Piping In a New Chief

With kilt-clad bagpipers wheezing Scotland the Brave in a cavernous hall filled with cheering, dancing and festive hugging, the scene might well have been a nationalist celebration in Edinburgh. But the hoopla last week was in Los Angeles, where Scottish-born Douglas Fraser, 60, assumed the presidency of the 1.4 million-member United Auto Workers at the union's triennial constitutional convention. First came an emotional farewell by retiring Leonard Woodcock, whom President Carter has named to head the U.S. liaison office in Peking. Then, after a brief, symbolic challenge by a black local union officer from Michigan, the U.A.W. delegates approved Fraser by acclamation, reflecting the solidarity that has characterized the union for decades.

Social Goals. Fraser, too, is an emblem of that unity. Like Woodcock, he is a man in the mold of Walter Reuther, the visionary U.A.W. president who was killed in an air crash seven years ago. Once a metal finisher in a De Soto plant, Fraser became a boy-wonder local president and was Reuther's administrative assistant for most of the 1950s. As a union vice president in 1970, he seemed a likely choice to inherit "the Redhead's" post, but lost out when the union's executive board recommended Woodcock by one vote. More gregarious than Woodcock, a punchier speaker, a hair more liberal, Fraser signals a change in style rather than substance.

That means, most significantly, that the U.A.W. will continue to uphold the Reutherian philosophy of pursuing social goals no less fervently than higher wages. The union has long championed national health insurance, and both Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter dropped by to affirm their own commitment to that goal (see THE NATION). For all their dedication to social welfare, however, auto workers are among the world's most privileged wage earners; Kennedy quipped at the convocation that just about the only paid holiday the U.A.W. does not get is Groundhog Day, "and if I know Leonard, he's working on that."

Fraser will have quite a few things to work on too. For instance, he has pledged to continue the union's drive for a four-day work week. On another matter that once seemed equally important --reaffiliation with the AFL-CIO, from which Reuther defected in 1968--Fraser's mandate is less clear. The Los Angeles delegates voted to authorize union leaders to call a special convention within six months to consider the matter, but many members fear that reaffiliation would strip the U.A.W. of too much autonomy. Though contract bargaining time is two years off, Fraser has to start persuading white-collar workers that their needs will be well represented. Union organizing has been going poorly at plants relocated in conservative Sunbelt states, and even in the North, younger workers are losing interest in union activities.

Fraser knows that the union's principles can be perpetuated only by a new generation of leaders. "We have plenty of talent out in the plants and in the shops," he says. "We have to nurture it." Time is running out: by 1983, when Fraser must retire, every one of Reuther's close associates in the U.A.W.'s leadership will have reached retirement age as well.

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