| 摘要 | The United Auto Workers has gone on strike against General Motors. Once upon a time, within my living memory, this would have been — was — front-page national news. When the UAW went on strike against General Motors in 1946 and 1970, GM was the nation’s largest employer and the UAW one of its largest labor unions. Some 343,000 UAW members went on strike in 1970, 22,000 of them in Canada, and the strike lasted 67 days. This was during what turned out to be the last months of a recession.
In contrast, just 46,000 UAW members went out on strike this week. The work stoppage at GM has had an impact on suppliers and factory communities, but it’s orders of magnitude less on the national economy than during the strike 49 years ago.
I have noticed some thoughtful writers urging a return to the postwar economy, with its high wages, generous fringe benefits and job guarantees. As the old saying goes, nice work if you can get it. But dependence on one company assumes that company will remain of similar magnitude or only grow larger over time. That was plausible in 1970 (it was the great theme of John Kenneth Galbrath’s 1967 bestseller The New Industrial State), when General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler seemed to be as dominant in the U.S. auto industry as they had been a generation or more before. But it’s no longer plausible today.
Back then, it was assumed that wage settlements reached by industrial unions and giant employers would set a pattern that would be followed, with higher pay and higher prices, through very large parts of the economy. Presidential administrations followed the negotiations closely, hoping that strikes would not cause or prolong recessions and that the reverberations from a settlement would not prove inflationary.
Forty-nine years later, nobody thinks these negotiations will have a significant effect on the larger economy. UAW strikers in 1970 constituted four-tenths of 1 percent of the work force—about 1 of every 200 workers. UAW strikers today constitute three-hundredths of 1 percent of the work force — about one out of every 3,300 workers.
One other big difference: The UAW president in 1970 was Leonard Woodcock, who succeeded to the position after Walter Reuther, president from 1946 to 1968, died in a plane crash. Woodcock and his ultimate successor Douglas Fraser continued the austere institutional culture instilled by Reuther, in which union leaders received relatively low pay and perquisites and were held to the highest standard of honesty. As I noted earlier this month and as a Washington Examiner editorial noted yesterday, that culture seems to be extinct, with UAW officials accused of or in some cases already found guilty of corruption.
The definitive history of the 1970 strike is The Company and the Union, by William Serrin, a Detroit Free Press reporter when it was first published in 1973 and later a reporter for the New York Times. Serrin criticized the UAW for not gaining more in wages and fringe benefits and argued, in an introduction to a later edition, that it was ludicrous to think that any auto company was threatened with bankruptcy. He was proven wrong on that. But he also made the point that both the union and the company did little or nothing to make assembly plant work less rote and routine, in line with the theories of Frederick W. Taylor that workers should be treated like animals and only required to perform the simplest tasks over and over again. Here, the foreign-owned (and especially the Japanese) auto companies had more enlightened management ideas which the U.S. based companies ultimately tried to imitate, sometimes with resistance from some (not all) UAW leaders, who preferred the adversarial approach encouraged by U.S. labor laws. On this point, Serrin was way ahead of his times.
Personal note: I lived and worked in Detroit at this time and knew Serrin. At the time, I thought he was right that the auto companies were financially impregnable and wrong that a non-Taylorite, Japanese-style, cooperative labor-management relations would work better. I was exactly wrong on both counts. |
