Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Fraser was fired from Everhot for union activity. The work force was filled with stool pigeons in those days, and he had obviously talked to the wrong man. A foreman told Fraser he could save Fraser’s job if Fraser would only stop working for the union. Fraser thanked him and instead started looking for another job. He found one with Chrysler, first at Dodge Main, and then at the DeSoto plant, where he was a metal finisher. In his first year there he worked one month and was laid off for the next eleven. He arrived at the height of the New Deal, when the autoworkers’ union was just coming to power. Because he was young and literate and well-spoken, he quickly became a union leader. Most of his fellow workers were Poles and Italians who had trouble with the language, and they were less confident of their place both in America and in the factory. They were nervous about challenging authority; he was not.

  In 1939, Fraser became the shift steward, the representative of some two hundred people. His job, he knew from the start, was to stand up to Ed Remsnyder, the general foreman in charge of all the other foremen. He was an intimidating figure. He kept his desk not in an office but on the plant floor. He never talked to the workers, and he never smiled. His power came from his silence, from the way that he sat at his desk, always scowling, his eyes surveying the plant. Periodically he would summon one of the foremen and point to a worker, and the foreman would return and either bawl out the worker or fire him. Everyone in the place, foremen and workers alike, was afraid of Remsnyder. It was not unusual for workers to switch to the second shift, with worse hours, in order to escape his gaze.

  The New Deal had given far greater protection to workers, but it was as if the reach of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal fell just short of the territory governed by Ed Remsnyder. This was his domain. The laws here were his, as yet undiluted by modern labor legislation. If you came to work here, you left the New Deal outside. Only if Fraser could stand up to Remsnyder, he knew, would the workers take heart and would this plant become a civilized place. In 1940 he got his chance. Fraser’s shift was working on fenders, and because of the poor quality of the steel and the poor stamping machines, the fenders always came out badly wrinkled. The job of Fraser’s shift was to take the wrinkles out. It was the worst kind of backbreaking work. There was no shortcut to it. They could do fourteen a day, and barely that. Then Remsnyder announced that they had to increase their production and turn out sixteen a day. The anger among the men was intense; it was more than they could do. Fraser had an idea. He decided they should go to twelve fenders ą day. It was critical, he told the other workers, that they give Remsnyder no excuse to retaliate against them and fire anybody. There could be no early quitting, no prolonged trips to the men’s room. Everybody had to work as hard as before, but this time they would produce only twelve. For a week everyone on the shift followed Fraser’s game plan to the letter. It was an invisible slowdown. The men all seemed hard at work, there was no detectable drop-off, and yet only twelve fenders a day were produced. Out of the corner of his eye Fraser could see Remsnyder watching the floor more closely than ever, scowling, calling his foremen over. Yet they could not pin anything on anyone.

  After a week Remsnyder called Fraser over. He gave him a hard look. “Okay,” he said, “you can keep it at fourteen.”

  It was Fraser’s first victory as a labor leader, and his most precious one. From then on he knew that that was what he was going to be. He was smart and tough, and, unlike Reuther, who was always so serious, he had a deft charm that served him well. By the time he was twenty-six he was the head of a local.

  That, Doug Fraser often thought, was a very different era. It was one of the ironies of American society that success and affluence loosened the ties that bound men and institutions. When he was young and poor, everyone had been united by hardship. He first started noticing the change in the attitude of the younger workers in the late sixties and early seventies. It was not something, he knew, that had happened overnight, he was sure it was cumulative, but at some point he and a few other members of his generation realized there was something of a crisis. Part of the change, he believed, was the effect of Vietnam and Watergate; there was a new skepticism, even cynicism, about all institutions. It had begun with the children of the upper middle class and had taken a little less than a decade for itself to work into the children of the working class. By the early seventies it was a problem for factory managers and union representatives. There was a new iconoclasm, a change in the nature of loyalties, and a new view of work and of money.

  The older generation of workers had seen in their lifetimes the fruits of the UAW’s negotiating victories. They owned their homes, had two cars and all the most modern kitchen appliances, and often owned boats and summer cottages. All this they associated with the UAW. The new generation, Fraser began to learn, was less thankful and more suspicious. Their alienation extended not just to the workplace but to the union as well. They accepted the results of negotiations not as victories but as a given. The comparison they made in their lives was not with a harsher America and a brutal workplace but with others who to them seemed to have a better deal—the college students who protested a war they did not have to go to, the company executives who made hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and bonuses, the people they saw on television sit-coms who were rarely blue-collar and who seemed to have pleasant, middle-class jobs, nice suburban houses, and pretty wives and never had to go to work in a noisy, exhausting, spiritually depressing factory. Work seemed less important to these young people, and money seemed less important too. They complained above all of too many hours of work, of too much overtime. It was as if the local UAW officials were no longer their friends but their enemies.

