AN EXTRAORDINARILY GOOD MAN

AN EXTRAORDINARILY GOOD MAN
By Dick Meister

It was in May of 1970 that Walter Reuther died in a plane crash. But though
he's been dead for 37 years now, the life of the auto workers' leader
continues to hold vital lessons for those seeking to revitalize the American
labor movement.

I came upon him late in his career, and to me he seemed verbose, distant and
a little pompous: a do-gooder who didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't wench;
who did only good things, and always in the artfully arranged glare of
publicity.

He couldn't possibly be as good as those who had known the man for a long
time claimed him to be. But they were right. Walter Reuther was an
extraordinarily good man.

He was, as one of those old friends of his said, the conscience of organized
labor -- a crusader struggling very, very hard against the stagnation he
found in a movement he had helped found, lead, and, finally, had tried to
reform.

Walter Reuther was the conscience as well of a lot of people who never paid
union dues in their lives. I mean those who saw him as the embodiment of
their hopes to change this imperfect society in ways that would better the
lives of those at the bottom of its social, economic and political ladder.
Reuther was their symbol and their champion, more so than any other leader
outside of political office and the civil rights movement.

It was Reuther, as much as any union leader, who brought dignity and
economic security to the mass of Americans, expanding the country's major
concerns beyond the elementary economic concerns that preoccupied most
people in the years before World War II.

Reuther's specific contributions were many. There was the central role he
played in establishing the United Auto Workers Union, over which he
eventually presided. There was his role in forging together the country's
industrial unions and in leading them, as president of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations, in struggles for broad economic and social causes.

There was Reuther's exceptional success in negotiating better wages, hours
and working conditions for the auto workers and in championing, for them and
so ultimately for all workers, such pioneering concepts as the guaranteed
annual wage.

There were Reuther's many efforts to shift the labor movement in new
directions. His last attempt, and surely his boldest, came in 1969 when he
led the United Auto Workers out of the AFL-CIO and into an "Alliance for
Labor Action" with the then-unaffiliated Teamsters Union.

Reuther hoped the alliance of the country's two largest unions could begin
carrying out the programs he had suggested repeatedly to the AFL-CIO, only
to be rebuffed by AFL-CIO President George Meany and the other former
American Federation of Labor leaders who dominated the federation. He hoped,
too, that other unions would join the auto workers and Teamsters in their
joint effort. Teamster leaders were at least as conservative as Meany and
his colleagues, but they were eager to challenge the AFL-CIO and accepted
Reuther's suggestions as a way to do it.

The alliance planned organizing drives among white-collar workers and other
groups,particularly in the South, that the AFL-CIO had been neglecting. But
the new organization hoped to go beyond organizing the unorganized, as
important as that was.

For Reuther was, as his brother Victor noted, "a social visionary who always
related his trade union commitments to other broad social responsibilities
which all Americans could share." The goals of the alliance were nothing
less than a summary of the great needs of the country:

Helping build low-cost housing; developing new job training programs;
unifying the poor and minority groups; improving education and health
services; attacking racial discrimination, poverty, consumer fraud, the
problems of the young and the aged, and urban decay, pollution and other
environmental problems.

The alliance never really got going before Reuther's death and dissolved
shortly afterward. Some of Reuther's fellow labor leaders had scoffed, in
any case, that it was actually nothing more than an attempt by Reuther to
satisfy the ambitions for broad union leadership he had been unable to
realize within the AFL-CIO.

"Walter," they would tell you, "is just being Walter -- all talk and no
action."

Well, they were right about one thing at least. The man could talk. Others
were accustomed to it, after three decades of Reuther-watching, But he was
new to me, and I marveled to see him hold audiences of thousands for an hour
and more while speaking off the top of his head.

I especially remember a talk he gave in 1966, in a dilapidated little
auditorium in Delano, California, where vineyard workers just a few months
before had begun the strike that someday would capture the attention of the
entire country.

I played the sophisticate and smiled knowingly over Reuther's wordy and
dramatic promises to the farm workers. But then came the terrible news, four
years later, of a plane down in Michigan, and I thought back to that cold
December day in the grape country.

I remembered what those words had meant to the penniless, obscure and
powerless band of farm workers who had gathered in the auditorium. There he
was, one of the great leaders of America, promising to "stand with you until
the end."

I may have been fooled, but the farm workers were not fooled. They knew
that Walter Reuther meant exactly what he said. He always did.

Copyright © Dick Meister

Story ID:	2151
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Biography
Location:	Detroit Michigan USA
Year:	1970
Person:	Walter Reuther