Uaw Quotes

UAWs tend to live above their means; they emphasize consumption. And they tend to de-emphasize many of the key factors that underlie wealth building. YOU

All too often high-income-producing UAWs spend countless hours studying the market—but not the stock market. They can tell you the names of the top auto dealers, but not the top investment advisors. They can tell you how to shop and spend. But they can’t tell you how to invest. They know the styles, prices, and availability at various car dealers. But they know little or nothing about the various values of equity market offerings. As

But if there is one reason why, in the United States, a left-leaning liberalism emerged from the Great Depression as opposed to a right-wing populist, if not fascist, nationalism as in other polities (and the UAW’s union drive in Detroit took place near the home of the right-wing anti-Semite Father Charles Coughlin), it was because of the presence of a left-leaning organized labor in the New Deal’s winning political coalition—and not only its presence but its assertion.107

George Romney’s private-sector experience typified the business world of his time. His executive career took place within a single company, American Motors Corporation, where his success rested on the dogged (and prescient) pursuit of more fuel-efficient cars.41 Rooted in a particular locale, the industrial Midwest, AMC was built on a philosophy of civic engagement. Romney dismissed the “rugged individualism” touted by conservatives as “nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.”42 Nor was this dismissal just cheap talk: He once returned a substantial bonus that he regarded as excessive.43 Prosperity was not an individual product, in Romney’s view; it was generated through bargaining and compromises among stakeholders (managers, workers, public officials, and the local community) as well as through individual initiative. When George Romney turned to politics, he carried this understanding with him. Romney exemplified the moderate perspective characteristic of many high-profile Republicans of his day. He stressed the importance of private initiative and decentralized governance, and worried about the power of unions. Yet he also believed that government had a vital role to play in securing prosperity for all. He once famously called UAW head Walter Reuther “the most dangerous man in Detroit,” but then, characteristically, developed a good working relationship with him.44 Elected governor in 1962 after working to update Michigan’s constitution, he broke with conservatives in his own party and worked across party lines to raise the minimum wage, enact an income tax, double state education expenditures during his first five years in office, and introduce more generous programs for the poor and unemployed.45 He signed into law a bill giving teachers collective bargaining rights.46 At a time when conservatives were turning to the antigovernment individualism of Barry Goldwater, Romney called on the GOP to make the insurance of equal opportunity a top priority. As

Now Solidarity House was located at 8000 East Jefferson on property that was hauntingly familiar. Edsel and Eleanor Ford once had owned a riverfront mansion on that very site. The family moved there when Henry II, the oldest of four children, was four, and left when he was nine, moving on up to a new mansion in Grosse Pointe Shores designed by Albert Kahn. The old place on East Jefferson was gone now, but the original boathouse still stood in back of an undistinguished building that looked more like a cut-rate motel than UAW headquarters, a center of the labor movement.

More often than not, UAWs allow “significant others” to determine their financial lifestyle. Interestingly, these “significant others,” or reference groups, turn out to be more imagined than real.

There is a fundamental reason beyond Mr. Friend’s perceived social and educational deficiencies that explains why he became a UAW: His parents taught him the ways of the UAW.

costs of this so-called deal in time and effort? Most high-income generators, whether they are PAWs or UAWs, work more than forty hours a week. Typically, the amount of time remaining each week is allocated in ways that are congruent with their goals. All

seem banal, but it was an incredibly powerful experience for many of the UAW employees. The TPS makes building quality into products the highest priority, so a problem must be fixed as soon as possible after it’s discovered, and the system must then be improved to try and prevent that from happening again. Workers and managers cooperate to make this possible. The moment a worker discovers a problem, he or she can summon the manager by pulling on a cord (the famous andon cord). The manager will then come and help to try and resolve the problem. If the problem cannot be resolved within the time available, the worker can stop the production line until the problem is fixed. The team will later experiment with, and implement, ideas to prevent the problem from occurring again.

At my first neighborhood community meeting, I faced nine worn, black faces and two white ones. I was easily the youngest person there by thirty years. I suddenly felt foolish, like a kid old enough to know better caught playing pretend. I was introduced and there was a moment of silence before a man with white hair in a worn UAW jacket said, “Hopefully, she can convince more brave, young people to come and save our neighborhood.

You get [to the Iraq occupation] and you realize, oh, these people are poor as shit...You got a poor shithead from Philly fighting a poor shithead from fucking, I don’t know, Najaf or somewhere in Iraq. It’s an endless cycle of people who don’t have shit being forced to fight people who don’t have shit.

Jimmy may well have read the front-page banner in late August exhorting readers to “Go and Register.” The accompanying article extolled the dual power of the franchise: “When we register and go to the polls in large numbers … we not only perform thereby a duty which is obligatory upon good citizens, but our votes make public officials more obligated to give us the recognition and consideration to which we are entitled.” 109 This paper and others sought to whip up excitement about the recent passage of a civil rights bill championed by Democratic state senator Charles C. Diggs. Declaring with some hyperbole that the bill would be the “New Emancipation,” the black Democratic organization Michigan Federated Democratic Clubs sought to use the bill to both galvanize the community and shore up support for Diggs with the “First Annual Emancipation Picnic and Dance” in his honor on August 1, 1937. Attendees received “a small pocket-size souvenir-copy of Senator Diggs Civil Rights Bill” along with “a statement of what to do if the Bill is violated.” 110 More than a decade later, Jimmy would be among a group of activists associated with the Detroit NAACP and the United Auto Workers (UAW) who mounted an effort to enforce this law by “breaking down” restaurants that discriminated against African Americans. By that time, black Detroiters had made important inroads into the UAW, and a strong coalition emerged between labor and civil rights organizations.

Ford CEO Henry Ford II and United Automobile Workers president Walter Reuther are jointly touring a modern auto plant. Ford jokingly jabs at Reuther: “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay UAW dues?” Not missing a beat, Reuther responds: “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?

BY MOST MEASURES, James and Grace Lee Boggs made an unlikely pair. Born in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island, to Chinese immigrants, Grace Chin Lee was raised in New York City and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College at the age of twenty-five. With dim prospects in academia as a Chinese American woman, she moved to Chicago, where she came of age politically by living in the black community and entering left-wing politics. James “Jimmy” Boggs was born in Marion Junction, Alabama, in 1919 and migrated to Detroit in search of employment in the auto industry following his high school graduation in 1937. In 1940, the year that Grace earned a Ph.D., Jimmy landed a job in a Chrysler auto plant, beginning a twenty-eight-year career as an autoworker and member of the United Auto Workers (UAW). Out of these divergent personal backgrounds and social experiences, Grace and Jimmy fashioned a unique brand of black radical politics by the early 1960s.