Loss of a Healer

During his lifetime, United Auto Workers President Walter P. Reuther was regarded by many businessmen and rival union leaders as a dangerously disruptive force. Yet since his death two weeks ago in the fiery crash of a small chartered jet in Michigan, it has become increasingly clear that he was one of the healers that U.S. society sorely needs right now. Of all prominent labor leaders, he maintained the closest ties to the poor, the black and the young --those frustrated groups whose sense of alienation is fed by the suspicion that U.S. institutions, including big unions, care little for their aspirations. At the same time, Reuther kept the sort of control over his own union that many other labor leaders are losing in this potential Year of the Big Strike. The impact of his abrupt removal from the scene will be felt in the auto industry, the labor movement and throughout the nation.

Every Last Penny. Reuther helped to lead the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, spoke out almost alone in labors high command against the Viet Nam War, strongly supported Cesar Chavez's grape strikers. He bubbled with social ideas: for a national medical-insurance plan and for a program to build low-cost housing for the poor, using assembly-line techniques. At the end of his life, he was talking about adding some form of pollution control to the demands that the U.A.W. will serve on the auto companies when bargaining begins this summer. Not all his enthusiasms bore fruit, but the respect that they won is illustrated by the list of eulogists at the memorial services for Reuther and his wife. They included Michigan's Senator Philip Hart, a leading spokesman for consumerism; Sam Brown, the Viet Nam Moratorium organizer; John Gardner, chairman of the National Urban Coalition; and Mrs. Martin Luther King. Probably no other labor leader could have drawn a similar lineup.

Many of the U.A.W.'s 1,600,000 members were unenthusiastic about Reuther's wide-ranging social ideas, but they trusted him completely to squeeze out the last possible penny in bargaining. He had little trouble convincing the rank and file that any settlement he negotiated was the best possible. In his 24 years as U.A.W. president, he made many bargaining breakthroughs that once seemed radical but have since become commonplace: long-term contracts, company-paid pensions, cost-of-living escalators, supplementary benefits for laid-off workers, a form of guaranteed annual income. Auto workers' wages rose from the 850 an hour that Reuther earned as a young tool-and-die maker in 1926 to an average of $4.03 now. His successor, with no such rec ord to call on, will be under far more rank-and-file pressure to prove that he is driving a hard bargain.

The U.A.W.'s 25-man executive board will make the choice this week, probably from among these leading candidates:

> Leonard Woodcock, 59, director of the union's General Motors and aerospace departments, which include almost half of all U.A.W. members. Woodcock, a graying, spectacled intellectual who looks more like a college president than a unionist, already has begun some discreet politicking for the job among U.A.W. local presidents. He recently was felled by tuberculosis, but has recovered.

>Ken Bannon, 56, director of the Ford department. His major bargaining experience goes back to 1949, when he helped Reuther negotiate the auto industry's first pension plan. As the only candidate who is not yet a U.A.W. vice president, Bannon is the dark horse.

> Douglas A. Fraser, 54, head of the Chrysler and skilled-trades departments. A deft, canny bargainer, Fraser had been considered the man whom Reuther was grooming for the succession --but not until 1974, when Reuther, at age 66, would no longer have been eligible to run.

> Emil Mazey, 56, the U.A.W.'s No. 2 man as secretary-treasurer since 1947 and now its acting president. Articulate and sober-minded, Mazey controls the purse strings and is popular among local presidents, but he has had little bargaining experience.

The union's next president will inherit a conflict that even a bargainer of Reuther's skill and prestige would be hard-pressed to resolve peacefully. The three-year contracts in the auto industry expire Sept. 14. Responding to the surge of militancy from union men who feel that their wage gains have been eroded by inflation, Reuther had talked up huge wage and pension demands. He also was building a $120 million war chest that could carry the U.A.W. through a ten-week strike against General Motors, or a longer one against Ford or Chrysler. Auto men, hurt worse than most other industrialists by this year's business downturn, were talking of countering with tough demands of their own to reduce absenteeism and loafing on the job. Reuther's death will make the negotiations harder because his successor will be eager to establish a name for himself with a rich contract. He will also be able to call on the workers to "win one for Walter."

Firmer Command. To the often-squabbling U.S. labor movement, Reuther's death may bring a period of surface calm. Although he helped mightily to negotiate the A.F.L.-C.I.O. merger in 1955, Reuther was a constant disturber of the peace within the federation, needling its officials to conduct bigger organizing campaigns and do more to help civil rights and other causes. In exasperation over the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s slowness to heed these pleas--and no doubt in frustration over his own dimming chances to become A.F.L.-C.I.O. president --he led the U.A.W. out of the union federation in 1968. Last year he forged a bizarre combination of the scrupulously clean U.A.W. and the scandal-ridden Teamsters. The combine, known as the Alliance for Labor Action, may endure on paper for a while. With Reuther gone, it is unlikely to grow into anything resembling a rival labor federation. A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany, 75, who never could appreciate Reuther's insistence that a union should be dedicated to broader goals than improving the lot of its own members, has been left in firmer command of labor than ever.

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