From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 24, 12 June 1950, p. 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The contract with GM that has been signed by the United Auto Workers has two sides to it, as has been pointed out in Labor Action last week and in the article on this page: the gains for the workers which it registers, on the one hand, and the price (the long-term tie) on the other.
This contract was, by and large, a victory for the UAW. It has been hailed on all sides as setting a precedent. The question is: a precedent for what?
The magazine Business Week, a big-business publication, is fully aware of both sides too. In its May 27 issue it writes in its Washington Outlook column:
“The General Motors contract with the UAW-CIO ... could keep the general wage trend on the rise. As long as one big union is getting increases, the others aren’t going to let up.”
That’s right! That is the pattern which the GM contract has got to be made to set. by the labor movement. As the same magazine points out in its news story on the contract:
“A lot of observers figure that this new UAW deal will set the pace for bargaining in the electrical industry – especially in plants held by the CIO International Union of Electrical Workers. They figure that, since GM’s UAW agreements usually establish the pattern for GM’s IUE dealings, the same thing will happen again. And then they expect that IUE may use the GM deal as a model for other pacts that it may make.”
Which is the pattern – wage gains or long-term contracts? A danger is that weaker unions, presented with tire “model,” can be more easily euchered into long-term contracts without even the compensating gains won by the UAW. All the more reason why the UAW leadership had and has the duty of clearly explaining to its own members (and the labor movement) that the five-year “model” is no pattern for labor!
Finally, Business Week, instill a third place, points sharply to another side of the five-year feature:
“GM has bought five years of comparative labor peace. Its workers, with. nothing to fight over for the next half decade save minor grievances, will almost forget they are union men. By 1955, UAW’s GM unit may no longer be a militant bargainer.” (Emphasis theirs)
That’s worded in typical businessman fashion (“nothing to fight over”) and it expresses a wish and a hope, to be sure, but there is no doubt that, from the capitalists’ angle. Business Week has put the finger on.the same characteristic that ought to concern the union men.
The five-year term was the big price for a contract which otherwise represented gains. To present it otherwise, as is the tendency of the UAW leaders, is a danger to the whole labor movement.
Last updated on 7 January 2024