A Reminder of Auto Workers Past

I received this note through an auto worker's list and got the author's permission to put it on this blog.

Richard

I raised the question with my grandfather a few years ago about whether labor unions had grown too powerful. I relayed stories of General Motors employees I knew in Ohio who bragged about punching in and leaving the plant or getting a United Way assignment that took them off the line for months at a time.

There are plenty of accounts of more serious abuses, but those are the ones I heard directly from a proud UAW veteran.

My grandfather, who was 93 at the time, listened and didn't say much. The conversation moved to other things, the weather, the fall crops, who had died that week and whether I remembered him or her (I usually didn't.)

Then, without much in the way of a transition, he launched into a story. He talked about working on the line at General Motors briefly in the early '30s. I had heard about how hard life was on his Branch County farm then and how he and his friend, Howard Garman, landed jobs at a GM plant in Pontiac. They got an apartment there, and drove home on weekends to work the farm and see their families.
Marshall Cranson

I had also heard that he became very sick with pneumonia around that time. He was in an oxygen tent in his bedroom in the farm house outside of Coldwater, and Dr. Culver visited everyday. He and my grandmother didn't have money to pay all the doctor bills, but the doc told him not to worry and to just make payments when they could. "Pay the folks who are crowding you the worst," my grandfather recalled Dr. Culver saying.

What he hadn't told me was that he was working at GM when he became sick. He hadn't been there long but he had established a bond with his fellow workers. He was no doubt a valuable employee for GM. I know his work ethic since I grew up watching him drive off six days a week with his dump truck and backhoe, installing septic systems, tiling fields, digging trenches for plumbers. He would return home each night in time to gather eggs and work in the garden.

Later, long after he helped send me to college, I watched him commanding the controls of his backhoe and shoveling trenches well into his 80s.

So when he was too weak to stand at his auto job, his coworkers helped cover for him. They let him sit and rest until a foreman came around, then they would lift him and help steady him at the line. "They didn't have any sick time, see, so if you didn't come to work, you didn't have a job," he explained.

The UAW would not be formed for a few more years, and paid sick leave was much farther in the future. So without paying dues or formally committing to a bond, my grandfather's fellow workers helped out a brother.

Eventually, he became too sick to work and was confined to bed. Despite Dr. Culver's best efforts, my grandfather nearly died that winter. But somehow, as you've no doubt surmised since I'm here, he did recover. Things picked up on the farm, and he paid Dr. Culver in full.

When he finished the story, he didn't scold me to be careful about how I talk about labor unions and what he liked to call "working guys." He was content to let the story speak for itself.

Whether U.S. automakers get federal government funds or not, this will be remembered as another watershed moment for the United Auto Workers. The staunchest opponents of the bridge loans say they want more concessions from workers. Many Republican senators, mostly from southern Right-to-Work states, have made it clear that their lack of support for the bill is all about the UAW.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., blamed the UAW for not taking enough concessions and "blowing up" the deal.

It begs the question of how many of those senators, their parents, and their parents' parents, benefited from the blood and sweat of labor organizers. It's difficult to deny that many people working in non-union jobs have pay and benefits based on a scale once negotiated by a union.

The divide hasn't changed much from the UAW's founding 73 years ago. Many business owners and leaders see organized labor as anti-capitalist and a threat to free enterprise. That's over-simplified.

But does that mean labor is off the hook for the image of the Big 3 as stuck in the past and too slow to adapt? No.

Did most union leaders ignore obvious signs about the future and conspire with auto executives to reap short-term gains from gas-guzzlers while Japanese automakers got a jump on hybrid technology? Yes.

My grandfather died last year and would have turned 99 today (Friday, Dec. 12.) The allegory he shared a few years before his death was the first thing I thought of this morning when I awoke to hear the auto rescue deal had collapsed in the Senate.

I wish he were here because I'd love to hear his wise take on the debate over whether to use taxpayer funds to keep the Big 3 afloat. I suspect he would be conflicted as many of us are.

But I doubt he would bash the workers.

E-mail Jeff Cranson: jcranson@grpress.com