Fraser a Shoo-in

When it comes to internal politics, the United Auto Workers is the Switzerland of the labor world--no coups, no bareknuckled infighting, just a neat, orderly succession from one leadership to the next. This relatively halcyon condition dates from the late 1940s, when Walter Reuther, the progressive ideologue who headed the union for 24 years, built a durable power base. After Reuther's death in an airplane crash in 1970, two men vied for his mantle: Leonard Woodcock, the intellectual chief of the union's General Motors division, and Reuther's apparent favorite, Chrysler Department Head Douglas Fraser. When it seemed certain that Woodcock had garnered 13 of the U.A.W. executive board's 25 votes, Fraser bowed out gracefully. Last week he got his reward. Woodcock, who is 65 and must retire this year, announced that after consulting with him, the three other serious contenders for the presidency--U.A.W. Vice Presidents Ken Bannon, Irving Bluestone and Duane ("Pat") Greathouse--all had decided to withdraw. So the 60-year-old Fraser is a shoo-in for election at the union convention in May.

Chief Asset. Though the U.A.W. will not bargain again with the auto industry until 1979, Fraser will soon face some stiff challenges. He must step up recruitment of new members to compensate for losses that the union has suffered because of automation of car plants and the move of many auto factories to Southern areas hostile to unionism. He also must placate the U.A.W.'s skilled workers, who are clamoring for the right to veto contracts even if they are acceptable to assembly line people. Fraser's chief asset in running the union will be his great popularity; he is among the most admired men ever to serve the U.A.W. Rank-and-filers have never considered him a "pork-chopper," their term for a high-hat leader. They like his unpretentious ways--he often wears a turtleneck shirt--and candid talk. Sample: when "job enrichment," the idea of making workers' jobs more rewarding psychologically, was a fashionable subject in the early 1970s, Fraser remarked bluntly that the best way to enrich an auto assembler's job was to give him more paid time away from it.

The sentiment came naturally: Fraser is a veteran of the auto plants. Born in Glasgow, he came to the U.S. at six. Though his electrician father managed to work on and off through the Depression, Fraser recalls hopping aboard slow-moving railroad gondolas to knock off a few chunks of coal to carry home for heating. After graduating from high school in Detroit, he went to work at Chrysler's De Soto plant and, faithful to his father's socialist leanings, quickly drew notice as a union agitator. By age 26, he was president of his local, where he tried to boost membership by serving beer; at 30, he was an international representative; by 34, he had caught the eye of Reuther, who took him on as an administrative assistant.

Fraser has been highly active in Michigan politics and was once asked by prominent Democrats to run for the Senate; he declined. With his wife Winifred, a Ph.D. who teaches psychology at Detroit's Wayne State University, he lives in a small town house in a downtown Detroit urban-renewal area. He has two children from a previous marriage, is an inveterate reader and intermittent balletgoer.

Salt-and-pepper-haired and slim --he has trimmed down by cutting ice cream out of his diet--Fraser should be more of a public personality than Woodcock. "Doug is much more charismatic than Leonard," says a friend of both men. "He's much more flamboyant." He is also a more forceful and engaging speaker, who is likely to follow more effectively in Reuther's path as an apostle of social change. He backed liberal Democrat Mo Udall in the primaries.

In one crucial area Fraser might well subvert Reuther's legacy. In 1968 Reuther paraded his union out of the AFL-CIO, charging that the federation had become too conservative. Now the U.A.W. is tiptoeing toward reaffiliation. There are major stumbling blocks--the biggest is just how much autonomy the auto union could retain--but Fraser might conceivably preside over a reconciliation. If that happens, he could some day become a formidable contender for the top job at the AFL-CIO.

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