Reuther, Walter

(1907-1970)

   Future labor leader Walter Reuther was born in West Virginia and left school at the age of 16 to work. In 1927, he went to Detroit, Michigan, to work for Ford Motor Company. In 1932, he went to Europe and spent two years working in the automobile industry in the Soviet Union. He returned to the United States in 1935 and in 1936 became a labor organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the United Auto Workers (UAW). He led a successful sit-down strike in 1936 and took part in the Flint Strike in 1937. He was badly beaten by men working for Ford Motor Company outside the River Rouge plant in Detroit. During World War II, Reuther became the UAW vice president and in 1946 president. In 1946, he called upon General Motors (GM) to give a 30 percent increase in wages without raising the price of their automobiles, arguing that it would boost consumption and help avoid a return to the conditions of the Great Depression. In 1948, he won an automatic cost of living agreement from GM and subsequently linked wage rises to productivity.

   Reelected to the UAW presidency in 1947, Reuther took a strong anticommunist position and was a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action. He also worked to establish procedures that would avoid strikes and helped win pensions and health benefits as part of the auto workers’ contracts. In 1952, Reuther became president of the CIO and helped secure the merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1955. However, he withdrew the UAW from the AFL-CIO in 1968 because of what he saw as the organization’s complacency. He was killed in an air crash in 1970.