Tactically, the stand-up strike of 2023 deliberately invokes the sit-down strike of 1936–1937, which first established the UAW. But at a deeper level, the current strike marks a return to the UAW as a force fighting for the entire working class and a broader social vision.
In this, some note that Fain seems to be channeling elements of the last UAW president to gain such national prominence: Walter Reuther. It was Reuther who, first as UAW’s GM director and then as president, built up the pattern agreements in auto that set the standard for working-class jobs in the postwar period. He also sought to tie those contracts to a broader social democratic vision in which unions like the UAW would play a much larger role in shaping social, political, and economic life.
Reuther fell short on that count, resulting in a bargaining regime with the Big Three that led to real improvements for autoworkers while also setting the stage for the crises the union faces today. With the current strike, Shawn Fain is taking cues from the old Reuther playbook — but this time fighting for a different outcome.
We can see this if we turn back the clock to the GM negotiations of 1945. In that round of bargaining, Reuther was fighting for a broader vision that included having the union exert control over company investment decisions. He was not only negotiating over autoworkers’ wages and benefits, but also over questions such as how much cars would cost. The union’s main demand, framed under the slogan of “Purchasing Power for Prosperity,” was a 30 percent raise for autoworkers without increased car prices — an explicit attempt to divert company profits from capital to labor.
Like Fain today, Reuther viewed the 1945 negotiations as political, linking autoworker demands to efforts to “get a more realistic distribution of America’s wealth,” as he put it. He demanded that GM “open its books” to demonstrate that it could afford the increase. Beyond wages, Reuther also tied the negotiations to a wider vision of social democracy, which included fighting for public social benefits like national health care, pensions, improved vacations and leave policies for all workers, expanded unemployment benefits, and more.
Because he was waging a broader fight and making it political, Reuther also made the 1945 negotiations into a more public confrontation. He opened 1945 bargaining not only to members but to the press, literally bringing a stenographer into talks so that bargaining exchanges could be reprinted in the media.