02-06-2007, 09:53 AM
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#25 (permalink)
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Banned
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Aladdin Sane
It is none of your business how much executives or anyone else in the private sector is paid. It's not your money or your property.
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....LOL.... the wheel keeps turning.... your "sentiments" only fuel the determination of the participants in this never ending, balancing act:
Quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Reuther
.....In 1936 he became president of tiny local 174 (with 100 members), which on paper had responsibility for 100,000 auto workers on the west side of Detroit, Michigan. Reuther led several strikes and in 1937 and 1940 was hospitalized after being badly beaten by strike-breakers. He also survived two assassination attempts during this period; one attack on April 20th, 1948 left his right hand permanently crippled.
He had a highly publicized confrontation with Ford security forces on May 26, 1937, also known as The Battle of the Overpass. By this time, thanks to the sit-down strikes, UAW membership had exploded and Local 174 was a power inside the UAW. He worked with the left-wing Unity Caucus (which included the powerful Communist groups) to defeat the conservative president Homer Martin. As a senior organizer, Reuther helped win major strikes for union recognition against General Motors in 1940 and Ford in 1941.
After Pearl Harbor, Reuther strongly supported the war effort and refused to tolerate wildcat strikes that might disrupt munitions production. He led a 113-day strike against General Motors in 1945-1946; it only partially succeeded. <b>He never received the power he wanted to inspect company books or have a say in management, but he achieved increasingly lucrative wage and benefits contracts.</b> In 1946 he narrowly defeated R. J. Thomas for the UAW presidency, and soon after he purged the UAW of all Communist elements. He was active in the CIO umbrella as well, taking the lead in expelling eleven Communist-dominated unions from the CIO in 1949.
As a prominent figure in the anti-Communist left, he was a founder of the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. In 1949 he led the CIO delegation to the London conference that set up the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in opposition to the Communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions. He had left the Socialist party in 1939, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s was a leading spokesman for liberal interests in the CIO and in the Democratic party.
Reuther delivered contracts for his membership through brilliant negotiating tactics. He would pick one of the "Big three" automakers, and if it did not offer concessions, he would strike it and let the other two absorb its sales. Besides high hourly wage rates and paid vacations, Reuther negotiated these benefits for his union: employer-funded pensions (beginning in 1950 at Chrysler), medical insurance (beginning at GM in 1950), and supplementary unemployment benefits (beginning at Ford in 1955). These labor contracts made automobiles more expensive, but since there was very little competition from foreign brands in his lifetime, the consumer paid high prices, the workers took home high wages, and the companies made high profits......
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