Word: frasers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Popular in the U.A.W. as a man whom workers can grab by the lapels "for a beer and bull shit," as a union staffer puts it, Fraser is also welcomed by company negotiators at the bargaining table...
...silver-haired six-footer with a deeply seamed face, Fraser, 62, retains the liberal's faith in the American people, but is vocal about his disenchantment with the nation's leadership. Says he: "The auto workers have a feeling that Government could screw up a two-car funeral. What you've got in the House of Representatives is 435 baronies-with a few exceptions -and it is almost as bad in the Senate...
Ideologically, Fraser is further left than his union, a blue-collared bundle of tensions divided on social and economic issues and standing outside the AFL-CIO. During the 1976 negotiations, when he was a U.A.W. vice president, Fraser pressed to have auto workers elected to the Chrysler board. He admits that his bargaining committee "was kind of relieved when I pulled the proposal off the table during the last couple of days." He does not plan to make an issue of it this year, although he admires the West German system of having some workers serve as directors...
Born in Glasgow in 1916, Fraser can remember his father returning home from work in a distillery and lighting the fire with pilfered whisky. He was six when the family moved to Detroit and his father got work in Ford's River Rouge plant. After quitting high school in the eleventh grade because he was "impatient and bored," Fraser got a job packing cork insulation around water heaters; he was fired for trying to organize a union. Later he went to work for 75? an hour at the Chrysler De Soto plant, but left the shop floor to become...
...Fraser is not eager for a strike and he cites the union's modest settlement in 1958, another slumping year for the industry. But the last year that talks were concluded without a strike was 1964, and the two sides are starting out far apart. If a settlement has not been reached by the Sept. 14 contract expiration date, the betting is that Fraser would select General Motors for a strike target rather than Ford or the financially stricken Chrysler...