Word: frasers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Carter's first stop was his most important: the United Auto Workers' annual convention, in Los Angeles, where he made a speech to 6,000 delegates, alternates and guests. The delegates had gathered to elect Douglas Fraser to succeed retiring President Leonard Woodcock, the Administration's choice as head of the U.S. liaison office in Peking (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). Although most of the U.A.W.'s leaders were among Carter's strongest union supporters last year, many of them fear that he is abandoning his campaign promises of social reforms in favor of balancing the budget...
With kilt-clad bagpipers wheezing Scotland the Brave in a cavernous hall filled with cheering, dancing and festive hugging, the scene might well have been a nationalist celebration in Edinburgh. But the hoopla last week was in Los Angeles, where Scottish-born Douglas Fraser, 60, assumed the presidency of the 1.4 million-member United Auto Workers at the union's triennial constitutional convention. First came an emotional farewell by retiring Leonard Woodcock, whom President Carter has named to head the U.S. liaison office in Peking. Then, after a brief, symbolic challenge by a black local union officer from Michigan...
Social Goals. Fraser, too, is an emblem of that unity. Like Woodcock, he is a man in the mold of Walter Reuther, the visionary U.A.W. president who was killed in an air crash seven years ago. Once a metal finisher in a De Soto plant, Fraser became a boy-wonder local president and was Reuther's administrative assistant for most of the 1950s. As a union vice president in 1970, he seemed a likely choice to inherit "the Redhead's" post, but lost out when the union's executive board recommended Woodcock by one vote. More gregarious...
...Fraser will have quite a few things to work on too. For instance, he has pledged to continue the union's drive for a four-day work week. On another matter that once seemed equally important -reaffiliation with the AFL-CIO, from which Reuther defected in 1968-Fraser's mandate is less clear. The Los Angeles delegates voted to authorize union leaders to call a special convention within six months to consider the matter, but many members fear that reaffiliation would strip the U.A.W. of too much autonomy. Though contract bargaining time is two years off, Fraser...
...Fraser knows that the union's principles can be perpetuated only by a new generation of leaders. "We have plenty of talent out in the plants and in the shops," he says. "We have to nurture it." Time is running out: by 1983, when Fraser must retire, every one of Reuther's close associates in the U.A.W.'s leadership will have reached retirement age as well...