Blue-Collar Catharsis

By William R. Doerner

THE COMPANY AND THE UNION by WILLIAM SERRiN 308 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

The union was the United Auto Workers, an organization that regularly increases the liquidity of its strike fund by selling off gilt-edged securities. The company was General Motors, whose annual sales would constitute a gross national product bigger than that of, say, Switzerland or South Africa if it were a country instead of the largest business corporation on earth. When the U.A.W. struck GM for two grim months in 1970, the U.S. economy nearly stopped dead in its tracks.

Was anything actually settled by the costliest strike in U.S. history? Not much, says the author, a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist who helped cover the strike for the Detroit Free Press. The union won an unlimited cost-of-living escalator clause; but the growing sense of futility attached to assembly-line work--psychologically at least, the real issue of the strike--was barely confronted. The settlement mostly dealt with added pay, a little more vacation, and slightly earlier retirement. Only a year later, worker discontent exploded again at Chevrolet's highly mechanized Vega plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

Author Serrin contends that the fault for the auto industry's blue-collar treadmill lies with the top echelons on both sides. Over the years, the chiefs have grown closer to each other than they are to their respective Indians. This "civilized relationship," as Leonard Woodcock once called it, in practice seems to produce a kind of industrial-age charade in which both parties tend to forget about everyone's long-term interests and settle on short-term gains that are pretty much predetermined.

The book is at its insider's best ex plaining the charade. In one of the strike's darkest hours, GM could easily have arranged a bruising raid on the union's strike fund by demanding some $23 million to keep up payments on the workers' health and life insurance plans.

Instead, management agreed to advance that sum to the U.A.W. in a short-term loan -- in effect helping finance the strike against itself. The company's explanation: GM stood to lose more in public relations points than it could gain at the bargaining table had it ruthlessly pressed its advantage. The real turning point came not through patient haggling but during a secret meeting between Woodcock and GM Chairman James M. Roche, at which both resolved that the strike must be ended before Christmas. After terms had been accepted by the union leadership, GM Head Negotiator Earl Bramblett -- doing what he could to get the rank and file to approve the deal -- dutifully implied that it was extremely inflationary.

In the end, U.A.W. members cheered a settlement that, by Woodcock's admission, could have been won before the contract deadline, which meant that the strike itself was little more than a blue-collar catharsis. Be cause of the cost of the walkout and loss of overtime during the recession, relatively few eligible workers took ad vantage of the "30 and out" early-retirement program that was supposedly their major gain. Employee absenteeism soon returned to its normal 5%, and employee morale does not seem much different from that expressed by the worker who explained his frequent sacrifice of one day's pay a week by saying that was all the absenteeism he could afford.

sbWilliam R. Doerner

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