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Though Walter Reuther might rally the rank & file telling them it was just an old-fashioned strike, he knew better. It was not a strike for union recognition; it was not a strike of desperation. It was not a strike against outrageous working conditions or starvation pay; no one was starving.
It was a new kind of strike. The workers' demand for more pay had the old familiar ring, and there was even precedent for the union's demand that the company open its books so that its employes could determine its capacity to pay. What made it new was that Walter Reuther had based his arguments on the sweeping effect an increase in pay in the vast motor industry would have on the economy of the country; he said that better pay in the auto industry would step up wages everywhere, take the nation to higher production and abundance.
Four days after V-J day, U.A.W. had asked for its 30% pay increase. Reason: it wanted to keep peacetime take-home pay exactly where it had been during the war. As its primary argument, the U.A.W. did not use the normal reason that it wanted its members to live better. It said (Walter Reuther speaking) that it wanted everybody in the country to live better, and the way to do it was to keep all wages up and all prices down. The U.A.W. was determined to be the guinea pig in this full-economy experiment. It admitted that maybe G.M. could not pay a 30% wage increase without increasing prices. But to have this proved to its satisfaction, the union wanted the company to open its books.
General Motors' answer was stated by Vice President Harry Anderson in a radio debate with Walter Reuther. Said he: "When we sell our products at competitive prices, buy our materials in competitive markets and pay high wages to our employes by all of the usual standards of high wages, what we may make after taxes is a fair profit for our investors."
That profit, Vice President Anderson said on another occasion, is none of the union's business and furthermore the company did not open its books even to its 426,000 stockholders.
That seemed to be that. But negotiations went on, usually around a huge table in Detroit's General Motors Building. There was a battle of handouts, in which the language got more violent. A strike loomed more & more imminent.
Follow the General. If it came to a strike, the union wanted it run by Walter Reuther. With the possible exception of John Lewis, he is the most resourceful labor leader on the U.S. scene. He is on the sunny side of middle age (38), above average in schooling (three years in Wayne University), a skilled phrasemaker. He has worked by hand at the trade he represents. He took out three years (1933-35) to work and study labor conditions in Germany, Russia, China and Japan.
He has gone through the rough & tumble of union organizing (along with U.A.W. Vice President Dick Frankensteen, he was unmercifully beaten by Ford agents in the Battle of the Overpass of 1937), and he has weathered the skull-busting of union politics (a middle-of-the-roader in union politics, onetime Socialist Reuther is under constant attack from the Communists within the U.A.W.).