Word: reuthers
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...months he signed up only 78 members, half of them in the Kelsey-Hayes Wheel plant, which Reuther decided to strike. "We needed drama," he later explained. "We had a big Polish gal who had fainted on the assembly line. We assigned her to 'faint' again. Someone else was to shut down the assembly line." Next day the Polish girl fainted on schedule, the switches were pulled, and the cry arose: "Strike! Strike!" Soon the plant's 5,000 men were milling around Reuther, who delivered a rousing speech while an anxious manager tugged at his coatsleeves...
...Reuther has displayed the winner-take-all talents of a Commando leader in his strike strategy. In 1939, to save strike funds, he pulled out General Motors tool-and-die men at exactly the right moment to stop all production; the other workers, technically nonstrikers, collected state unemployment compensation. In 1937, during the bitter, G.M. sitdown at Flint, Mich., he helped to organize the seizure of a key building and stop production...
...company shut off the current in the building," Reuther said later, "and it became so cold that it was unbearable. Powers Hapgood, the organizer, and myself crawled on our bellies along the railroad tracks to go beyond the Army lines, and told state officials that the men planned to start fires in an attempt to keep warm. The heat was turned on and the lights were turned off. 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...
When the 1946 union convention at Atlantic City came around, Reuther was ready to take on the Communist-line clique that controlled the U.A.W.'s president, R. J. Thomas. Day and night, hundreds of delegates argued and battled over the Communist issue; bloody brawls between the factions broke out on the boardwalk. When the vote came at last, the Communists and their followers lost; by the narrowest of margins, Walter Reuther beat R. J. Thomas for president of the U.A.W...
...victory cost the Communists more than the U.A.W. Emboldened, the C.I.O.'s late President Phil Murray acted at last to cut the deep-seated Red rot out of the C.I.O. : eleven Communist-controlled unions were expelled and have since withered. Phil Murray, who once rated Reuther a bumptious redhead, eventually be came his friend and ally. When Murray died in 1952, Reuther ran for C.I.O. president. His campaign divided the C.I.O. bitterly. As usual...