Word: reuther
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Murray has long expounded labor-management cooperation, believing that labor can show management many a trick to slick up its lagging machine. He fathered the Reuther plan for speeding up aircraft manufacture. He himself has made a survey of steel and vows he can show steelmen how to increase their production by 30% without expanding their present facilities. Whatever the practicality of the Reuther plan and the Murray plan, both support Murray's claim that labor, having won a seat at the council table with industry, is not content to behave like a captious outsider, but is willing...
...Defense Commissioner Knudsen had long been hammering away to get that capacity into use, had a specific plan under way to do so (by last week, contracts had been let for four plants to put together bombers from assemblies and engines made in part by the automotive industry). Mr. Reuther had probably overstated the immediate adaptability of automobile plant machin ery, the possibility of "500 planes a day" any time soon. Many motormakers undoubtedly underestimated their own potentialities, hung back from the sacrifices that would be required. Aircraft manufacturers wanted to keep as much defense pie for themselves as possible...
Last week many a laborite, many an other citizen simply concerned for defense, boiled & roiled over the cold shoulder which Washington seemed to give ClOman Walter Reuther's plan for planes (TIME, Dec. 30). President Roosevelt gave it a polite brush-off at his press conference, indicating that Mr. Reuther's proposal to use idle automobile capacity for aircraft manufacture was just another idea. From the National Defense Advisory Commission, whence any action would have to come, there was nary a peep. Automakers in Detroit said nothing, inspired thumbs-down stories in the press...
...insiders in Washington last week had the impression that Walter Reuther had done very well indeed. According to these dopesters, Mr. Reuther had done his real spadework before he got any publicity. Reason for this conclusion was a certain similarity between Defense Commissioner William S. Knudsen's own, earlier plan to have automakers manufacture aircraft parts with new tools in both new and old plants, and Mr. Reuther's more vaulting proposal to have them also use old plants, tools, machinists. It was known that Big Bill Knudsen had visited his old stamping grounds in Detroit in October...
...ports since last July, the State Department has taken the position that exports of machines not directly needed for de fense should be allowed. But by last week almost every kind of machine-building capacity and labor looked useful for defense. Typically, C. I. O.'s Walter Reuther proposed using excess automaking equipment to make planes, arguing that adapting it to this purpose would take a third of the time needed to build new machines...