What the UAW made

I wrote recently that as part of the auto industry bailout various GOP senators wanted to gut the UAW. I had forgotten a more basic reason: Union members reliably vote for Democrats. And GOP senators would rather commit economic treason than let a Democratic voting bloc pass unchallenged.

On to an article of what the UAW has brought to America. Before I mentioned that it had created the middle class. Here is the story in more detail (even so, this is only a summary).

After Pearl Harbor Detroit's Big Three drew up plans to convert their manufacturing power to the war effort. The UAW also drew up detailed plans -- that would accomplish the conversion even faster.

The UAW contract for 1950 is known as the Treaty of Detroit in which the union agreed to work with the auto companies (in contrast to the battles in the late 1930s) in exchange for lifting workers into the middle class. The workers got retirement and health security, and cost of living increases.

Marxism demands the workers rise up and take the means of production from the owners. The UAW specifically rejected that idea. Even so, and even killing off Marxism in America, 20 years later they were accused of creeping socialism and Communism by the GOP. But that "socialism" brought unprecedented prosperity for everyone and security for the workers. This social contract lasted 30 years.

The UAW provided the incubator for the Progressive Movement by supporting, among other things, the 1963 March on Washington, Cesar Chavez and the farm workers union, the National Organization for Women, the first Earth Day, and even proposed national health care. That last was particularly important because health insurance was seen as a perk of being a union member, not something available to just anybody.

That support of national health care is part of a sorry trend -- the UAW sounds a warning, they are ignored, they are proven right, then get blamed for the company's shortsightedness. Isn't that a measure of effectiveness and success?

Even though foreign auto companies built plants in states where it is hard to unionize, the UAW affects their pay and benefits. These companies have to pay better than other manufacturers both to keep the union out and to keep their workers from heading to unionized plants. Which means if the auto bailout forces a pay cut (to bring them in line with non-union plants) those plants will be able to cut pay too. Perhaps the GOP likes that idea.

The children of UAW members were able to afford college and get white-collar jobs and many even had enough money to see the world.

Personally, the UAW has benefited me. I was not a union member, but I worked for one of the Big 3 for 27 years. Whatever new benefits the union wrested for its members were also given to me. In the last decade or so of my work, the union idea of cafeteria benefits -- the company supplies a broad range of benefits and "flex-dollars" to pay for some of them and we select the ones that are useful to us -- meant that I could "buy" an extra week of vacation each year.

I was puzzled about the attitudes of my boss. He had worked in a factory one summer (long enough to convince him to get good grades in his last two years of college), yet was convinced the union was a leach on the workers. He didn't see what it did for him as a white-collar worker and a manager.