Reuther, Walter

Reuther, Walter (1907–1970), labor leader.Walter Philip Reuther was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, the son of German immigrants. His father, a trade unionist and socialist, taught his sons that workers needed unions and capitalist society needed reform. A diemaker, Reuther worked for the Ford Motor Company (1927–1932) and then spent three years abroad, including a stint in a Soviet factory. Back in Detroit, he organized for the infant United Automobile Workers (UAW), served on its executive board, and participated in its strikes, often in collaboration with his younger brothers Roy and Victor. In May 1937 Reuther and other UAW organizers were brutally beaten by Ford Motor Company security thugs in front of a Ford plant.

From the directorship of the UAW's General Motors Department (1939–1946), he became the union's vice president (1942–1946) and, in 1946, its president (until 1970). Concurrently he headed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (1952–1955) and was vice president of the combined AFL‐CIO (1955–1967). A Cold War leader of the anticommunist left, he helped expell communist‐dominated unions from the CIO in 1949.

An eloquent speaker, Reuther was also a bold strike strategist and nimble negotiator. During his presidency the UAW won numerous benefits for its members, including cost‐of‐living and productivity wage increases, pensions, health coverage, and supplementary unemployment benefits during layoffs. The union brought auto workers a middle‐class living standard and protection from some hazards of an industrial economy. As a social democrat, Reuther sought a more egalitarian society, enlisting himself and the UAW in efforts for social betterment, culminating in the Great Society and civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. Breaking with other labor leaders, he opposed the Vietnam War. Despite his untimely death in a plane crash, Reuther's legacy lived on in the UAW's continuing commitment to social reform.
See also Anticommunism; Automotive Industry; Labor Movements; New Deal Era, The; Sixties, The; Socialism; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

John Barnard , Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers, 1983.
Nelson Lichtenstein , The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor, 1995.

John Barnard