  Nothing brought it home more clearly to Fraser than an incident at Chrysler in the early seventies. Fraser was the head of the UAW’s Chrysler division, Leonard Woodcock was still president of the union, and a UAW official named Cliff Earl had the job of meeting regularly with the membership listening to grievances. In the past that job had been prized, but by the early seventies, Earl was becoming increasingly shaky. The meetings, he said, had turned ugly. There was no pleasure in going before the locals. These men were supposed to be Cliff Earl’s allies, his fellow workers, but they were treating him as a representative of a hostile force. The tone was surly, the mood often mutinous, and the anger often seemed focused on things the union was powerless to control. What these young men were complaining about—the larger frustrations of their lives—was beyond the reach of the UAW. What he actually could attain for them seemed unimportant to them. Finally he went to Fraser. “You’ve got to find me another job,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore.” So Fraser had told Woodcock that they had to do something about Earl, that he was about to have a nervous breakdown, and a switch was made: Earl was given a job dealing with the problems of retired workers. He had in one moment switched not just jobs but generations. A few weeks later Fraser ran into Earl. “How do you like the new job, Cliff?” he asked.

  “Wonderful, Doug,” Earl said. “I was at a meeting for six hours yesterday, and would you believe it, no one called me a son of a bitch.”

  Fraser had plenty of evidence that a major change was taking place in attitudes toward work—for example, the company statistics displaying a sharp rise in absenteeism. But the glaring case in point was what happened in 1974 after he helped settle a strike against Chrysler at the Sterling Heights stamping plant. Because of the strike the Chrysler pipeline was dry, so Chrysler scheduled full shifts for both Saturday and Sunday, double time for everyone, which meant on each of those two days a worker could pick up an additional $100. That Saturday, Bill O’Brien, the Chrysler labor vice-president, called Fraser at home.

  “Doug, you won’t believe this goddam thing,” he said, “but we’re paying double time, and we’ve only got a fifty percent turnout.”

  “Jesus Christ, Bill, get me a pair of gloves,” Fraser answered, “and I’ll get out there myself.”

  The incident was important
, for the indifference of the new worker toward the job and toward that much money was as much a puzzle to the employer as it was to the union leader. The new workers were less materialistic in a pure sense than the old ones, and less accepting of authority. Because of new techniques of birth control, they were not, as their parents and grandparents had been, heavily burdened by family responsibilities at an early age. Their wives often worked. There was often less dependence upon the paycheck. Around them a new white-collar, college-educated service society was rising, people who did not get their hands dirty or pay many dues, who made more money while never loosening their ties, and that tempered whatever gratitude they might have otherwise felt. A job on the line in an auto plant had always been a tough one, a son-of-a-bitch job in the vernacular, a job one did because there was no alternative and celebrated only because it paid much more than anything else that was available. Now more than ever it seemed to suffer by comparison with other work possibilities in America. More and more the men on the line suspected that everyone in America but them had some sort of deal going. The younger workers either had more options in life and were willing to exercise them or, in other cases, like that of the black workers at the Jefferson Avenue plant, they had very few options and were bitter about that.

  Fraser himself liked to tell the story about a worker in the Chrysler stamping plant at Twinsburg, Ohio. A young diemaker there, who had just graduated from an apprenticeship program, had a terrible attendance record. He worked faithfully, but only four days a week. But the plant was on a full schedule, going seven days a week, and because of that there was a desperate shortage of diemakers. If it hadn’t been for that shortage, Fraser was sure, the young man would have been fired. The foreman at the plant argued with the young man, cajoled him, tried everything. He finally turned to the plant manager in desperation. “You’d better talk to him,” he said. “I can’t get anywhere.” So the plant manger went over to the young machinist and found him, in full working regalia, grinding down a part. The manager tapped the worker on the leg, indicating he wanted to talk to him. The worker flipped down his face shield.

  “Why do you work only four days a week?” the manager asked.

  “Because I can’t make a living working three days a week,” the young man said, and he flipped the shield back up and returned to work.

  Attitudes like those were hard for men of Fraser’s generation to understand. They had fought for the right to work every day, and for the benefits. On the carefully planned budgets of men and women with Depression mentalities, a day worth $100 was something to be cherished. It was hard for the UAW in the seventies to deal with the rising absenteeism and the rising alienation of its own people, their rebellion against the union itself. To the younger men, some critics of the UAW said, the union was the same as the company, simply the junior partner in a relationship filled with resentment, one more large, distant, insensitive institution.

