Word: reuthers
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...accident," says Valentine Reuther, that three of his four sons became labor officials, all in the C.I.O. It is also no accident that Walter Reuther can debate Detroit's most fluent corporate talent to a standstill...
Ford was retooling and thousands were laid off, but, after standing in line at dawn daily for a week, Reuther got a job at Briggs (85? an hour). "I looked like I fell off a green apple tree," he later recalled. Soon he got a better job ($1.10 an hour) at Ford as a tool-and-die leader bossing 40 men. He discovered his own talents. He also discovered that he was not very interested in making money...
Breaking company commandments, he tried to organize Ford workers. Soon after Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932, Walter Reuther was fired by Ford. He and his brother Victor withdrew their savings (some $900) just before the 1933 bank closing and sailed on a world "tour of social engineering." The brothers got to Berlin just in time to see Hitler's Reichstag fire. In eleven months they bicycled through ten countries, sleeping at farms and youth hostels, visiting mines and factories-"studying life," said Walter. They got visas to Soviet Russia and worked for 16 months with other...
When the workers asked for metal spoons in the stalovaya (factory lunchroom) "like workers in other countries have," the Reuthers machined a batch out of old fender metal. Delighted, the Russians took the spoons home. Soon all were gone. "This under Socialism, comrades!" sputtered a party official. "Sheer capitalistic acquisitiveness!" On leaving Gorky, the brothers traveled 18,000 miles across the U.S.S.R., came home via Japan. At 28, Walter Reuther had completed his education and was ready to get to work in an auspicious environment, Depression-haunted Detroit...
...Strike! Strike!" Labor discontent in the auto industry was erupting in sloppy, bloody, sporadic strikes. Reuther set out in 1936 to organize West Side Detroit for the struggling automobile workers union...