Car workers to strike

In just about every region of the United States, there are two more months of what, in northern Europe, would be regarded as ideal summer weather – in the south and the south-west make it three more months, or four, but it's no news to any of us; this country, or rather this nation, was founded by people of British descent. September and October in the old country were times of mists and mellow fruitfulness and then the wild west wind signalled the approach of winter.

It's a colonial hangover. In New Zealand, there's another example. It might be 80 degrees in some places on Christmas Day but, as a friend of mine remarked, we shall have the holly and the ivy and the greeting cards with snow drawn on them and we shall obediently sweat our way through turkey and stuffing and plum pudding.

So, Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is doggedly accepted as the end of summer, whatever the thermometer says. The time to get back to work and the time for the unions, the steel workers, the airline workers, the automobile workers, to look towards a new contract. The middle of September is the usual deadline and it used to be, through a long stretch of modern history, that the deadline would pass, there'd be no agreement and there'd be strikes, almost always for more pay, better pensions, more paid holidays and so on.

Two years ago, the country was struggling out of a recession and the automobile industry was in a disastrous slump. Nothing like the thousands of lay-offs had been seen since the Great Depression. You know that since the movement of goods across the continent passed from the railroads to the highways, THE barometer of the American economy has been no longer the monthly average of freight car loadings, but the number of new cars pouring out of Detroit.

President Reagan appealed to the automobile workers to exercise restraint in their wage demands, even to take cuts, and they did. Ronald Reagan wasn't the threat to their jobs but the Japanese imports. The general attitude – and it's remarkable to think now that it was a general attitude – was summed up concisely and grimly in the words of one automobile worker, 'We priced ourselves out of the market'.

So, to the outsiders' amazement and the great relief of the manufacturers, the workers in two great companies requested no wage increase in a new contract. In the third company, they went as far as to accept a 15 per cent cut. They were resoundingly praised by President Reagan as fine, upstanding and far-seeing Americans.

Well, in two years there's been a spectacular change. The industry is greatly prospering again. The three main automobile companies reported record profits and the most positive sign of the new prosperity was the fact that the top brass of the automobile companies, managers, vice presidents and the like, voted themselves bonuses running to many millions of dollars. In some quarters, notably among Democrats and liberal columnists, it was called 'an obscene act'.

Some economists and columnists who are devotees of Reaganomics – cut taxes, keep cutting government spending – hastened to explain to shocked onlookers that these multi-million dollar bonuses did not intrude on the profit margin and nobody should think that if the chairman of the board awards himself a million-dollar bonus, it will make a dollar's worth of difference to the pay cheques of the rank and file.

Now whether this argument is defensible, intellectually defensible, or not, it sounded brutally insensitive to many thousands, many hundreds of thousands, of automobile workers who had lived in the past few years, or are still living now, pinched lives and feeling that helpless sort of humiliation which is known only to people in middle life who suddenly find themselves unemployed.

I think we shall look back a year or two from now on the action of the company bigshots as a mistake. A psychological mistake or, to be cold-blooded about it, a howling mistake of public relations. The automobile workers, both those in and out of work – and there are still 140,000 men who've been out of work since 1982 – they're not waiting for another year or two to react to the company managers' bonuses. It has undone the goodwill, the trust that the workers showed in bowing to Mr Reagan's appeal to stay with the old wages or have them cut.

Until a few months ago, when the industry's record profits were announced, the workers, according to surveys, were on the whole loyal to Ronald Reagan. The 40 per cent of them, anyway, who had defied their union leaders and voted for him in 1980 believed him when he attributed the 1981 recession to the Carter administration, to its runaway inflation and its 19, 20 per cent interest rates, whereas the startling economic recovery which nobody denies – interest rates are about halves and inflation has gone from 12 to two per cent – the recovery must be due to nobody but Reagan.

