STANDING in the rain to collect their strike pay—$30 a week for a single man, $40 for a family—the strikers in their baggy cotton pants and frayed shirts evoked an image of the 1930s. The line stretched around the grimy headquarters of United Auto Workers Local 235 in Hamtramck, Mich. Occasionally, one of the men raised a clenched fist in salute, or another flashed a smile for photographers or a V-for-victory gesture, but mostly they were strangely silent. Across the street, pickets patrolled Chevrolet's gear and axle plant, carrying signs that proclaimed: UAW ON STRIKE FOR JUSTICE, or INCREASED PENSIONS or, simply, EQUITY. Said one of the pickets, Robert Jackson: "They told us the strike would last till next year. We're going to see Christmas on these picket lines, but we're fighting for a purpose."
In that atmosphere, a strike that could turn out to be the most significant one since the 116-day walkout of the steelworkers in 1959 began last week in Detroit. The nation's largest industrial union, the 1,600,000-member United Auto Workers, invoked labor's ultimate weapon against General Motors, the world's largest manufacturer. In a classic test of raw power, the strike pulled 344,000 workers off their jobs in 145 U.S. and Canadian plants. Every day that it lasts, G.M. says, the company will lose $90 million in sales, the men will be deprived of $12 million in wages, and federal, state and local governments will be denied $20 million in taxes.
Crusades in Conflict. For both sides, the costly contest was almost a jihad, or holy war. To Leonard Woodcock, the quiet, scholarly leader who took over as president of the U.A.W. last May after Walter Reuther died in an airplane crash, the strike was a call to arms for a younger generation of workers who know nothing of the union battles of the '30s. In meeting after meeting, he has told the men to dig in for a long, bitter siege, warning that they will have to go without strike pay after the union's $120 million war chest runs out in about seven weeks' time. "We have to be prepared to fight, as we used to do, in an old-fashioned way," he told workers. "A union with money is a bureaucracy. A union without money is a crusade."
G.M.'s management is holding out in what it sees as a higher cause: halting runaway wage increases. Chairman James Roche declared: "We must restore the balance that has been lost between wages and productivity, for upon this balance rests our national ability to cope with inflation, to resolve the crisis of cost. This in turn determines our capacity to achieve the lofty national goals we have set for ourselves."