
    Reuther became head of the UAW’s General Motors division in the 1940s. He understood the massive, exquisitely calibrated production system of America’s biggest corporation better than most of its executives. Knowing that just one small wildcat strike could render half a dozen plants useless, he began consolidating control of his members so that no wildcats would take place. Thus able to promise America’s largest corporation what it wanted—labor peace—he was able to gain unheard-of concessions in return: a contractual “cost of living adjustment”; then, in 1955, a historic “guaranteed annual wage” whereby, for the first time, workers would be paid during layoffs—65 percent of full pay when state unemployment compensation levels (which UAW lobbying helped increase all around the country) were added in.
    Walter Reuther soon became Public Enemy Number One in the offices of the kind of factory owner who supported Clarence Manion. Bargaining concessions won at the top of the industrial system had a tendency to trickle down as more and more workers demanded the same perks. But if the GMs of the world could afford these concessions—and, indeed, welcomed them because they greatly stabilized a company’s labor relations—smaller manufacturers insisted they could not. Moreover, these company leaders believed with religious certainty that in this plague of Reuther-style contracts, which increased wages year by year regardless of productivity, were recipes for inflation. The contracts were also un-American: “Strict seniority without regard to individual merit, equal pay for unequal work,” bathroom fixtures magnate Herbert Kohler said, “—these and similar bargaining demands of union leaders treat the workers en masse, not as individuals.” If on top of supporting unions the government
unbalanced its budget with reckless spending thanks to unions’ undue influence in the political realm, inflation might race out of control. Union-shop provisions were the keystone of the entire edifice—so the right-to-work fight was the centerpiece of the effort to do “Reutherism” in. That 1955 GM contract, Clarence Manion railed in one of his first broadcasts, “moved Mr. Reuther close up to the supreme dictatorship of American organized labor as a prelude to a try for the presidency of the United States.” It was “offered at the point of a strike threat to practically every big industry in the country by a labor monopoly that is exempt from the antitrust law and can, therefore, callously disregard the public interest that every other person, corporation, and organization is obliged to serve.” (Reuther, of course, saw it just the opposite: the entire goal of the labor movement was to dignify the individual by removing him from the vagaries of market competition. This was the public interest.)
    Manion and Kohler could rage at Reuther. But he was a useful adversary; years later conservatives should have lifted a glass in his honor. There would have likely not been much of a conservative movement without him as