What Walter Wants

Peeling off his navy blue overcoat, the United Auto Workers' Walter Reuther stepped briskly along the fifth floor of General Motors' Detroit headquarters, blinked at photographers' flash bulbs and wheeled into pastel-colored conference room No. 5-202. There, trading handshakes and he-man jokes with 13 deputies of his own U.A.W. and 15 G.M. bargainers, he sat down to hammer out the auto industry's first new labor contract since 1955. Cracked Reuther to G.M. Vice President Louis G. Seaton, as he slipped behind a chipped wooden table: "Well, it's the same old table." Grinned Seaton: "We can't afford a new one."

The grins vanished when Walter Reuther spelled out what he thought General Motors could afford. In ten hours, the U.A.W. negotiators rattled off a package that could cost G.M. $555 million a year. Demands:

P: A 25% slice of all pre-tax profits above 10% of the value of shareholders' equity, i.e., the value of stocks plus surplus. Had the plan been in effect last year, each U.A.W. worker would have drawn a bonus of $591 at G.M., $500 at Ford, $323 at Chrysler. Estimated cost to G.M.: $275 million.

P: A wage boost of 3.9%, which would average 9-c- an hour, reflecting the 3.9% average yearly increase in productivity of U.S. manufacturing and farm workers between 1947 and 1956 (although last year's productivity went up only 1.6%). Cost to G.M.: $63 million. P: Better unemployment benefits totaling, together with state benefits, 80% of take-home pay for a full 52 weeks. Auto-workers now get 65% for the first four weeks and 60% thereafter for a maximum of 26 weeks.

P: Full company-paid medical insurance for workers and their families (v. 50% payment at present); higher pensions, tied, like wages, to cost-of-living escalators; moving allowances and severance pay for workers dislocated by plant shifts.

All told. Reuther's proposals would boost autoworkers' wages and benefits by 35-c- to 45-c- an hour (not counting the bonus), almost twice as much as the 21-c- package the union won in 1955. Said Reuther: "It's the biggest package ever."

"Dead Serious." G.M. countered by calling for a continuation of the present contract, which would provide a flat 6% yearly wage boost, no additional benefits and no profit-sharing. Automakers speculated that Reuther himself has little hope of winning a profit-sharing agreement, is only using it as leverage in the main fight for a hefty wage raise, despite all his "dead serious" talk of finding "a way by which wage earners can achieve their equity, their measure of social and economic justice." Reuther may even have trouble gaining much of a pay boost. With skidding sales, the industry can make a good case that it cannot afford it. Furthermore, there are rumblings of discontent within Reuther's own U.A.W. In all, 115,000 autoworkers are laid off. and the rest sorely want to hold onto their paychecks. Last week automakers reported that they were getting hundreds of heretical, anti-Reuther letters from workers worried about a strike.

To Strike or Not? At week's end the G.M. talks were recessed for a fortnight, and Reuther got ready to make his demands on Ford and Chrysler. The hard bargaining will come when the current contracts near their expiration dates between the end of May and early June. And though union and management are poles apart, everyone hopes a strike can be averted. At most, the U.A.W. may walk out on one automaker, most likely Ford. A strike against G.M.. the biggest employer, might well flatten the U.A.W.'s $50 million strike chest, while a strike against lagging Chrysler could wreck Chrysler. But Reuther, who notes that the industry has 900,000 unsold 1958 models, is not eager for any strike at all. Says he: "The effect of a strike would be to deplete those inventories. We are very realistic and practical people, and we are not going to fall into that trap."

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