  Fraser was struck by the change. In the old days the role of the union leader was relatively easy. The times were harder, the rules more primitive, and it had not been hard to rally the workers with a kind of us-against-them approach. Now it was different. Now you didn’t try to be a labor boss, you tried to be a leader, and you listened more. You looked at the membership, he said, and hoped they were following you, not chasing you. He had a sense that the problem that the union faced was something that the nation as a whole faced; his life in the UAW had taught him that the factory was no different from the rest of the country but in fact was a microcosm of the country. That did not augur well, for these alienated, complacent workers, whether they knew it or not, were under challenge from purposeful, disciplined workers around the world, and their jobs and their whole way of life were in the balance. One memory kept recurring to Fraser. He was walking through a plant in Tokyo with a Japanese labor leader and a management official just as the workers were about to take their lunch-time break. Fraser checked the clock and could see that the workers were readying their lunches. Then the whistle blew. In America their little group would have been stampeded as the workers scrambled to get away from the workplace and go eat. But here the manager simply raised his hand as if to say stop, and everyone around them stopped. It was if they were frozen, no longer people but lifelike statues. Fraser’s group passed through, and only then, when it was gone, did the workers come to life and go off to their break. In America, Fraser reflected, half with pleasure and half with melancholy, if a manager had tried the same thing, the members of the group all would have been knocked on their asses by the workers.

  30. CITIZEN NADER

  ONE OF THE PROBLEMS afflicting Henry Ford in those years was that he felt himself under attack, particularly by a government that he considered intrusive, one that seemed more and more determined to tell him what to make and how to make it, a government that seemed to prefer the word of outsiders—meddlers, in his view—to that of good professional businessmen like himself. Nothing symbolized that to him more than the rise of a young reformer named Ralph Nader. When Henry Ford was truly angry and speaking his inner truth, not the sanitized truths that came out of his public relations machinery, he turned to the subject of Nader with special vehemence.

  Ralph Nader was thirty-two years old in 1966 when he took on General Motors. He was a solitary, distant, wary person who confided in no one and whose closest friends were amazed at how little they knew about him. A complete loner, without an institutional base such as a university appointment or an office in government, he was the most unlikely of young men to challenge a giant industry. Yet his timing was perfect. The auto industry was ripe for criticism, and many Americans, without knowing it, were ready for a citizen’s challenge to an entity that for them had come to symbolize an increasingly haunting aspect of American life—bigness and power without apparent accountability.

  In 1966 the American auto industry was at the absolute height of its power, so rich and mighty that its arrogance, its certainty that it was America, was almost unconscious. Its leaders were so carefully shielded from the world around them that when they sinned in the construction of the cars, they did not seek to correct the sin but rather sought to find the flaw in their accuser. At the same time the society had become so affluent that a broad-based consumer’s protest—unthinkable in more difficult days, when people were grateful for jobs—had become a genuine possibility. Nader himself later described the consumer revolution he led as nothing less than a qualitative reform of the industrial revolution. It represented that to many members of the middle class and particularly to the upper middle class. (Almost all of Nader’s most passionate recruits were from the upper middle class, in effect the children of the management class with which he was contending.) For them, more was no longer necessarily better; it was the quality of life that mattered—that and the responsiveness of large institutions, whether public or private.

  It was as hard for Nader to understand the titans of Detroit as it was for them to understand him. He was constantly puzzled by their lack of feeling for their consumers, as he termed their customers. He could not see why they did not make cars safer or why they did not listen to their own engineers. They in turn were puzzled that someone so talented, so well educated—Princeton, Harvard Law—would want to knock the very system that was now open to him instead of taking his rightful place inside it, as they had taken theirs. Part of the conflict was generational. The top executives of Detroit were mostly men who as boys had suffered through the worst of the Depression, and many of them had lived difficult boyhoods. (Jim Roche, the head of GM, who was to be Nader’s chief adversary there, had been orphaned at twelve and furthered his education by taking correspondence courses; Lynn Townsend, who was the head of Chrysler, was also an orphan; and Philip Caldwell, who was soon to head Ford, as a boy watched his father lose the family farm.) They were only too glad to join large, prosperous companies and trade some measure of personal freedom for the remarkable security these companies offered. That someone from the class they worked so
hard to join would dispute its privileges was to them almost un-American. Roche once referred to Nader as “one of the bitter gypsies of dissent who plague America.” The remark showed how someone at the top of the Detroit power structure, like Roche, perceived Nader: To Roche, Nader was a rootless, insubstantial person who owned no property, had never married, and contributed little to those around him in the conventional sense. He was not a citizen as the executives of GM defined citizenship. By the GM definition, a good citizen took the best job he could with the most powerful company around, bought a lovely suburban home (which he could not quite afford, leaving him even more dependent on the corporation), had two, possibly three children, and owned at least two fairly new cars, one of them a station wagon. He hoped to buy an even better home. He was a pillar of the community, serving on Community Chest drives with his wife alongside him. That, of course, was not the only definition of a citizen. To many others Nader himself became the quintessential all-purpose national citizen. One of the several biographies of him was in fact entitled Citizen Nader.