Word: reuthers
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...ready for a big organizing drive, the C.I.O. is cutting its staff of regional directors from 54 to 13, thus freeing many "porkchoppers" (unionese for bureaucrats) for the all-out campaign. C.I.O. Boss Walter Reuther thinks that the recent practice of going after small companies first, in trying to organize an industry, is wrong. He aims to hit the big ones and expects the little ones to fall in line. Prime target: the chemical industry, and specifically, Du Pont, in which 75% of the employees belong to independent (company) unions...
...next two years." A few days later, the chairman of Congress' Joint Immigration Committee revealed that the President had asked for a re-examination of the McCarran Act "with a view to achieving legislation which would be fair and just to all." ¶Wrote C.I.O. Boss Walter Reuther (who had asked him to call a conference on full employment) that he "firmly" subscribes to "the Employment Act of 1946, [which] reflects a determination on the part of the American people to see to it that the stupidity of mass unemployment never again visits this land...
Cried President Walter Reuther: "We say to the employers: 'We are not going to sign new [contracts] until you put into them guaranteed annual wages for the workers in our basic industries.' " Reuther announced that he had persuaded ten top economists and industrial relations experts (e.g., Harvard's Economists Seymour Harris and Alvin H. Hansen, Wisconsin's Edwin Witte) to serve as unpaid advisers to help smooth out the specific details of workable annual-wage plans...
Actually, Reuther was far behind many farsighted U.S. companies, which long ago established annual-wage plans without any prodding. As long ago as 1946, the Department of Labor counted 196 companies with plans for guaranteeing minimum employment or pay to their workers. One of the most successful of such plans is that of meat-packing George A. Hormel Co. of Austin, Minn. Started experimentally in 1931, it now covers some 8,000 employees. Milwaukee's Nunn-Bush Shoe Co. began its famed "Share-the-Production" flexible annual-wage plan in 1935, has continued it, with slight modifications, ever since...
...Reuther's annual-wage campaign cannot amount to much before 1955, when his five-year contracts with the auto industry expire. Actually, the industry has already taken big steps toward steady employment (e.g., by scheduling retooling during the vacation season, to avoid mass layoffs). But the automakers have opposed formal guarantees because of the fear that Reuther would want them pegged too inflexibly to current wage levels. Unless the wage is tied to prices, the automakers fear they will be unable to cut prices during a recession and still be able to meet payrolls...