Word: reuther
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...which imploded after years of complicity and ineptitude by GM management and the United Auto Workers (UAW), it's more like disintegration. The UAW organized both GM and Chrysler in early 1937 - Henry Ford famously held out four more years. For decades, particularly under the leadership of Walter Reuther, who headed the union from 1946 until his death in 1970, it was able to win concessions from the automakers, bringing its members into the middle class. As long as demand for autos grew in the post-WW II halcyon days, relations between the unions and the automakers were basically quiescent...
...once been the most visionary of American unions. As early as the 1940s, UAW president Walter Reuther was urging the auto companies to produce small, inexpensive cars for the average American. In 1947 and '48 the union even offered to cut wages if the Big Three would reduce the price of their cars. But by the early 1980s, the UAW had entered into a nakedly self-interested pact with the auto companies. After the union's president joined GM's chief congressional lobbyist to defeat a tougher mileage standard in 1990, the lobbyist declared that "we would not have...
...part of the overall restructuring plan put forward by the company, 16 manufacturing facilities in the U.S. will be closed, including four assembly plants, according to Alan Reuther, director of the UAW's Washington office...
...with high hourly wages, lifetime benefits, and a pension will not be part of the economy in the future. That is true. The U.S. manufacturing base cannot be competitive if it keeps the legacy benefits that unions like the UAW negotiated for their members in the years that Walter Reuther ran the union...
...Reuther, who began to worry about rising health-care costs as far back as the 1950s, feared that the auto companies would one day not be able to meet their obligations. That that day is here is one reason the UAW made yet another concession. It reached an agreement with Ford to change the way the company contributes to the retiree health-care fund administered by the UAW. Instead of cash, Ford now has the option of issuing stock to fund up to 50% of the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or VEBA. It means that the health of UAW members...