Word: forded
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...doors opened, flashbulbs flared and newsmen were toppled in the rush. Despite 40 hours without sleep. Reuther radiated his usual brisk, cold-shower glow. He praised Ford's plan for a modified G.A.W. and, after a night's sleep, tackled General Motors. Every day, flanked by U.A.W. Vice President John Livingston and Negotiator Irving Bluestone. Reuther marched into Detroit's G.M. building for bargaining sessions in the big fifth-floor conference room. Late each night they left again with no word of progress. G.M. Negotiator Louis Seaton, director of labor relations, printed and passed...
...Ford was retooling and thousands were laid off, but, after standing in line at dawn daily for a week, Reuther got a job at Briggs (85? an hour). "I looked like I fell off a green apple tree," he later recalled. Soon he got a better job ($1.10 an hour) at Ford as a tool-and-die leader bossing 40 men. He discovered his own talents. He also discovered that he was not very interested in making money...
...ideas. When the Depression hit Detroit, he reacted with a surge of Socialist hope and a sense of historic urgency. Excitedly, he joined picket lines and soapboxed at breadlines, organized soup kitchens and leftist student clubs. In the 1932 presidential campaign, he mounted a rear platform on his old Ford coupé and campaigned for Socialist Norman Thomas...
Breaking company commandments, he tried to organize Ford workers. Soon after Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932, Walter Reuther was fired by Ford. He and his brother Victor withdrew their savings (some $900) just before the 1933 bank closing and sailed on a world "tour of social engineering." The brothers got to Berlin just in time to see Hitler's Reichstag fire. In eleven months they bicycled through ten countries, sleeping at farms and youth hostels, visiting mines and factories-"studying life," said Walter. They got visas to Soviet Russia and worked for 16 months with other...
...Again we went out and reported to officials that the men planned to make torches of oil-soaked waste rags. The lights were lighted again." After 44 days, the U.A.W. won the strike, organized General Motors and within a year had 400 contracts covering most carmakers, except, notably. Ford (where company police beat up Reuther and his associates during 1937's "Battle of the Overpass"). In 1941, with war production booming, Ford capitulated after a ten-day strike. Ever since then, the U.A.W. has been virtually unchallenged in its control of automobile labor. In postwar strikes, the automakers never...