AUTOS: The First Target

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In determined and confident tones, the powerful United Automobile, Aircraft and Agricultural Implement Workers (C.I.O.) read out the declaration of war. Said the union: the auto industry must raise wages 30% to make up for the loss in take-home pay caused by the return of peace, i.e., the loss of eight hours of overtime when the week was cut from 48 to 40. The industry, said the union, must raise wages without raising auto prices,* which have not yet been fixed.

If the pay raise is not granted, said the union, it would strike one automaker and close all his plants and keep them closed. The spectacle of those tight-shut, silent plants, said the union, should be a lesson to the rest of the industry.

First Assault. Which automobile company would be the target for this all-out assault? For a day, the union kept mum on its choice. Then wily, redheaded Walter Philip Reuther, U.A.W. Vice President announced the first objective: General Motors Corp.

The union had timed its stroke with the care of a general planning an invasion. It could hardly have picked a better time for itself, a worse one for G.M. Swamped by $2 billion in contract cancellations immediately after V-J day, G.M. had sweated and strained to reconvert its 102 plants all over the U.S. It had the biggest job of all U.S. industry; some 35% of the entire reconversion job of the nation. By working night & day, G.M. had cleared acres of tools from its plants, nearly completed installation of hundreds of miles of conveyors, set up dozens of assembly lines. Now the back-breaking job was almost done. The new lines were running in Detroit.

This week, from the spanking new assembly plant in Detroit, where only two months ago G.M. had been building tanks, the corporation rolled out a glistening new Cadillac. It was the first car G.M.'s production lines have turned out since February 1942. It looked much the same as the 1942 model, although G.M. bragged that its sleek body contained 63 improvements.

G.M. had planned to be ready soon to produce all of its cars. Pontiac was scheduled to start rolling off the lines in a week. Buick a week later, and Chevrolet and Oldsmobile in two weeks.

Reconversion had gone so well that G.M. had confidently set its production sights high. In the next year it had hoped to turn out from 1,328,000 to 1,770,000 cars, sell them at prices "somewhat" above those of 1942.

Then suddenly came the U.A.W. declaration of war. How many autos would G.M. be able to make now? How many could the industry make? The U.S. had a big stake in the answers, vastly bigger than the mere desire for new cars. One out of every seven persons in the U.S. depends on the industry in some manner (rubber workers, filling-station operators, etc.) for their living. And G.M. was almost half (47%) of the auto industry.

On the 24th Floor. The crisis between the world's biggest union and the world's biggest automaker would not be settled in Detroit. It would be settled high up on the 24th floor of G.M.'s building near Manhattan's Columbus Circle. There, in the paneled office of G.M.'s board chairman, Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., all G.M. problems eventually come home to roost.