Walter Reuther

Walter Reuther was an American labor leader who led the United Auto Workers from 1946 to 1970. He expanded the union’s bargaining power and linked labor organizing to civil rights and social reform.

United Auto Workers: The American labor union representing workers in automobile manufacturing and related industries. Reuther led the UAW for nearly a quarter-century and made it a major force in organized labor.
Collective bargaining: Negotiation between employers and workers or their representatives over employment terms and conditions. Reuther used negotiations with automakers to secure wages, benefits, and workplace protections.
Postwar economic expansion: The sustained growth of the United States economy after World War II, especially from 1945 through the early 1970s. UAW contracts helped workers share in the prosperity of the postwar automobile industry.
Taft–Hartley Act: A 1947 U.S. federal law that restricted certain union activities and amended the National Labor Relations Act. Reuther opposed the law’s restrictions, which constrained the labor movement he sought to strengthen.
Philip Murray: A labor leader who served as president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations from 1940 to 1952. Murray’s CIO leadership shaped the union federation in which Reuther rose to prominence.
Sit-down strike: A strike in which workers occupy their workplace and stop production rather than picketing outside. The tactic helped workers force recognition from General Motors in the 1936–37 Flint sit-down strike.
Labor rights in the United States: Legal and collective protections governing workers’ organizing, bargaining, and workplace conditions in the United States. Reuther’s campaigns strengthened union bargaining and advanced labor’s influence on public policy.
Congress of Industrial Organizations: A U.S. labor federation founded in 1935 to organize workers by industry rather than craft. The CIO was Reuther’s principal labor federation before it merged with the AFL in 1955.
George Meany: An American labor leader who headed the American Federation of Labor and later the AFL–CIO. Meany’s cautious approach to politics and organizing differed from Reuther’s reform agenda.
Flint sit-down strike: A 1936–37 strike in which General Motors workers occupied plants in Flint, Michigan. The strike established the UAW as a powerful union before Reuther became its president.

Linked from 12 pages