Then came the proud announcement that the automobile industry was booming again in spite of the Japanese invasion and then came the managers' presenting themselves with the million-dollar bonuses. It seems to have aroused an enmity between the bosses and the workers which is common enough in European trade unions, but which has been noticeably absent from American labour relations since the worst days of the Depression in the 1930s. Namely, the belief in a class struggle, or at least the belief that labour and capital are natural enemies.

British labour leaders, I remember, who came over here in the 1930s, when the automobile industry especially was ravaged by picketing violence, by running fights between strikers and company scabs, such labour men – I recall Nye Bevan, in particular – were astounded that labour in America had not founded a political party. Sure, there was a small attempt and a very minor party ran and runs a presidential candidate, just as the farmers' union runs one and the temperance party and the vegetarians, not to mention the single tax party and the Communists. But American labour has always preferred, especially since the great union organising movement of the Thirties, to use its power as an outside bargainer between the two ancient political parties.

The big American labour leaders of the times, John L. Lewis for the miners, William Green for the American Federation of Labor, the Reuther brothers for the automobile workers, they stayed with the traditional conviction that to elevate labour into a national political party would alienate working people from the rest of the electorate by creating a party out of a single issue – employment. They've always preferred to stay on the fringe of politics, like some gorgeous and greatly-to-be-desired bride. They need us more than we need them was the principle, let them come to us. Which, of course, they did.

So, you saw and will see in the coming two months of campaigning between Reagan and Mondale each of them sweating and straining to try and prove that he can do more for the working man and woman than the other.

Well, now, next week, the 15th to be exact, is the strike deadline for the workers of the General Motors Corporation and the Ford Motor Company and, as I talk, the chief union bargainer at Ford says, 'We are not in the same ballpark at this point'. President Reagan still urges the need for wage restraint, but today that's a dirty phrase. The Ford union man expresses the new attitude in a nutshell, 'We shared in the misery. Now we want to share in the prosperity'.

And this time it's not just a share in the record profits by way of what they call a fair and equitable pay rise and better pensions, but a guarantee of stated restrictions on foreign production. That means tough import quotas and a limit on foreign parts. The new element in these contracts is profit-sharing. The unions response has been to call a strike at both companies.

There is, I suspect, a tough time ahead, not just in these negotiations, but a tough time for organised labour. In many other industries, in steel, in machine parts, in the schoolteachers' unions, in, of course, coal mining. There is, apart from their own particular grievances, a general recognition that organised labour is on the ropes. One economist has put it in a, at first sight, puzzling and alarming way. He says, 'Union labour is on the run because labour is losing its place in the economy.'

Now, how can that be? Well, one result of the recession is that the increase in productivity is due more to overtime than to rehiring the people who lost their jobs in the recession. There are still 175,000 automobile workers who have not been recalled and the vast increase in employment in this country, the seven million new jobs in 20 months that the administration understandably boasts about, are mostly unskilled, low-paying jobs, probably a majority of the skilled victims of the recession are now attendants in supermarkets or fast-food chains or running small garages, if they're lucky. Forty per cent of all of them have used up their savings.

So now it appears that the really significant – and could be ominous – thing about the 1981-83 recession is that most of its victims were skilled workers. They are the nucleus of the new unemployed and they are mostly union men. The result has been that today there is proportionately less union labour in the United States than there was in the early 1930s, before the big New Deal union recruitment began. By the time of the Second World War, about 40 per cent of all American labour was organised in unions. Today, it is 24 per cent. In other and starker words, only one American in four belongs to a union.

Walter Mondale, calling on the workers' old allegiance to the Democratic party, could win every union vote and all other things being equal, still lose the majority of working-class votes.

Sooner or later, surely, there's bound to be a second, big movement towards unionising, to restore the workers' stake in the economy? Probably, it won't come this year, but if, next year, or the year after, the country slumps again into recession, I doubt there'll be any more disposition on the workers' part, obediently to share the misery. They will ask the government to do more than its share.

And, at that point, the reaction against Reaganomics and the Republican party could be as palpable as an earthquake.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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