{"id":2014,"date":"2008-12-17T12:31:38","date_gmt":"2008-12-17T16:31:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/?p=2014"},"modified":"2008-12-17T12:31:38","modified_gmt":"2008-12-17T16:31:38","slug":"the-threat-of-the-uaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2008\/12\/17\/the-threat-of-the-uaw\/","title":{"rendered":"The Threat of the UAW"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson has a must-read piece on the United Auto Workers union<\/a>, and why hating unions holds a hallowed place in Republican ideology:<\/p>\n

[B]y the early 1950s, the UAW had secured a number of contractual innovations — annual cost-of-living adjustments, for instance — that set a pattern for the rest of American industry and created the broadly shared prosperity enjoyed by the nation in the 30 years after World War II.<\/p>\n

The architects did not stop there. During the Reuther years, the UAW also used its resources to incubate every up-and-coming liberal movement in America. It was the UAW that funded the great 1963 March on Washington and provided the first serious financial backing for C\u00c3\u00a9sar Ch\u00c3\u00a1vez’s fledgling farm workers union. The union took a lively interest in the birth of a student movement in the early ’60s, providing its conference center in Port Huron, Mich., to a group called Students for a Democratic Society when the group wanted to draft and debate its manifesto. Later that decade, the union provided resources to help the National Organization for Women get off the ground and helped fund the first Earth Day. And for decades after Reuther’s death in a 1970 plane crash, the UAW was among the foremost advocates of national health care — a policy that, had it been enacted, would have saved the Big Three tens of billions of dollars in health insurance expenses, but which the Big Three themselves were until recently too ideologically hidebound to support.<\/p>\n

Narrow? Parochial? The UAW not only built the American middle class but helped engender every movement at the center of American liberalism today — which is one reason that conservatives have always held the union in particular disdain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s all true.\u00c2\u00a0 And it’s an important reminder for people like me, a liberal who generally holds unions in low regard.\u00c2\u00a0 Unions are hardly the entire solution to labor’s problems, but they’ve earned a prominent seat at the table.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson has a must-read piece on the United Auto Workers union, and why hating unions holds a hallowed place in Republican ideology: [B]y the early 1950s, the UAW had secured a number of contractual innovations — annual cost-of-living adjustments, for instance — that set a pattern for the rest of American […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policy","category-society"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2015,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions\/2015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}