Word: auto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...overpass at the No. 4 gate of Henry Ford's great River Rouge plant." So began TIME's account of the Battle of the Overpass, the confrontation that made May 26, 1937, a red-letter day in labor history and brought to national attention a young United Auto Workers official named Walter P. Reuther...
...W.Va., had the family regularly discuss the role of unions, as well as social and economic issues. Like thousands of others who lived in poor regions such as West Virginia, Walter and two of his brothers, Roy and Victor, migrated to the Detroit area to find jobs in the auto industry. Not surprisingly, they became actively involved in the budding United Automobile, Aircraft and Agricultural Implement Workers Union...
...when he became president of Local 174. It was a tumultuous period in labor history, when the U.A.W. literally fought for survival. Reuther became one of the union's generals, directing a series of sit-down strikes and other guerrilla tactics to try to organize auto plants. He soon gained national prominence and even entry into President Roosevelt's White House. He and his wife May also became great friends of Eleanor Roosevelt's. It's not difficult to see why he was welcome. In 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor, he proposed converting available capacity in auto plants...
Austrian immigrant Bluhdorn took a run-down Michigan auto-parts distributor and built it into Gulf & Western Industries, a $2 billion marvel whose activities ranged from mining (New Jersey Zinc) to movies (Paramount Studios). By 1969, the former $15-a-week clerk was worth $50 million...
...Organization Man (1956) and Vance Packard's The Status Seekers (1959) skewered conformity within the corporation. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) condemned corporate polluters and gave birth to the environmental movement. Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) led to drastic, overdue and life-saving changes in auto-safety standards. The underside of American business was also revealed in such hand-to-mouth, left-leaning publications as I.F. Stone's Weekly and Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker. Why these crusaders, and the subjects they exposed, did not command more attention in the mainstream business press is debatable...