UAW strike in '36-'37 changed workers' lives across USA

DETROIT -- Arthur Lowell talks slowly about the winter of 1936-37 when he spent several weeks inside a cold General Motors plant trying to make a point.

Lowell remembers being stunned when labor leaders told workers they were going on strike. They expected the strike to be at another plant where workers already were clashing with GM security forces.

He remembers GM cut off the water after the strike began, and it was a few days before the city forced the company to restore it so strikers could again use the jammed-up toilets. He remembers sleeping on a springy length of wood balanced between boxes and eating apples, bean soup and cornbread brought by the women's auxiliary.

Most of all, he remembers what the United Auto Workers union was fighting for: respect.

Lowell says that he and his fellow strikers were fighting for the basics. To earn more than 50 cents an hour. For the right to take time to go to the bathroom, or to stop random worker firings.

"It was a slave house," Lowell says. "Nobody can imagine if they didn't work there."

The success of the UAW is credited by many historians as key to the growth of the U.S. middle class. After the UAW got a foothold, it won wages, job security, health care and job-safety rules that became basic working conditions for industrial work.

But recent debate over bailout loans exposed that many Americans are skeptical of the UAW, seeing members as overpaid, underworked and to blame for much of the industry's decline.

"It was a combination of the Detroit Three's industrial prowess and the sit-down (strikes) in Flint that gave us an expanded middle class in the 20th century," says Harley Shaiken, a professor of labor studies at the University of California-Berkeley.

And the decline of the UAW and other unions could shrink it in the 21st, Shaiken says. "The irony is that if UAW wages are pressed down, wages throughout the U.S. economy will follow."