These Are the Good Old Days
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These Are the Good Old Days
Or at any rate, they can be, if the UAW can revive the spirit of the Treaty of Detroit.
Cadillac Square, Detroit, 1949. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.
There was a time when every Democratic presidential nominee knew precisely when and where he’d kick off his final push to the general election: Labor Day, Cadillac Square in Detroit, Michigan. That was because of the influence of organized labor, whose most important union was the United Auto Workers. UAW President Walter Reuther was the most consequential labor leader of the second half of the 20th century, and very possibly the greatest labor leader in American history. Here’s how President Lyndon Johnson ended his Cadillac Square speech on September 4, 1964:
Let us bring the capitalist, the manager, the worker, and the government to one table to share in the fruits of all our dreams and all of our work. And let’s leave for our children, as we enjoy for ourselves [italics mine] the greatest country that man has ever known.
Note that Johnson did not speak in the political dialect of today, which consists of slogans about restoring a golden age, whether it be “Let America be America again” (John Kerry, 2004) or “Make America Great Again” (Ronald Reagan, 1980, Donald Trump, 2016). Johnson stated with confidence that the golden age was today, and he spoke only of bequeathing his Great Society to the next generation. He said this even though, in many pretty obvious ways, 1964 was very far from a Great Society, especially if you were Black, a woman, or LGBTQ.
That sense of confidence was to a great extent the result of a 1950 UAW contract that the sociologist Daniel Bell, then labor editor at Fortune, called the Treaty of Detroit. My latest New Republic piece looks at UAW President Shawn Fain’s effort to restore something like the Treaty of Detroit in the UAW strike that started this morning at midnight. He’s saying, in effect: This country is prosperous and strong, and we don’t have to put up with the crap that the Big Three management are dishing. Fain’s confidence is attractive; I’d love to see it translate into a greater confidence among Democrats that we don’t have to put up with the crap that Donald Trump or Kevin McCarthy or Fox News have been dishing, either. You can read the piece here.
These Are the Good Old Days
So. The UAW cleaned up its act and now has a leader with balls. Good for them. I spent 3+ decades as a UAW member and hourly GM employee and was around for the concessionary contracts in the 80s when management's strategy for competing with the Japanese (We'll throw them back into the sea) had the company standing flatfooted in a corner getting its brains beat out, their competitive strategy indicating how little grey matter was actually there to beat on.
Was there for another 20 years and never got made whole on those, either.
We had a common saying in the shop: You can take everything GM ever *gave* you and stick it in your eye and not even blink. It was all fought for by the union and then earned by the workers. Corporate largesse at the big 3 has never extended below the top ranks of management. And them pleading poverty in both good years and bad is just how they play the game.
It's heartening to see that Fain's got a pair. Busting up the Billionaire Economy. I like it.