Walter who?

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http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1996401,00.html

Viewpoint
How the UAW Can Get Its Horsepower Back
By Sasha Reuther Monday, Jun. 14, 2010

At the United Auto Workers convention that opens Monday, June 14, job No. 1 will be to install a new leader to follow Ron Gettelfinger, whom a Detroit News columnist last week called "the most consequential UAW president since Walter Reuther."

Walter who? To a younger generation more familiar with the UAW's embattled present than its heroic past, that declaration may provoke questions. The answer is that Reuther was the leader of a powerful social movement, a man considered so dangerous to the status quo of his time that he was the target of an assassination attempt. Back then, the fight to create America's middle class was a revolutionary struggle. (By comparison, Gettelfinger had the much more defensive role of saving the UAW from extinction.) Reuther, running the union from 1946 to 1970 as a family dynasty along with his brothers Roy and Victor, won unprecedented protections for working people, set a standard for collective bargaining and drove the U.S. economy to new heights. Today's UAW, after making repeated concessions to automakers and suffering huge job losses, is running with much less horsepower. Its membership stands at 355,191, down from a peak of 1.5 million in 1979.

Can a humbled UAW ever again be a social force? That's a question relevant to me personally — Walter and Roy were my great-uncles, Victor was my grandfather, and I'm working on a documentary about the trio called Brothers on the Line — but also to working-class Americans who need stronger voices on their behalf. At a time of abuse-of-power scandals among such giant corporations as BP, Toyota, Goldman Sachs and even Johnson & Johnson, it's clear the balance in our economy has tipped too far toward the behemoths that organized labor once challenged. Traditionally, the UAW was a fearless advocate for people in the middle, both as workers and consumers. Back in the mid–19th century, that role even called for physical courage, not just the fiscal kind. Both my grandfather and great-uncle survived shotgun blasts through the windows of their homes, leaving Walter with a mangled arm and my grandfather with a glass eye.

Flipping through my grandfather's scrapbooks, mining the labor archives at Wayne State University in Detroit, cracking open film canisters untouched in 50 years, one thing I can say for certain is that the UAW once had a loud and definitive voice in public affairs. No matter what the issue — civil rights, urban development, health care, the environment — Labor would weigh in, typically with progressive, long-term positions. Walter Reuther felt it was crucial that the union was about more than just another nickel in the pay envelope. "It has had a social vision, economic goals," Berkeley labor expert Harley Shaiken told the Wall Street Journal. "That link was fractured with the economic recession, and now they need to get that back."