National Affairs: Titans’ Tempers

General Motors and the United Automobile Workers were off to a bad start in their wage negotiations. Both titans sat down suspiciously at the conference table. Newsmen, barred from the room at company insistence, could hear U.A.W.’s red-headed Walter Reuther in a long, haranguing monologue, guessed that company representatives were listening in stony silence.

Unable to get much sympathy in the tense atmosphere of the conference room, both sides took their case to the public. Walter Reuther called a press meeting, re-delivered his speech:

¶ The union needs a 30% pay rise to keep take-home pay for a 4O-hour peacetime week as high as it was in wartime.

¶ Due to wartime expansion and technological improvements, the company could grant the 30% rise and still make a fair profit without raising its selling prices. (If the company could prove otherwise, said Reuther, he would gladly scale down his demands.)

¶ Unless workers’ incomes are kept at wartime levels, they will not have enough purchasing power to support a high level of production, and a depression will result.

Next day General Motors President Charles E. Wilson called his own press conference, presented his own arguments:

¶ The demand for 30% more pay cannot be met without drastic price increases (see BUSINESS).

¶ If the demand is granted, other workers will demand the same increase, farmers will want higher prices, production costs and the general price level will go still higher.

¶The only way to increase take-home pay to wartime standards is to adopt a 45-or 48-hour week during the postwar period of high consumer demand; the longer work week would increase production by 20%, would permit the country to pay higher wages without increasing prices.

¶ “The featherbedding principle of more pay for less work is unsound. . . . [There will be no depression] if the people of our country are willing to work for the things they would like to have.”

Whatever the merits of Wilson’s plan, it held no hope of settling the controversy: labor will never willingly give up the 40-hour week it fought so long to write into law. Reuther, hopping mad, jumped back into print with a reply that made nobody happier, did nothing to add to Walter Reuther’s stature.

“[It is] a gigantic lie that higher wages mean higher prices and higher prices mean inflation. This is the Hitler technique of the big lie.”

The first week of negotiations had only raised tempers.