Trouble at River Rouge

In the sweltering noonday heat, 62,000 United Automobile Workers streamed out of the gates of the Ford Motor Co.'s sprawling River Rouge and Lincoln plants and onto the picket lines. C.I.O. loudspeaker trucks rolled into place. Square white placards carried the message: FORD IS ON STRIKE. It was the first mass walkout at Ford since 1941, when a bitter, ten-day strike forced stubborn old Henry Ford to recognize the union. This time U.A.W. had been painfully rallied by an old, three-alarm cry: "Speed-up!"

In a private dining room of Detroit's uptown Rackham building, U.A.W.'s scrappy, redheaded President Walter Reuther, his right arm still in a splint from a gunman's shotgun blast (TIME, May 3, 1948), battled to the last minute to force Ford to terms. As the walkout began, Reuther tried to tell newsmen what the fight was all about.

The trouble, he said, centered in the vast "B" Building of the 1,096-acre Rouge plant, where assembly lines normally spill out between 330 and 350 Fords every eight-hour working day. For several months, Reuther said, Ford had been speeding up the assembly line without consulting the union or adding more workers. Reuther called this "an unsolved grievance." Ford denied the union's charges, suggested arbitration as provided by the contract. Reuther countered that the arbitrator would have to be "part doctor, engineer and astrologer."

But Reuther's heart was clearly not in his work. With new contract negotiations coming up within a week, he would have preferred to save the strike weapon to push through the union's 1949 demands for wage increases, pensions, and a health program. His hand had been forced by the tough, Communist-led faction in U.A.W.'s huge, 59,000-member Rouge Local 600, which had snowballed the speed-up into a major issue of union politics.

To win a recent election, Local 600's President Tommy Thompson, lukewarm friend of Reuther, had been forced to ride the issue even harder. When Local 600 voted 30,000 to 4,000 to call the strike, Reuther's international board at first stalled on authorizing the strike.

But like it or not, Reuther finally had to go along. Reuther could only hope that Ford would find a way to take him off the hook. This week, as the paralysis of Ford's River Rouge complex threatened to make thousands of other Ford workers idle, Reuther suggested, and Ford agreed, to resume negotiations.

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